STAGES are locations in Snowflake where data is stored, and staging is the process of uploading data into a stage. Data that needs to be loaded or stored within Snowflake is stored either elsewhere in the other cloud regions LIKE in AWS (Amazon Web Service) S3, GCP (Google Cloud Platform), or AZURE, or is stored internally within Snowflake. When data is stored in another cloud region, this is known as an EXTERNAL stage; when it is stored inside a snowflake, it is known as an internal stage. Internal stages can be further categorized as follows: 

• User stages: Each of these stages pertains to a specific user, so they'll be assigned to every user by default for storing files.
• Table stages: Each of these stages pertains to a specific database table, so they'll be assigned to every table by default.
• Internal named stages: Compared to the user or table stages, these stages offer a greater degree of flexibility. As these are some of the Snowflake objects, all operations that can be performed on objects can also be performed on internally named stages. These stages must be created manually and we can specify file FORMATS when creating these stages.