Cloud Storage became cloudy..

Gdetrailer wrote:
Hmm.. only $99 vs free, lets see, holding someone elses "data" and requiring them to "pay" AFTER they had use for free.. Sounds a lot like a "hostage" situation, right?

I give up, Dropbox does not need me to justify their business strategy. I am a satisfied user and I am sure there are many others.

I also have multiple several TB hard drives. I seldom use them. I've moved on to way more productive ways to spend my time. I am constantly amazed how accessible my photos are with the many ways Google Photos allow searching them for specific subjects.

As you have, I have scanned in all my photos, slides, etc. that have been taken over my eight decades of life either by me or my ancestors and they are all on Google Photos where I can easily access them anywhere and at any time.

I'm glad you are happy with the world you live in. Bad mouthing alternatives and paranoia about the sky falling doesn't change reality.

AsheGuy wrote:

Gdetrailer wrote:
Shades of Photobucket holding your stuff "hostage"?

Yep, enough folks have taken the "bait" (cloud), the hook has been "set" and now the "cloud" is "realing" in all of the suckers that bought into all of the easy free "syncing" stuff..

Now that you have gotten your life depending so heavily on this cloud storage your life will literally come to a dead stop if the Internet fails or the cloud provider decides to change rules or even completely stop providing.

Wow, holding my stuff hostage? Dropbox has been free to me up till now. Dropbox is now attempting to charge a little for its use. $99/year if I choose to subscribe is a nit considering what it does.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. My opinion is no one is keeping me hostage and I personally get great value from cloud storage. I've never lost any files/photos and don't fear such loss as long as I stick to solid providers. I do a hard drive back for both Google Drive and Dropbox content occasionally, it's takes just a click of the mouse but I have never had to use the backup.

Hmm.. only $99 vs free, lets see, holding someone elses "data" and requiring them to "pay" AFTER they had use for free.. Sounds a lot like a "hostage" situation, right?

Put another way, say you had a friend take care of your favorite pet for a week and the agreement was FREE, no strings attached and the next week when you go to pick up your favorite pet they refuse to give you your pet back unless you pay them $99 would that be the SAME as what Drop box (and PhotoBucket) has done?

Granted, you are currently able to still access your Dropbox data for free, but you cannot add any more FREE devices it IS the SAME THING as a hostage situation..

What I am saying is rather than trying to sync ALL of your stuff, just only sync what currently NEEDs to be synced.

Ween yourself off the cloud and buy a few external HDs and do your own backups, 2TB external drives now days cost less than $70 and two of them could be used in rotating backups with plenty of space hundreds of thousands of photos and documents..

Heck I have thousands of hrs of video (home movies and even backed up DVDs) on several 2 TB drives and I have not even used half of those drives.

Not to mention I have thousands of 35mm slides my Dad took scanned in and archived not only on DVD Roms but on external hard drives.

Slowly backing up my music collection from reel to reel, 8 track, cassette, vinyl and yes even CDs, thousands of hrs worth of music.

These are the important items to me and they are not worthy of cloud storage where it is outside me physical touch.

You are more than welcome to follow the cloud, but just remember, once your information leaves your physical presence it is no longer yours, it becomes part of the Internet "collective" and you have lost control of who has access, when it can be accessed and IF you can access it.

Even businesses have to be extremely careful when it comes to cloud vendors, I work closely with medical related equipment, deal with HIPAA and PHI information, can't just randomly spew this type of information just out anywhere and that IS including the use of Dropbox..

AsheGuy wrote:

Gdetrailer wrote:
Shades of Photobucket holding your stuff "hostage"?

Yep, enough folks have taken the "bait" (cloud), the hook has been "set" and now the "cloud" is "realing" in all of the suckers that bought into all of the easy free "syncing" stuff..

Now that you have gotten your life depending so heavily on this cloud storage your life will literally come to a dead stop if the Internet fails or the cloud provider decides to change rules or even completely stop providing.

Wow, holding my stuff hostage? Dropbox has been free to me up till now. Dropbox is now attempting to charge a little for its use. $99/year if I choose to subscribe is a nit considering what it does.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. My opinion is no one is keeping me hostage and I personally get great value from cloud storage. I've never lost any files/photos and don't fear such loss as long as I stick to solid providers. I do a hard drive back for both Google Drive and Dropbox content occasionally, it's takes just a click of the mouse but I have never had to use the backup.

Not only that, Dropbox does't just store your stuff on their site. It's first saved locally on my machine then automatically uploaded and copied to any other machine I choose to have sync. That's an automatic backup with the benefit of web access should I end up needing some information when I'm away from my computers.

If they pull the plug or go under, I still have my (several) copies so no hostage taking there. I much prefer that to simple "cloud" storage. Yes, I'm paying for it because you don't get something for nothing and I use far more than the free version provides.

Gdetrailer wrote:
Shades of Photobucket holding your stuff "hostage"?

Yep, enough folks have taken the "bait" (cloud), the hook has been "set" and now the "cloud" is "realing" in all of the suckers that bought into all of the easy free "syncing" stuff..

Now that you have gotten your life depending so heavily on this cloud storage your life will literally come to a dead stop if the Internet fails or the cloud provider decides to change rules or even completely stop providing.

Wow, holding my stuff hostage? Dropbox has been free to me up till now. Dropbox is now attempting to charge a little for its use. $99/year if I choose to subscribe is a nit considering what it does.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. My opinion is no one is keeping me hostage and I personally get great value from cloud storage. I've never lost any files/photos and don't fear such loss as long as I stick to solid providers. I do a hard drive back for both Google Drive and Dropbox content occasionally, it's takes just a click of the mouse but I have never had to use the backup.

AsheGuy wrote:
I got an email from Dropbox this week about this issue as seen in the image below.


I use both Dropbox and Google Drive cloud storage. I use Dropbox for all non-Google app documents that I want synced to all my devices (this is the default on Dropbox) so they are there whether I am online or not.

I use Google Drive for all Google App documents and photos. I have a Google Drive "Legacy" account since I was an early adopter. As you can see in the image below, I only pay $5.00/yr and are only using 7% of my available storage. Google photos do not count against that limit as long as they are "High Quality" uploads (what my phone photos are uploaded as).


So, as you can see I may be rethinking my use of the two based on Dropbox's new costs (non now).

Shades of Photobucket holding your stuff "hostage"?

Yep, enough folks have taken the "bait" (cloud), the hook has been "set" and now the "cloud" is "realing" in all of the suckers that bought into all of the easy free "syncing" stuff..

Now that you have gotten your life depending so heavily on this cloud storage your life will literally come to a dead stop if the Internet fails or the cloud provider decides to change rules or even completely stop providing.

Think about this..

Ask yourself the question, Do I REALLY "NEED" all of my stuff "synced"?

Do I REALLY "NEED" all of my docs and photos accessible 24/7/365?

I don't.

My cellphone is not synced to anything else, not to my desktop PC or any of my other specially built PCs but yet, I do have my contacts on my phone "backed up" to a SD card that I inserted into my phone.

On that card I have only a few photos and docs that I might wish to show folks but that is it.

I keep my own "backups" of everything important to me on different hard drives which I can keep in my own fire resistant safe.

I don't live with my cellphone 24/7/365, nope only on me going to work and back home. When I get home it gets put on the counter in the kitchen and that is where it lives all of the other hrs of the day..

I learned a long, long time ago that putting your faith into online Internet storage (which IS what the "cloud" is) whether Paid or free is a fools paradise..

Learned that when one online storage that I paid for just up a disappeared, vanished into the wobbly web with no refund and no online storage..

My warning to folks is not to totally depend on anything on the Internet "Cloud", terms of service can and will change anytime the vendor wants to do so. Free can become paid and the service can be changed, altered or completely abandoned with little on no notice.

I got an email from Dropbox this week about this issue as seen in the image below. I have Dropbox on three computers, my phone and a tablet.


I use both Dropbox and Google Drive cloud storage. I use Dropbox for all non-Google app documents that I want synced to all my devices (this is the default on Dropbox) so they are there whether I am online or not.

I use Google Drive for all Google App documents and photos. I have a Google Drive "Legacy" account since I was an early adopter. As you can see in the image below, I only pay $5.00/yr and are only using 7% of my available storage. Google photos do not count against that limit as long as they are "High Quality" uploads (what my phone photos are uploaded as).


So, as you can see I may be rethinking my use of the two based on Dropbox's new costs (non now).

MrWizard wrote:
the cloud is definitely somebodies remote servers

i have a friend whose job description is 'cloud architect'

he is programmer, programming cloud apps and storage systems

anyway get it back on topic for the OP, or quit posting, no need to argue
round and round the way the cloud works

that was NOT the subject

either that or we can close the topic

my response is decided by what you do

I'm sorry for having replied to misinformation that has dragged this into completely off topic discussion. But you are right in that it is someone else's servers. But data is spread across hundreds of servers times x amount of drives per server. And yes, I recently resigned where I was also a cloud architect.

the cloud is definitely somebodies remote servers

i have a friend whose job description is 'cloud architect'

he is programmer, programming cloud apps and storage systems

anyway get it back on topic for the OP, or quit posting, no need to argue
round and round the way the cloud works

that was NOT the subject

either that or we can close the topic

my response is decided by what you do

RedRocket204 wrote:
That's not the way cloud works.

That's exactly how the cloud works, remote hard drives owned by someone else, and you leasing space on those remote hard drives.

RedRocket204 wrote:

philh wrote:
Other issues arise with the business, what happens when the business goes bankrupt, can somebody just come in, buy the hard drives and suddenly somebody has access to all your data?

That's not the way cloud works.

If the remote servers aren't saving data on hard drives, what are they using? Tape drives?