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Comment by alehul | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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