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People are seeing convenience but are only just becoming aware of the trade offs. At the moment there are very few alternatives available and I disagree that 'hosting your own data is trivial' - it typically devolves into becoming a sysadmin, when all you wanted was a way to share a photo. Thankfully there are many efforts to improve the ability of mere mortals to own their digital footprints and FWIW, I'm working with others on an open source stack that can do this [1]. We're starting with the core services of mail, contacts and calendars (to replace iCloud), but the stack itself is very flexible and built using Mirage [2].

I'm curious about what tools/software you use to manage things.

[1] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/

[2] http://www.openmirage.org/wiki/overview-of-mirage

> "I wished more people would see the endgame in situations like these: you're going to be paying through the nose for something that was already yours."

This very scenario occurred in 2014 with Bitcasa, when they increased their prices from $99/yr for infinite storage to $999/yr for 10TB [1], and only gave 3 weeks to migrate files [2]. I don't think I've ever cancelled an account so quickly & with such anger.

Luckily I'd only stored ~100GB of backups so far on there, but lesson learned - the cloud is for sharing/collaboration & backups, not primary storage, always have local copies as well & always have contingencies so you can switch online providers immediately with little impact.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/24/bitcasa-no-unlimited/

[2] http://blog.bitcasa.com/2014/10/23/important-we-are-upgradin...

    Hosting your own data is trivial

No it's not. For a reason you've already recognized but glossed over. Backups. Even really tech savvy users have a hard time keeping backups going correctly. And not doing so means you have to worry about hardware failures and software errors accidentally wiping out your data. Not to mention the growing industry of somebody taking your data hostage.

If you want to remove the incentive for people to move their data onto a Provider who manages the whole protection, backup, and availability side of their data for them you will have to provide a user friendly peer to peer solution for them somehow that doesn't require calling the tech-savvy {brother,sister,uncle,grandson,...} to set it up for them.

It's a testament as to how hard that is that no one has figured it out yet. Dropbox is probably the closest in that they keep the data on you box for you and allow you to pay directly for the service. But they still have a copy of the data that they can access if they should have a change in priorities.

Take a look at btsync and syncthing.

You are sort of making my point. They store the data on their devices and leave encryption up to me. How is this better than dropbox? It looks basically as easy to use as dropbox but how is it a step up?

They dont store your data.

If we are talking about the same thing (https://www.btsync.com/en/faq/)

Then they explicitely state that they store the data on their own servers. Is there another btsync?

EDIT:

Actually rereading it states they allocate space on their servers which sounds like they store data on their servers but I suppose it's also possible they might not.

Unfortunately btsync.com is a service offering of the bt sync software. Check out http://www.getsync.com/

The only thing BT seems to store is your location (so they can connect any peers which use your key) and potentially the mechanism for authenticating the key the other device uses to connect (it could be done client side but I dont think so).

A has files and gives B the key to the sync location. B enters it into btsync and chooses a folder. B downloads A's files over an encrypted channel directly from A's computer.

Add more people to get more to get multiple seeds.

We already solved the peer-to-peer solution along time ago - it was called TCP/IP.

At least, The internet was supposed to be peer-to-peer. It was for a while. Hosting data yourself - possible because your local computer was an equal peer on the network - worked wonderfully.

Sharing some photos with a friend was as easy as sending them a URL[1] to your local server. Yah, it slowed down your internet every time someone wanted to access the data, but that was fine because you only sent it to a couple friends. Better hosting was only needed if you wanted a larger audience or if you had some special requirements.

Unfortunately, a lot of people - either intentionally or from ignorance - ended up conflating "NAT" with "firewall" and generally popularized the idea that giving up your status as an equal peer on the internet was important "for security". This became the excuse to put off IPv6 until v4 addresses started to run low which took over as the reason to hide everybody behind a NAT.

A common response to this is that setting up a server is still technically complicated - the average user still won't understand how to setup Apache or how to configure DNS. Even with proper addresses, these technical issues will stop self-hosting from becoming popular! This used to be true, but... software gets easier to use over time. The only reason we haven't seen progress easier to use server software is.... who would run it? The people who understand NAT enough to bypass it don't need "user friendly" server software, and everybody that needs it cant access their server form the internet.

sigh - Walker's imprimature[2] was right. NAT was (or will be) what reestablishes barriers to publication and turns the internet back into cable tv.

[1] Traditionally, the "URL" was actually an IP address, and the file server was probably anonymous fTP.

[2] http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

Not worried about them selling me my own data, so much as they want to get rid of the concept of "buy once and own it forever". The Internet megacorps have become addicted to the idea of lifetime rental. Rent MS Office. Rent this movie. Rent this song. They're getting rid of the concept of software and media ownership for the sake of profit.

Rent your own photos. Rent the software you use. It's all part and parcel of the same concept. A subscription model rather than an ownership model. The iPod was a trojan horse.

Seeing as Apple in particular has to be dragged into this new world and everyone (really everyone) was there before them I don’t think there is any truth at all to that characterisation. The iPod was never intended to be a trojan horse. That’s revisionist history at its best.

> Rent MS Office

You can buy MS office just the same as you can before, but consumers want to rent it. I balk at shelling out hundreds and hundreds for a fully featured copy of Office which will be out of date by the next release. Paying £50 a year or so for an always up to date copy (with a bunch of extras like Skype credit) is a much more attractive alternative.

> Rent this movie

Yeah, because when has that ever been a thing?

> Rent this song

And when will this ever be a thing (Renting a song is not the same as renting access to a library of thousands of songs).

Song subscription services do seem to be displacing some percentage of digital purchases. According to the Financial Times yesterday: "The US saw 9 per cent fewer digital albums and 12 per cent fewer digital songs sold over the year, according to Nielsen Music data. In contrast, US audio and video streaming increased more than 50 per cent, with 164bn songs streamed."

Personally, I both make purchases and stream and I expect we'll continue to see a combination. And probably subscription plans that include some number of included downloads. (I think I've seen such plans in the past although I'm not aware of any major services offering this today.)

Subscriptions work better for software that people use day in and day out. The big issue for me is with things I use now and then and don't really care if I'm up to date or not. Or I need the software to access archived files in a particular format even if I'm not actively creating new ones any longer.

Oh you can now. But at what point will that stop? The concept of owning software is going away. In 5 years, you won't be able to buy Office or Photoshop. Just rent.

Same for movies and music. Yes, you've always been able to rent them. But in the future, you won't be able to own them forever.

> Same for movies and music. Yes, you've always been able to rent them. But in the future, you won't be able to own them forever.

What makes you say that?

Spotify is essentially a "rent this song" model.

I am in the process of converting from using DropBox to Microsoft's services. For the $100/year for 1 terrabyte of storage on DropBox, Microsoft provides 1 terrabyte for everyone in my household, plus everyone gets to use Microsoft Office, OneNote, etc. for the same $100/year.

I have to say that Microsoft is being very aggressive trying to get new customers by providing good services for a low price. I was accepted into their BizSpark program last year providing free Linux VPS and other web services for three years (while I am working on a new business idea). Also, there $100 per year per household service is really a good deal.