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I've had this same thought about cloud storage. I had an older family member ask me "are you sure it won't go anywhere?" while I was encouraging them to use cl

by alehul 7y ago

I've had this same thought about cloud storage. I had an older family member ask me "are you sure it won't go anywhere?" while I was encouraging them to use cloud storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive rather than a flash drive. While I had naively never given it that much thought before, I wasn't sure the answer was "yes"— specifically that, if Dropbox or Google Drive were to shut down, they would give users the opportunity to take their files out. I tried searching through their ToS but couldn't find any guarantees.

java-man 7y ago
The difference between physical goods and service is the cloud has a copy. One does not lose own copy of the data when service goes bust, and one can use multiple cloud providers for redundancy. But in this case, I think ToS are insufficient, unless backed by physics - specific guarantees and allocated (escrow) funds, or insurance, for example, to purchase the replacement.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I agree with that but I suspect there are a lot of people who have their only copy of a lot of things in one cloud service or another. Even I probably don't have a copy of everything that's up on, for example, Google. On the other hand, I do try to remember to do a data download periodically and I doubt anything I'd lose would be too critical. And sometimes you need to put a level of trust in a service. I've sent things off to be scanned because, realistically, it was never going to happen otherwise and I really wanted to get the materials into digital form.
  - exhilaration 7y ago
    I suspect there are a lot of people who have their only copy of a lot of things in one cloud service or another. Very true, think of all the people using cloud-first tools like Google Docs or Google Sheets - how many bother to download/backup those files?
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Probably very few. Admittedly I don't worry too much about Google or Microsoft falling over although there's probably always a possibility that you lose access to your account because of some edge case.
  - Rerarom 7y ago
    Yeah, but Dropbox is okay since you have a copy of the folder on your computer(s). Also, it's guaranteed to be small (2 GB) so it's easy to backup.

by alehul 7y ago

java-man 7y ago

The difference between physical goods and service is the cloud has a copy. One does not lose own copy of the data when service goes bust, and one can use multiple cloud providers for redundancy. But in this case, I think ToS are insufficient, unless backed by physics - specific guarantees and allocated (escrow) funds, or insurance, for example, to purchase the replacement.

ghaff 7y ago
I agree with that but I suspect there are a lot of people who have their only copy of a lot of things in one cloud service or another. Even I probably don't have a copy of everything that's up on, for example, Google. On the other hand, I do try to remember to do a data download periodically and I doubt anything I'd lose would be too critical. And sometimes you need to put a level of trust in a service. I've sent things off to be scanned because, realistically, it was never going to happen otherwise and I really wanted to get the materials into digital form.
- exhilaration 7y ago
  I suspect there are a lot of people who have their only copy of a lot of things in one cloud service or another. Very true, think of all the people using cloud-first tools like Google Docs or Google Sheets - how many bother to download/backup those files?
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Probably very few. Admittedly I don't worry too much about Google or Microsoft falling over although there's probably always a possibility that you lose access to your account because of some edge case.
- Rerarom 7y ago
  Yeah, but Dropbox is okay since you have a copy of the folder on your computer(s). Also, it's guaranteed to be small (2 GB) so it's easy to backup.