Ask HN: Would you pay to keep all your data on one cloud? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you pay to keep all your data on one cloud?

7 pointsankit2193 comments

Recently, Flickr limited the storage for free accounts to 1000 photographs. Quite a few users are not willing to pay for more photos as they think they are already paying for services like iCloud, Office365, Dropbox, and so on. A lot of us already pay for storing our data on somebody else cloud. Some of these services are free today (as Flickr was too, once upon a time) can change to paid anytime, and will do sooner or later given the data to be stored is increasing manifold.

So rather than storing data on someone's cloud, and having multiple such accounts, why not have one which you pay for, yourself. (Of course, provided it addresses your security concerns, keeps data encrypted, and take measures to ensure enough backups and everything) would you pay for your data to be moved to your own cloud rather than being distributed like it is today?

I assume that this my own cloud is actually managed by someone else, who does all the hard work.

Maybe I would pay for that (I'm paying for my backups now), but the owner of the servers (the cloud) should be able to demonstrate that it won't spy on my data and metadata, not sell it, be able to protect it, etc. and stay in business at the same conditions. Furthermore I don't trust any of the current companies, why should I trust this new one?

Yeah, the cloud is managed by someone else who does all the hard work.

Of course, security, safety, protection are the biggest challenges against this kind of service. Trust can be built gradually. What I imagine is, it will still use the existing cloud companies like AWS, GCP, with added layers of encryption, and security protocols. Down the line, the biggest challenge will be to establish trust. One way to do it is to partner with existing clouds, and interoperability (in the future). Problem isnt that data isnt safe but more like if its on someone else's cloud, policies could change anyday.

This is more of an individual problem rather than a corporate problem. Right now, I am just putting it out there to see the response. Just an idea, have not written a single line of code for it.

What I'd pay for is robust, bullet proof, guaranteed, storage for small amounts of data that holds immense sentimental value.

This would be about 100 photographs or short video clips, mostly of my child.

I have thousands of photos and they're mostly ephemeral nonsense that I don't care about. But I also have a few that it would be devastating to lose.

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