OK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.
During NASA's Deep Space Optical Comms demo (https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communicatio...), they transmitted video at 267 Mbps from 16 million kilometers away. That's 1.78 GiB stored in space while in transit (assuming 53.3 seconds light-speed delay).
The furthest they did was 8.3 Mbps at 400 million km which is around ~1.38 GiB in transit.
You could totally do that with the mirror on the moon. (Retroreflector + optical data transmission).
The moon is approximately (it varies) 1.3 light seconds away, i.e. a 2.6 second round trip, and optical links can have very high data rates. You could fit quite a lot of data on there! (Edit: although maybe the data rate won't be so high at these distances)
People of Earth. I AM LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8! We will raise your planet's temperature by one million degrees a day, for five days, unless we see McNeal at 9pm tomorrow - 8 central!
With gravitational lensing, this is actually viable! Just send a signal at a gravity sink, and travel at sublight speeds to position yourself in a place where it will be redirected to eventually along a longer path, and you can intercept your own signal! You just have to be really, really lucky.
The distance from Earth to Mars is about 3 to 22 light minutes, not 20 to 90. That doesn't change anything about your point, except the capacity is lower.
That's only true in classical electrodynamics, as it happens. If you're in a very strong B-field like you might find near a compact object you'll get nonlinear QED effects.
The logic we typically use for repeaters (EDFA, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers) for long-distance lines amplifies but does not clean noise (so across the oceans, you are very much bound by SNR). And you need one of them every 80 km or so in typical fiber.
Before I consumed calories over days to figure out syntax. Now, a language model exhausts those calories away in seconds. Eventually we will advance too far into the future that the tail end of humanity will forget how to make pants.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.