If you use Snapchat a lot, you may notice how often you get updates from people or see their public story change. Do you ever stop to think about the old snaps,

If you use Snapchat a lot, you may notice how often you get updates from people or see their public story change. Do you ever stop to think about the old snaps, or miss them? No, because you have a constant stream of new ones. You can always make more memories. Nothing about the cloud is that different from what we had before. With shared hosting providers, you and 50 other users would fill up your disk quota on one or two hard drives on some dinky 1U server running Apache and ProFTPD. If the drives died, along with it went your data. Which is why you kept a copy on your own computer. Back then, nobody expected anyone to keep their data for them, so they just kept their own backups. The same was true for managed services and colo with the exception that you had to do more of the work yourself. Because the industry has gotten better about preventing data loss, we get complacent and stop saving our stuff as much. But why piss and moan over more reliable, more massive services for cheap or free? Because it isn't perfect, or innovative, or more transparent? The status quo of the industry is to reinvent the wheel, so it's hard to get mad at people for re-packaging the same solution in a different container. The obsession of holding onto all your old stuff just makes this look even more unnecessary.