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Comment by lwhi | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a huge problem with all cloud services.

As we start to rely on cloud providers to look after our data, we need to either become more educated (and proficient) by creating regular backups ourselves (which kind of makes the idea of managed cloud services defunct imo), or be in a position where we can individually sue for damages incurred by negligence on the part of the service company in question.

So many of these companies have liability clauses which negate all responsibility in situations where negligence leads to loss.

I think the current situation is crazy, considering the amount of responsibility and trust that's involved in using web-services which store and manage irreplaceable data.

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A single service, even a cloud, is still a single point of failure. Diversify your backup strategies.

Indemnification is likely going to push prices up further, making cloud non-competitive compared to traditional storage.

Still, I feel a lot of old technology is merely being relabeled. Today everything that stores data remotely is called a 'cloud'. We may yet see small NAS units relabeled as 'private micro-clouds".

I agree - I've recently learned of the importance of diversification first hand.

However, I'd argue the ability to take legal action, would actually encourage service providers to diversify their own backup strategies and procedures. If a mistake becomes too costly to consider - I think less mistakes would be likely to occur.

If a mistake becomes too costly to consider - I think less mistakes would be likely to occur.

This conclusion assumes that the people running the business are capable of resolving such issues. If they are not, then all it does is put people out of business. Not everyone grows and adapts when faced with such pressures. Some of them just go extinct.

"This conclusion assumes that the people running the business are capable of resolving such issues. If they are not, then all it does is put people out of business."

If a company can't be relied upon to look after my data - I want them to go out of business.

Unfortunately, recent years have given me the impression that if you set the bar too high, there will be so many failures that you won't have any services to turn to. That's my concern. I wish that weren't my concern and that I could heartily and unhesitatingly agree with you.

Which would also make the products much more expensive.

And I have a feeling that this money does not necessarily go into making the product more reliable, but that it is used to buy a better insurance.

You can't continue to get affordable insurance if you are continually making claims.

I don't get how in todays day and age the person lost their own copies of their photos. All the photographs I have taken with my current camera are still on the memory stick, on my hard drive and in the cloud. Why? Because data storage is massive compared to your average cameras photo quality.

My camera holds about 2,000 pictures on the highest compression setting on an 8GB card. It's not like that amount of data is precious. I have hundreds of movies and thousands of TV episodes stored, why is it that this person couldn't keep their photos?

I hear a lot of stories like this, and being a writer I can only think "are they stupid?" Until recently everything I'd ever written, if stored in RTF and rar'd would still fit on a floppy disk. I think I've expanded to two.

I now have a flash drive for storage. However my basic method is to simply download and rar all my files from Docs, email it to myself through gmail and load it onto the USB drive. It leaves me backed up in 3 places and the original copy.

TFA: "Mirco Wilhelm has the original files saved elsewhere, but the photos from his extensive Flickr collection had been linked to from all over the web, including the official Flickr blog. Those links will now point to deadspace. Additionally, the followers he had accumulated, tags, photo captions and copyright information have been wiped out and may not be restored"

Beyond that, I have well over 2000 photos in my photo library, and I'm by no means a serious photographer. A professional might take several hundred photos in a single day. (Not all will be useable or worth publishing, but the idea that you might just never delete any photos off your memory card just doesn't work for a lot of people.)

He will have the original photos because any serious photographer will capture them in RAW - which Flikr doesn't store.

The issue though is the links, comments, viewer history and comments that you cannot backup or restore - but which have real value.

The problem here is that the photographer lost data that he had no way of backing up. His photos are fine, his online collections, uris, and social networking are all gone and only existed on flickr's servers.

You're right in your point about backups. These cloud services present quite a problem in the sense that they're structured to accommodate massive amounts of data. Often times this data is generated within the service itself with no means provided to extract it. So even if the user wanted to be responsible for backing up their data it's often times impossible. Moreover, even if the user wanted to AND had the means to do it, it could be a massive amount of data to sync up -- more than your average user is going to take the time to do.

Consequential damages aren't covered in these services' terms of use because nobody can afford to pay for them. Should Amazon be liable for Netflix's profits on EC2? If so, Netflix isn't paying Amazon nearly enough money.

Well, there's the next startup idea, a backup service for cloud services.

There is a joke in there about putting a cloud in your cloud, but I am not sure how that meme goes.

That service exists: http://www.backupify.com/

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