1TB of storage space is $240 a year with iCloud. Amazon Cloud Drive is $12 a year for unlimited photos or $60 a year for unlimited everything. I'll stick to Lightroom and Cloud Drive for my photo needs. Until Apple join the league of Google and Amazon with their cloud storage options, then I'm not interested, even if their products are pretty good.
Even from Amazon, haven't we learned not to ever trust the statement "unlimited"?
I had an "unlimited" data plan from AT&T. People regularly get their "unlimited" $1/month shared hosting accounts terminated for going over a few megs of storage.
I keep the majority of my data at home on a NAS instead of flinging it to the other side of the world and being disappointed that I have trouble getting it back.
Given the lowering cost of storage and out-of-the-box ease for shoving NAS boxes on a network and them popping up in a network browsing situation, I wonder if more people will return to local storage and processing? Will there be a cloud burst, like the dot com bubble burst?
> It's almost like you can't trust cloud providers!
That's a rather sweeping statement. It's more accurate to say that you can't trust a service which you don't pay real money for. I would certainly trust a paid, dedicated cloud provider like e.g. SmugMug far more than a “free” service from a large company like Google or Amazon.
> Given the lowering cost of storage and out-of-the-box ease for shoving NAS boxes on a network and them popping up in a network browsing situation, I wonder if more people will return to local storage and processing?
That model has its own weaknesses: a single NAS box requires you to play sysadmin and is vulnerable to things like theft, accidents (never assume anything survives kids & pets!), and security problems. If enough people put everything on single systems, they're going to start looking like great targets to the kind of people who make ransom-ware – once the attacker blocks your access to the only copy, you have no choice but to pay up!
An interesting project would be figuring out how to solve those problems – e.g. a box which did strongly-encrypted off-site backups with guaranteed minimum retention periods would be interesting both as a hedge against many of those threats and as a way to get the recurring revenue needed to support a serious software project with non-trivial security exposure. You could probably even open-source everything since the vast majority of people are more interested in paying someone to handle ops than saving a latte per month in service charges.
You are right - my comment was too generalised with regard to cloud providers. If you do not have a SLA with them, then I suppose it's risky trusting your data to them. With everyone and their dog offering "cloud storage" to shove your data, I do wonder if more and more data will get shoved up into "The Cloud" either to be irretrievable (or forgotten about?)
Perhaps multiple NAS boxed distributed around everywhere would help?
