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Comment by java-man | Hacker News Reader

I would have assigned a high probability to this outcome from the beginning. Why would anyone want to send their CDs (or any other valuables) to a third party without express guarantees for getting it back?

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The article was quite clear on this in multiple places, there were guarantees that you still owned the media and that it would be returned.

The problem is, who guarantees the guarantors?

Exactly my point. With deposits, you have FDIC insurance.

With this, you have nothing.

This is a great reason to have discs backed up in digital form (in multiple orgs, not locations). Insurance covers the value lost, but not the content. Archive/Backup All The Things. Physical media archived away someone with no other copies? Not even once.

That's how music master tapes are stored. Irreplaceable originals often stored by contractors. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...

In some cases, they've decided the digital backups are good enough and destroyed the irreplaceable originals. On purpose, not by accident.

Promises are cheap. Be able to sue or absorb the loss (financial and sentimental).

Really, I can't imagine using a service like that unless it was in a place I could get physical access to.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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