Metadata is simply data about data. Take an item such as a laptop stored in a warehouse, for example. Somewhere in the warehouse (and also possibly in other locations such as the cloud) there may be several pieces of information about that laptop that can be referred to as data about the laptop, or even laptop metadata, such as:

• Location of the laptop within the warehouse
• Laptop brand and model
• Manufacture date
• Warranty dates and information
• Hardware and software specs
• Color and size

Additionally, data may have at least some basic information about it, whether it be at rest or in motion. At rest, data may be indexed on a hard drive in the file table to identify the location of the data and whether it may be available to the user, or is waiting to be overwritten. Data in transit will also contain header information (which will be discussed in later chapters), which gives information about source and destination addresses and the size of the data, just to name a couple.