Comment by _Understated_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Understated_ | Hacker News Reader

> all culture, raging over us, for $12.99 a month (or $15.99 for HD) as long as we keep up our payments like good economic entities. When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked.

This is the most frightening thing for me... by far: the concept that I no longer have control of the destiny of my own shit. Mine. Stuff I created.

I understand the concept of how cloud storage works: "hey, we'll look after it for you, back it up and stuff, and all you need to do it pay us a small monthly fee".

Makes sense.

But add to that fact that if you stop paying they'll keep you from your stuff. Also if they don't like you for practically any reason they'll keep you from your stuff. Or if they suffer a huge data loss they'll claim that the T's and C's protect them and they'll still keep you from your stuff.

What the hell are we sleep-walking into here?

Caveat: I'm a tech. I have a local copy, a local backup (that I rotate on an ad-hoc basis with the other HD at my mum and dads house) and an offsite cloud-backup (using Sync) so I'm covered but this stuff isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at my mum and my non-tech friends who just think "hey, it's <mega-corp>. They've got thousands of people and loads of equipment and they know what they're doing!"

They sure do!

Out of all my data, music and video is the thing I worry about least. I'm not going to lose my business or job because Apple Music stops working or I can't see the latest Netflix series. The last thing I want to spend my time doing is managing and worrying about terabytes of media.

Well clearly you don't have a library of Alexandria. Not to claim I do, but, well, i do curate my own library, both in books and in media and I do have some stuff that isn't easy to come by: mispressed Amorphous Androgynous CDs. Early Nate Tarrant music. The Screaming Abdabs bootleg - and to me they hold value just like a family album might hold to some. It's not about money or what i do, it's about intrinsic value of culture history, and if someone flips a switch and turns the while internet off, i will still be able to dig out the old hard drives stored in the basement and show my kid Tarkovskys' Stalker or Kubricks' 2001. Hell, i'll watch them again for the 79th time...

But if you just consume it... well, that's good too. Just keep in mind not all do, and curating a media collection is gardening to some.

People are walking into corporate traps left and right. Too bad. they should turn on their brains every once in a while.

The "bait" for these traps is almost universally ease of use and overall user experience, something open platforms and open source has failed to provide.

USB drives and SD cards seem to be doing just fine, along with hard drives for desktop use. The inconvenience of these is having to go somewhere to buy them and not being able to magically simultaneously sync between devices.

"I understand the concept of how cloud storage works: "hey, we'll look after it for you, back it up and stuff, and all you need to do it pay us a small monthly fee"."

If only there was a cloud storage provider that gave you an empty UNIX filesystem to do whatever you like with.

Maybe a proper .ssh directory to populate with your own keys and authorized_keys directives ?

Bonus points if it's a zfs filesystem with a .zfs/snapshot directory in the root.

If only ...

Is that not just a thin VM on $anyCloudProvider? You can attach however much storage to it, and just ssh to it. It's essentially just a headless storage machine living somewhere off in Califonia.

I believe they're aware and were making a joke.

The parent commenter is rsync (.net)

Sounds like a magnificient startup opportunity: everything you've ever watched / listened to / read stored into a file. Make files great again and make a great exit doing it.

Honestly that sounds like a privacy nightmare... that's the kind of shit that would make me live in a cabin in the middle of the forest with no power!

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