Photos are in Danger: Highlight 4
- Posted on January 26, 2016
- in Photo Storage Solutions
- by LK
Temporary Cloud Storage
Popular cloud storage services don’t always guarantee permanence.
Paid storage services, such as those provided by Dropbox and Sugarsync, are surely better options. But even they fail to offer the promise of permanent storage. In fact, their respective terms of service absolve their corporate offices of any and all responsibility for your data. If your memories are compromised, there’s nothing you can do. Are you really saving your data?
Your precious family memories could disappear as quickly and completely as footprints in sand.
Even the giants aren’t always reliable.
You might be thinking Dropbox or Google are too big to be unreliable. Surely you don’t really have to worry that they will fold or change directions. But big doesn’t necessarily mean consistent. These companies regularly issue sweeping updates to their terms of service. Can you afford to take a chance with your most precious moments?
We say none of this to suggest you should stop using Dropbox. We simply advise you to be careful.
These giants cannot be your only trusted backup.
Consider the much-publicized story of a Dropbox customer who lost over 8,000 photos in an instant. As her email to customer support shows, things can go terribly wrong, terribly quickly:
It is much worse than I thought, *in total 8345 files were deleted*, mainly my photos a videos [sic]…. This is an absolute disaster, I don’t have any other backup of these files, Dropbox was supposed to be the backup.
https://medium.com/@jan.curn/how-bug-in-dropbox-permanently-deleted-my-8000-photos-cb7dcf13647b
After working with customer service, they were only able to recover about 1,000 of those photos. Family photos and similar data are irreplaceable. Don’t put them at risk, needlessly, by relying exclusively on cloud storage companies, even the big ones. They’re only a temporary fix.
Highlight 5 is next.
LK