If you have concerns about unencrypted storage of personal photos, I’d request you to check out my project: ente.io[1]. It is essentially Google Photos, minus search capabilities, plus end-to-end encryption.
[1]: https://ente.io
[1]: https://ente.io
For that reason, I use https://www.photosync-app.com/ and back up my photo's to my webhost and to B2: both the app and the storage locations are interchangeable in case any of them stops working.
> how big is the risk of them calling it quits
In our specific case, the business is setup such that it is self-sustaining. There's no free plan, so for as long as you are paying for your storage, we'll be profitable.
Outside that, I would say trust snowballs in the long run.
Also, I don't know if size of a company is a metric that should warrant additional trust. The mission could be diluted in a larger organization, and hard-pivots could hurt them lesser.
We can also change the fees for our services (other than those you have already contracted and paid for) at any time if we give you notice.
10.2 make you pay, on demand, default interest on any amount you owe us at 10% per annum calculated on a daily basis, from the date when payment was due until the date when payment is actually made by you. You will also need to pay all expenses and costs (including our full legal costs) in connection with us trying to recover any unpaid amount from you.
In circumstances where we cease providing our services for other reasons, we will, if we consider it appropriate, it is reasonably practicable and we are not prevented by law or likely to incur any liability in doing so, give you 30 days' notice to retrieve your data.
That said, I now realize that this better applies to a B2B SaaS, where in a defaulter could have consumed a large amount resources, resulting in non-trivial financial damage.
Given the context of ente.io, this is not a situation we have to be worried about, and the clause has now been removed.
Thanks again for pointing this out.
The thing about the recovery fees though only works for B2B in France; so maybe it is going against EU regulations.
I'm not sure I agree with you. I would argue that a 1-2 persons shop actually has a much greater incentive to maintain a profitable small-scale business than a great group. For the former, it may be a comfortable addition to their income; for the latter, it might be an nth project that could turn out to not be profitable enough or be too much of a hassle to keep maintaining – the golden standard example being of course the Google Cemetery (https://gcemetery.co/).
An MMR of a few hundreds bucks is quite nice and worth cherishing for a single person, but it's more hassle than it's worth for a big company.
As opposed to something like Google that constantly shuts their services down?
It's totally possible to implement client side indexing and search. If you have the time/budget to do so, I think you would have a much more compelling product.
Thanks!
I tlooks quite a bit more expensive than google photos, but I could probably live with that. What I do want to know is where you are storing the photos, and what precautions you have taken to ensure data is not lost (assuming I still have access to my encryption key)
We're currently using B2[1] in Amsterdam for hot-storage, and Scaleway[2] in Paris for cold-storage.
> precautions
Replication to cold-storage is triggered as soon as a file is uploaded, and it will retry until the file hashes match across both providers.
Our production database is backed up once a day, and has a secondary node to which data is replicated synchronously.
[1]: https://backblaze.com [2]: https://scaleway.com