

What happens to your files when a cloud service dies? - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/114803-megauploads-demise-what-happens-to-your-files-when-a-cloud-service-dies

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steve8918
My wife subscribed to an online, Quicken-like service a few years ago that
went under, and then refused to allow her to download her information. After
that, she realized how vulnerable her data was, since she has no clue who has
her data, or what happened to it.

I don't use Dropbox or any online file service for exactly this reason.

I should really download all my gmail, but it's a major hassle having to take
care of that, but I realize that's another major point of failure for me.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Just use IMAP instead of or as well as the webmail interface. Configure your
IMAP client to download all your mail locally.

This is not a major hassle if you actually care about retaining access to your
email.

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steve8918
yes, I know I can use POP to download my mail, but the thing I've found is
that it creates a huge, fragmented multi-gigabyte mail file in Thunderbird,
which is annoying to have to take care of. But yes, I realize
#firstworldproblems :)

~~~
mike-cardwell
A quick search for "imap to maildir sync" shows up several free apps for
syncing between IMAP and Maildir. That way, each email would live in its own
file. Might be more manageable.

~~~
simcop2387
If you've got linux, or probably even OSX or cygwin, fetchmail is almost
trivial to setup to do a single run to do this. Read more about it at [1]

[1] [http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/97/using-
fetc...](http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/97/using-fetchmail-
and-procmail-for-maildir-style-storage-from-a-pop3-account/)

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AndrewDucker
This is why I like Dropbox. If it dies then I have all of my files on my
desktop and my laptop anyway.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Unless the Dropbox service sends a command to your Dropbox client to delete
the files as part of its "death".

If somebody other than the people who made and run Dropbox were responsible
for the action of shutting it down, this might happen accidentally. Or if the
service was hacked.

It's still a good idea to have your own local backups.

~~~
jessriedel
This is true for _any_ service, cloud or not, that has permission to write to
your hard drive. This ability has nothing to do with storage, and this risk is
much, much less likely than simple bankruptcy or whatever.

~~~
mike-cardwell
You misunderstand my point. Not backing up files on your hard drive because
they're in Dropbox is not safe. Dropbox has built in functionality to delete
those files from your hard drive. If any one of your clients or your account
is compromised, or the Dropbox service is hacked, these files could disappear.
Hence why you need backups.

Also, if the FBI starts pulling servers in a random order to shut Dropbox
down, are you confident that wont cause Dropbox's systems to incorrectly send
delete commands to your client just before the service disappears? If you are,
you shouldn't be. Not after the "log in to any account without a password"
issue of last year.

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aw3c2
<https://gist.github.com/1641705>

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driverdan
As has been said time and time again, you should have at least 3 copies of
every file you care about. One local, one local backup, and one remote backup.

If you need to restore a file quickly or the remote backup goes down you have
your local backup. If your house burns down you have your remote backup.

~~~
fredley
The backup mantra I was taught: Files that don't exist in three places don't
exist at all.

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51Cards
Not to be a broken record for everyone else but I always keep a local copy
(several) of all my data. I have a folder called "Store" and it is a large
tree of everything I ever plan to keep long term. Parts of it are on various
cloud services (mainly DropBox) depending on the type of access I need but
everything resides locally somewhere in that tree structure. From letters I
wrote in 1990 to photos (critical ones) to pretty much every line of code I've
ever written. That folder is backed up across several devices by a nightly
sync because I came perilously close to loosing it a couple years back when I
got lax. In short, when it comes to my long term data I trust no one. :) Not
even myself most of the time!

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crcsmnky
I guess the key here is, are you storing files or are you mirroring files?

It would seem that the best possible solution is to run your own file storage
service, but who has the time/desire to manage that? For a free product like
Dropbox, I'm content (for now, at least) to make that tradeoff. I don't have
to worry about clients or syncing or servers, etc. I just save my files on my
computer and then they appear on my other devices.

Perhaps the trick (to avoid data loss) is to backup locally as much as
possible. I do backups once every 1-2 weeks depending on how often I'm nagged
by Time Machine. That seems to be the only way to get the convenience of cloud
storage while also not losing data if they go away.

~~~
mike-cardwell
For people who don't have local backups, it's going to bite you one day.
Here's how to set up free, hourly, incremental, encrypted backups with minimal
effort. I do it on my laptop:

[https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...](https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Backups_for_Linux)

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lmm
The article's claim that AWS et al would do better under the circumstances
seems dubious to say the least. Do they have an example of a more enterprise-
oriented cloud service going under to generalize from?

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a9
Mr Hand, I've been thinking. If I have access to the files. And you have
access to the files. Then doesn't that make them "our files"? - Spiccoli

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jimmy1234
Use personal cloud services like Tonido with your public cloud services. That
way you have a local copy as well.

