Anyone else feel like a month of warning before permanently deleting your data is cutting it a bit close?
Yeah, that occurred to me as well.
Each time such a service shuts down it puts another nail into this "put your stuff in the cloud" business model, as the absolute number of people who'd been screwed keeps growing, along with the people they influence.
I still believe there's a lot of promise in "the cloud". It's unfortunate that these types of shut downs leave such a bad taste in people's mouths.
There is a way to do it though. Decoupling application logic from data storage basically solves this problem. If we (Trovebox) ever has to send an email like this it would be along the lines of "Our service is shutting down but your photos are safe where they are, you don't have to do anything. If you want to continue using the service here are the ways to do it on your own."
I don't know if it's deliberate but it hardly made me felt welcomed
The other problem is of course that very few of these companies do that sort of thing as far as I know (which I wouldn't, particularly, seeing as I only use rsync.net for off-site safety (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado) and otherwise use local disk plus LTO tape with a full backup always in a safe deposit box).
Remember that we provide storage as well. There is unified billing that way at the cost of data ownership. This coupled with the ability provided to migrate to another storage provider is as good of a solution as possible today.
I hope this gets better in the future as I realize it is not ideal. But it is at least headed in an interesting direction :).
A friend of mine who has a fist full of patents on basic hard drive technology, including several in every hard drive you own, has a maxim that goes something like this: "When you buy a hard drive you should start planning for its death and the loss of all your data on it." The popularity of various backup services, especially in the face of strict data cap regimes outside of Verizon, suggests that plenty have learned this lesson, which I would assume also helps your case.
Anyway, it sounds like you're doing a very good thing, I wish you the best of luck!
However, our architecture opened up other interesting opportunities which we'll be announcing soon.
Have a look at the University of Southern California Digital Repository. They have system for long term digital preservation. They discard any storage media after 3 years and continually check for "rotting" of files.
I started thinking more about this following Fred Wilson's post on how this is happening in the investment community, as well as his vision for the future of VC (as I understand it).
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/06/decoupling-advisory-from-cus...
As I mentioned on comments there, I'm working on a concept in a different area but with the same fundamental pattern, which I see emerging as we desire more ownership and control of our assets, and permanency of data and other resources. I'm also working on a blog post about this.
For us, the API needs to simply abstract how and where data is stored. The same API works for any supported storage service.
We've open source large parts of our code and that falls under the "stewardship" banner. We act as a broker but make it as simple as possible if you want to be the broker yourself.
Sorry for the confusion, but by "stewardship" I meant that you maintain or manipulate the data but do not control the place that is stored. I could have chosen a better word.
This new model needs clearly defined terms for these roles.
Sending an email doesn't cut it on this short of a timeline.
The really weird thing is they had seven months to tell people about this deadline, and waited until six of them had passed.
Or, from the opposite perspective, my hard drive is a backup for my Dropbox account.