What Happens To Data When a Cloud Provider Dies? 262
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the up-in-smoke dept.
from the up-in-smoke dept.
Lucas123 writes "When cloud storage providers shut down, as four have done in the past year, users are left wondering how they'll get their data back and whether they'll be able to migrate it directly to a new service provider. More importantly, analysts say, what guarantees do they have that the data stored offsite will be deleted after the shutdown. Currently, there is no direct way to migrate data to another provider, and there are no government rules or regulations specific to data managed by cloud storage providers."
HAL (Score:2)
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It has a save feature that saves last two minutes of its existence, so it can relive its death countless times!
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Capt. Obvious reports. (Score:5, Insightful)
As if people weren't losing any data when "the cloud" was called "shared hosting".
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
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the cloud is just a new name on an old concept
Pretty much. And the increased visibility means it's now being used by people who don't understand the need for a backup.
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Or people who do understand the need for backup, and use this as a convenient way to do so. As long as you're not just storing the files on a solitary machine and the "cloud", it seems like a pretty nice backup system to me. Something like Dropbox or Ubuntu one is a nice way to keep working areas in synch on different machines. With stuff stuff like code for work I tend to keep it off of these services and back it up onto work's servers, but not much of what I have is that important.
Migration (Score:4, Informative)
On shared hosting you can migrate from one service provider to the other without major pain, because there are a lot of providers offering LAMP/J2EE/ASP.net etc.
In the case of the cloud, you depend on the cloud APIs which aren't standardized and because cloud servers aren't a commodity. You can't migrate from Amazon cloud to Microsoft cloud without writing your own abstraction layer on top of proprietary cloud APIs.
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Meh apis blah blah. When the shared hosting was at its peak during the second dot-com boom, you had at least several flavors of unix, several versions of apache with minor api differences, various databases with various options compiled or not compiled in, gd with or without gif support, and don't even start me on the php or perl module availability. Migration was as much a nightmare then, as it is now.
And the "big issue" was the same then as now -- in the end, the data is the responsibility of the entity t
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The problem comes when you have sensitive data stored offsite and that service goes under and the servers are sold to highest bidder or end up at home at some employee who are setting up his own service.
Who takes responsibility for that the data is erased?
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What's your solution for backing up tens of terabytes of data, with hundreds of gigabytes of differential data being generated every day?
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Offline porn collections are largely unnecessary now that we have decent connections and streaming.
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I dunno, what do you tell the boss when it breaks? Normally the prospect of losing a vast store of data would make you desire a backup more, not less.
If you are just protecting against service provider default, you can backup you could data elsewhere on the cloud, ya know, as long as the data on A and A' are on machines owned by different people.
OTOH, if you're storing tens of terabytes of data and gigs of diffs, are you sure you couldn't come up with a cheaper solution than a cloud provider in your closet
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
You take your chances if your hosting your data somewhere outside of your control. Unfortunately, when any company goes broke, customer concerns tend to go out the window as the major creditors swoop in to grab what value they can.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Right on spot. If you give your data away, you give your data away. It is not yours anymore. What the providers guarantees while online dies with the company as people are busy updating their resumes. Whatever means you may have to get to them (legal for example) is usually moot as well since the company is no more.
What you have on YOUR hard drive, on YOUR dvds, YOUR tapes is in YOUR control. Note that it is not necessarily better.
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What you have on YOUR hard drive, on YOUR dvds, YOUR tapes is in YOUR control. Note that it is not necessarily better.
Not if the RIAA, MPAA and others have their way./p.
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I didn't say you own it, I said it's in your control. And it is. Strings may be attached, but if your DVDs are stored in proper conditions you will most certainly be able to read them in 30 years. Assuming there will be a licensed player still in store then.
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Anybody who didn't think of these things before signing up was Doing It Wrong.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget that all SLAs, privacy agreements, and other items are not worth the paper they are printed in come a liquidation. We all heard the adage that possession is 9/10s of the law. It applies here too.
After a bankruptcy, the new holders of the servers can do anything they please with the data on the boxes. PII data about bank accounts and HR records? It can be put as a torrent for all to download, sold to a firm offshore for ID theft, sold to advertisers. There is not one single thing anyone can do about it, provided there is no confidential or classified data present. Trade secret? By law, it isn't a trade secret anymore.
One of the downsides of cloud computing is that all data, be it E-mails on a cloud system, offsite storage, or applications in house can easily be made public to sell to all comers should a cloud provider go bankrupt or change hands. No amount of paperwork can ever go to assure against that.
Only real protection? Encryption, with keys stored with the client, and ONLY with the client. Even then, it still isn't good for cyphertext data to be made public for all and sundry to try to figure out the contents.
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This really identifies an area where there needs to be a legislative solution to the problem. At the moment, your offsite provider goes bankrupt, any remedies you have are going to be expensive and hit-and-miss. There needs to be some law created around this to assure that when a company goes down, the data remains firmly the property of the user.
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After a bankruptcy, the new holders of the servers can do anything they please with the data on the boxes.
You mean like how when a physical storage place goes bankrupt?
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After a bankruptcy, the new holders of the servers can do anything they please with the data on the boxes.
I'm going to say "[citation needed]" here, because it damn well is(!). Even though AFAIK the US is generally more laissez faire and less strict with info in general than the EU- where, as the other poster mentioned, they'd get smacked into a pulp for doing anything approaching what you describe- I'm still not remotely convinced that any new owners would be legally permitted to s
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That all may be, but at least when you have the data in hand, you know what's happening to it. If a cloud provider goes down the tubes, even if you have backups (which, as you say, you should) you still can't guarantee what will happen to that data. Will it be erased? Will it be warehoused? Will it end up being someone's unofficial severance package?
Risk Reward... (Score:5, Insightful)
A cloud based form of backup or duplicates can only be one leg of a system to protect data. Gotta have at least 3 legs to stand on.
The reminder that 4 services closed in one year is fair warning.
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Hmm... (Score:2)
there are no government rules or regulations specific to data managed by cloud storage providers.
While there is most likely a solution to this problem, it does not lie in government regulation.
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Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
That information is my personal property.
It is the government that usually sorts out property issues (and contract issues). There is a VERY long history of this.
Sorry to rain on your psuedo-libertarianism parade but the government is exactly the right entity to help sort this out. This is a simple property issue.
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Most opinions on Slashdot tend to skew towards information not being "property" at all. It's a bunch of bits. A cloud storage provider is simply a storage device, and like all storage devices it CAN fail. You need to plan for that possibility and have a contingency plan in place. If you are so naive as to place your data solely onto one of these services then if it fails you're SOL.
Instead, use them as a supplement to your other backups. I use Dropbox pretty extensively myself, but if it goes under I'l
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Sorry to rain on your psuedo-libertarianism parade but the government is exactly the right entity to help sort this out. This is a simple property issue.
If you lend your car to Joe Bob Inc and then the company goes bust, what do you think will happen? Hint: they won't drive it back to your house and give you the keys.
I remember when a company I worked for years ago in London went bust with large debts, the bailiffs took away all kinds of hardware that was on loan from various companies and they then had to try to get their property back. Why do you expect data to be any different?
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there are no government rules or regulations specific to data managed by cloud storage providers.
While there is most likely a solution to this problem, it does not lie in government regulation.
That's what the airline industry said, same goes for the bankster industry, as well as the oil industry, oh, and don't forget the utility industry and commercialized penal system.
And last but not least, an unregulated government. The voters should demand a balanced budget, term limits, reasonable campaign funding, accountability of office-holders, the outlawing of corporate special interest groups, a re-affirmation of the separation of church and state and a separation of business and state.
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Of course, that would require a government that regulates for the good of its citizen rather than the corporations. Cloud market is still young, there is some hope that good regulation can be passed.
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But we already have the required government regulation, in the form of contract laws and the court system to oversee them.
There's no monopoly issue here, such as there is with say cable TV or EM spectrum.
There's no personal safety issue here, such as there is with food and drugs.
There's no necessity for living here, such as there is with electric/gas and water.
If you want some guarantee that they destroy your data when you are no longer a customer then use one that proivdes that guarantee. At my place of wo
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If you want some guarantee that they destroy your data when you are no longer a customer then use one that proivdes that guarantee. At my place of work we have language in out contract with our dedicated server provider about what they must do with hard drives that we have used and so on - and yes that means we negotiated with them for a price and likely paid more than if we didn't want that requirement placed on them.
And when said server provider goes belly up, how do you ensure that guarantee is enforced, rather than the servers sold off to the highest bidder, complete with all contained customer data?
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They can't guarantee that you get your data. That's what backups are for. Government regulation is not meant to protect people from their own stupidity, regardless of the fact that it's sometimes abused to this end.
But they can make it a criminal offence to sell servers, drives, flash media, or any other data storage device with customer data from a shut down company. It should also probably be an offence to buy the same without reporting it.
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Corporations should be beholden primarily to the taxpayers, the shareholders get a cut and say after that. Corporate officers should answer to the taxpayers. Attorney-client privilege for corporate lawyers
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Corporations should be beholden primarily to the taxpayers, the shareholders get a cut and say after that. Corporate officers should answer to the taxpayers. Attorney-client privilege for corporate lawyers should extend to the taxpayers, not the officers or shareholders.
Remember: Incorporation is a legal fiction given by the Government. The power of the government derives from the will of the people. Corporations should always act in the best interest of the people, and like the Secret Service, they should be willing to take a bullet for us. If a group of people don't want to take this responsibility, no one is forcing them to incorporate.
I'd hate to live in your dystopian future, friend. Government's powers derive from the people, but buisnesses don't. Incorporation is a recognition that people acting in a group with each other don't give up their individual rights.
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"...a corporation being a legal entity that is effectively recognized as a person under the law). The corporation may be a business, a non-profit organization, sports club, or a government of a new city or town."...
A corporation has extra rights that the "people acting in a group" don't have. If a person or persons dump oil into the gulf of Mexico, they can
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Conservative thinking is a failure. The only time regulation doesnt work is when it is purposely sabotaged to not work which is time and again what conservatives do because its too costly to follow the law and do the right things.
Wow. Even if you do accept the fallacy that modern republicans and democrats are different in any way, the perception is that the dems are the progressives who get things done, and reps are the ones who take the "high moral ground". There are areas where government regulation is a necessary evil, but not when it comes to my personal data.
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Absolutely it does. The simple fact is time and again it is seen that private entities are completely irresponsible and require government oversight and the threat of law to keep them in check.
This idea of deregulation needs to stop. Conservative thinking is a failure. The only time regulation doesnt work is when it is purposely sabotaged to not work which is time and again what conservatives do because its too costly to follow the law and do the right things. If corporations (even do no wrong Google) where not inherently evil, this wouldn't be a issue, But capitalism is just as evil as communism, just in its own ways.
Translation: It would have worked much better if we had only busted more heads!
Welcome back to mainframes bitches (Score:3, Insightful)
The cloud has immense uses but "trust me" is not something you ever want to here from the government or a company. Anyone that puts there assets out in the ether with no alternate location is asking for trouble.
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Well, a mainframe is actually the exact opposite of a cloud. It is just that most services that call them self cloud-services, especially cloud-storage are the exact opposite of cloud.
Cloud: Share a your among many but unreliably providers, treating this abstract idea as a single provider, a cloud.
Mainframe: Put you data in the hands of single central provider. The exact opposite of cloud service
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This seems to be a case of you trying to redefine an accepted term from what it actually means to what you think it should mean. Unfortunately, language doesn't work that way.
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Both are distributed.
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Torrents are the classic cloud-storage that inspired the concept. Also personal details in social media is another source, in terms like "nothing is forgotten in the cloud".
The reason for the devolution of the name is of course that Google's search service internally is structured like a cloud, but of course their storage services are not, because unreliable indexes are acceptable, unreliable data storage is not.
Simple (Score:2)
Oh Slashdot, this is not news. IT lawyers have been addressing this for ages. If the SPA doesn't have clauses in place to protect customer data, simple, dont go with them.
The bigger concern is where the data is storred and who's viewing the data. Any buyer out there who is looking at Cloud must ask all these questions before signing up.
If you pay peanuts you get monkies, I think that sums this up!
Is this a cloud specific problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd think these issues are general so far as storing your data "anywhere but here" is concerned.
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Except that "here" can also suffer a catastrophy. It's a problem of storing your data in only one place.
The Cloud is a ripoff (Score:2)
What? Never heard of SCP? (Score:3)
Storage is cheap. Just get something like a dRobo, throw some barracuda HDs in it and you have a multi-terabyte raid array.
Just SCP your files down the net into the black box and you're all set. Question is, why aren't you doing this already?
Just leaving your files up on your host and NOT backing up to local storage is classic dumbfuckery.
For databases, most cloud users use MySQL anyway, so just use the admin tool to back up and replicate to a local server. Don't have a suitable machine for a local server? Get a mac-mini, they are rather inexpensive and come with MySQL5 pre-installed and configurable through Apple's server admin interface.
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General idea seems good, but I dont really understand the fascination with drobos for anyone who does any kind of serious IT work. A freenas box with a proper hardware RAID card can be had (sans drives) for about half the price of an equivalent (sans drives) drobo, is faster, supports ZFS, and has built in Unison | Rsync | ftp.... etc. It also doesnt use some poorly documented "kind-of RAID".
Why would I want a drobo?
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Did freenas fix the ZFS performance issues? And why would you want a hardware raid? If you controller dies you will have to get a compatable replacement to rebuild the array. Also might I suggest Openfiler as also worth looking at.
Oh and this would IMHO make a nice NAS http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182234 [newegg.com]
You get 6 sata ports 2 x 1000Mbit network ports plus it uses VGA and PS/2 so KVMs are cheap and easy with this. It even has a serial port if you need it. Put FreeNas on a USB driv
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And why would you want a hardware raid? If you controller dies you will have to get a compatable replacement to rebuild the array.
Battery backed cache. And with mirroring you should be able to mount the drives directly if you can't find a replacement controller... with RAID5 you're probably screwed, but if you're using RAID5 you presumably don't much care about your data anyway.
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I was thinking RAID 6 but yes if you are just doing mirroring you will be good. As to battery backed cache yes but only for a high end system other wise I would consider the UPS as the battery backup for the cache. If you are going to go with a battery backup cache then I would also go with redundant power supplies and dual independent UPSs but then you are in a way different category than a DROBO IMHO. Again it all depends on what you want to pay for. If I could get way with it I would use a RAID 6 where I
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more important than "here" and "there" multiple backups is offline storage. Keeping your data backed up to a share (onsite or offsite) only helps until one of your employees decides to go bonkers and delete the live data _and_ backups on your network to really fuck the company. If you have an up to date tape locked up in a safe somewhere you can still get your data back in this scenario. If you are only backing up to SANs and an employee does this you are truly fucked.
The most dangerous (and most often over
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What do you consider a lot of network bandwidth? Where we are co-located, we have a 20mb commit rate that bursts up to 100mb if needed. We have a VMware farm that can spin up new servers in a few minutes.
I think the cloud is targetted at people who think they are going to experience "explosive growth", but don't really know what that means. If you are developing an application on a LAMP stack running on a single server, and you need to spin up three more servers, that is 300% growth. That's pretty explo
To all Cloud entrepreneurs & VC's (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Cloud entrepreneurs and VC's:
If you are wondering why businesses aren't trampling themselves to go to a public cloud, here is half your answer. The other half was the Amazon outage. A CIO does not like depending on an outside company for his uptime metric. He wants total control. If there is an outage, he wants HIS people on it reporting to HIM. He doesn't want to go back to the CEO, "the cloud provider is working on it and there is nothing I can do to make it go faster."
If clouds happen, it will mostly be private clouds under the company's control. Sure it may not have as high uptime or be more expensive, but at least it's under their control. You surrender control going to an external cloud.
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Running in the cloud has the same implications of running any other successful IT operation. The organizations that experienced long term outages during the amazon issue had no failover or disaster plan.
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Running in the cloud has the same implications of running any other successful IT operation. The organizations that experienced long term outages during the amazon issue had no failover or disaster plan.
But how many times has "the cloud" been pushed as taking care of that stuff for you and that it couldn't possibly have outages? Move to the cloud! It'll take care of all that pesky need for disaster planning, redundancy, fail over and backups across its multiple datacenters! Can you afford our complex infrastructure? No? Then you must suck and need the cloud to succeed! Yet it failed in exactly the way they said it wouldn't.
Meanwhile, I've seen colocated servers doing fancy stuff and running things like DRB
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Because IT is complex and hard, people flock to false simlpicity, aka fads.
All the programmers do it too.
For your own sanity, just accept that this happens, and find ways to best position yourself to survive/benefit.
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Please yes they really are. The problem is that people are taking the wrong lesson from this.
1. Machines fail.
2. Don't expect things to not fail.
3. Don't be stupid.
NetFlix did not go down. Amazon did not go down. Both use E2C. Foursquare and Redit went down. So what was different?
Simple NetFlix used E2C to build a distributed system with redundant nodes. Foursquare and other did not.
Just like every other discussion where people talk out their but about how distributed systems are more reliable they failed
Surprise ... (Score:2)
Once your data is in the cloud, you don't really control it anymore. And, some of the TOS for these things more or less say "we get to keep it and use it if we want to".
The fact that these fold an go under is hardly surprising ... and I bet the legal status of your data is a little bit murky if the assets get sold off to someone else.
The cloud has always seemed a little bit sketchy in some places ... both because it's poorly defined, and what's to say your data doesn't end up in a country with rather liber
That's easy (Score:3)
And that, folks, is why you store locally and sync (Score:2)
What is the draw to cloud services anyway? Access to your data from anywhere?
You can get 12" laptops with 500gb hard drives and decently-sized keyboards. U
the sig.... read the sig... (Score:2)
Hopefully semi-serious customers do have in-house backups, and semi-serious providers do give a bit of warning before pulling the plug ?
That's a lot of effort and money down the drain for users, in any case.
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Depending on the circumstances surrounding their closure, not necessarily.
A lot depends on how business law in the country where they're based. In the UK, for instance, once a company enters administration, the directors are all sacked and administrators come in to run the business while looking for some way of disposing of it.
This means that no matter what guarantees you were given about the safety and availability of your data, those guarantees are out of the window the minute the administrators are call
Ideally, should be just like a safe deposit box (Score:2)
That said, I agree with other
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What good is the contract though? If the provider went under, there's no one left to sue for breaching the contract.
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Companies seldom evaporate overnight. There's a whole bunch of processes they have to go through before they're closed down in a legal sense.
The difficulty I see is that while there's established law and procedures in place if a company holds a physical object of value that belongs to someone else on the day they go to the wall, I'm not sure it's quite so simple if the item of value is the data they held for their customers. Particularly when the customers might need access to that data within X hours or
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Yes, but those things are all handled through law and the attached threat of criminal sanction (for things like unlawful conversion). If something exists only in contract, the only remedy is to sue, which is difficult if the counterparty is already bankrupt.
Some liquidator gets it. (Score:2)
There could be legal agreements between you and the provider that prevents the provider from selling it. But t
Cloud is for deployment, not storage, doh! (Score:2)
The cloud's purpose is to serve your data without using your local pipe.
You should maintain the main copy of that data yourself.
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And nothing says you can't contract with Cloud Company A for primary services, Cloud Company B as a backup site and then direct a backup to be made from A to B. As long as A and B are financially and physically independent, this should work./
Nothing new (Score:2)
How is this different than have your data stored in any single location?
* Stand alone system w/o backups: lose the system, lose the data.
* Stand alone system w/ backups in the same facility. lose the facility, lose the data.
Anyone that puts all of their eggs in a single basket without understanding the scope of the decision probably shouldn't be making those decisions. A proper risk analysis will weigh the risks, the costs, and the benefits.
The One That Lets You Keep Your Data (Score:2)
I had an idea which I thought at the time was novel. I haven't worked out all the kinks in it yet, but if it could be made to work, I think it could be awesome.
It starts with a home server, web-facing and firewalled against casual intrusion. You keep your data on that in some standard configuration which lets outside companies tap into and add value to the data of everyone who registers their servers with that company.
Example: Photo-sharing on a social network. You'd have your pictures on your home computer
Answer: TBD (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience, non-IT companies are falling all over themselves to move to (at the very least) hosted IT services. The true answer to this question will come out when the first major provider flames out. Think about this with a cynical eye towards the situation. CIOs and other decision makers are under immense pressure to cut costs, especially in companies where IT is not seen as a strategic investment. For every software company or non-IT company that uses IT to its advantage, there are 10x as many who use IT for file/print/email only, and see it as a cost like paying the janitor and building staff to keep the place running. Cloud providers win business by doing a shiny PowerPoint with animated graphics showing all those power-eating servers and local IT staff fading into "the cloud." At the same time, they promise the ability to get rid of your IT staff and replace the current IT spend with a monthly charge that can be completely written off as an operational expense. MBAs are seemingly taught on Day 1 that human resources are a necessary evil to be minimized, and that operational expenses are preferable to fixed asset spending. Therefore, this PowerPoint resonates with them and the decision is made.
The problems come behind the PowerPoint. Every IT problem the business had before now becomes the provider's problem, including data storage/retention, bandwidth issues, server provisioning and all that stuff. How well does it work out? Everything depends on the competence of your provider. Even with ironclad SLAs in place, (a) Really Bad Stuff can still happen that makes them null and void, and (b) SLAs are only a piece of paper guaranteeing you free service or a payment in the event of an outage.
Any business considering The Cloud needs to think of the following:
(If this sounds like the list of questions to ask when considering an outsourcing agreement, it is. Cloud is just IT outsourcing without a directly accountable staff at the provider.) Businesses who want data integrity and decent service need to realize that they have to pay for it, just like they do in a traditional outsourcing/hosting scenario. If a CIO chooses to go with the equivalent of GMail for their internal messaging, just 'cause it was cheaper than the fully-hosted, DR'd, off-site backed up, SOX-compliant managed email service, then they deserve what they get.
Between the powerpoint and the problem... (Score:3)
Cloud providers win business by doing a shiny PowerPoint with animated graphics showing all those ...The problems come behind the PowerPoint ..
But between the powerpoint and the emergence of the problems, there are bonuses for the top management. The gang has shown the powerpoint to the board and have already awarded themselves fat bonuses and have already left camp looking for their next chump. The board also does not care too much, they get paid, what 100K for six meetings in a year? and the free use of corporate guest houses, jet, club memberships and special boxes in the stadia...
The stock traders don't care either. They buy before the confe
That's an easy one.... (Score:2)
IT get's sold on the server's hard drives on ebay or at the Liquidation auction.
I have a friend that has a large chunk of the "pets.com" database from the old server he bought years ago.
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True, not likely a liquidator is going to wipe the drives. I've seen some interesting stuff from eBay. I suppose the only way the company could deal with this is to run all storage encrypted, keep the key on a USB flash, and if they ever go chapter 7 pull all the keys as they walk out the door.
The problem with SLAs (Score:2)
This video illustrates the problem with SLAs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RabecxZKmU [youtube.com] (probably safe for work, depending on how long you watch the clip for -- stop watching after the promise to be safe).
Vendors want customers, and will do anything or say anything to get them. Especially vendors will promise something if making the promise will get them what they want, and there is absolutely no disadvantage to breaking the promise. Any customers who believe a promise that cannot possibly be kept are fo
EC2 is only semi-cloud (Score:2)
That's why I like Amazon EC2 - my "cloud" servers are Linux instances running in their cloud, and I can easily mirror the data to my own servers. While I use their cloud API to start/stop/provision servers, I'm not dependent on of their API's to host my application. If Amazon went away, I could have my servers up and running at another provider overnight. (I do take full advantage of Amazon's multi-region instances, so I wasn't affected by their East Coast problems.)
Fortunately, I don't have terabytes of d
Cloud Insurance? (Score:2)
There is an Answer (Score:2)
Read the Contract! DUTY TO DEFEND!!!! (Score:2)
Read the contract carefully. Providers generally exclude themselves for all liability in the contract that they post on the Internet.
But there is one big time bomb in those cloud storage contracts that nobody talks about: The contracts often impose a "duty to defend" upon the customer. That particular little bedbug means that if a person sues the provider over the data you store on their site, that you have a duty to defend the provider. That means you pay for all the provider's lawyer, expert, and cour
Why regulate? (Score:2)
I'm not convinced at all this type of service needs government regulation. Data recovery and destruction policies should be part of the contract with the company, and existing contract law can deal with any problems. If you chose a service that didn't have good recovery and destruction policies, that is a poor choice on your part.
Screenplay working title (Score:3)
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And this is why I wont be using harddisks for anything of value. I've printed off the contents of all my storage devices on A4 sheets of paper in raw binary format, recently I've had to renovate the garage to cater.
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...nice strawman there but it kind of loses some of the essential elements of the original.
A hard drive remains in my control just like a piece of paper does.
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But a hard drive can fail at any time, and there may not be any warning. If you're looking for one magic bullet where you can store your data without any care as to setting up backups, then sorry, it doesn't exist. If you have data that you don't want to lose, it HAS to exist in multiple places. Otherwise it's just a matter of time before it's gone.
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I think you're looking at the wrong problem.
The problem here is not the failure of a bit of hardware. That can be remediated by having backups to tape, DVD, or whatever, that you control.
The problem here is the failure of a business that has your data. If the business fails, they have functioning hard drives, tapes, etc., with a copy of your data that is not under your control. That data may be, and probably is, the core of your business. That outside copy of your data could potentially be sold to your
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And, this is why I will not be using cloud services for anything of value (meaning "anything ever"). It is bad enough that I have to rely on email from someone else.
Why do you have to reply on email from anyone else? It's not too hard to setup a mail server for yourself.
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Don't use the smaller cloud providers, rely on those that are too big to fail.
There is no such thing as 'too big to fail'.
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> Why is it that recently, people seem to think the answer is in government regulation
This is a personal property and contract issue.
That's pretty much the very core of what governments are there to deal with.
Yes. UPS should be expected to not give away my parcels to some random 3rd party and yes the government should get involved if UPS doesn't do the right thing.
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This is a personal property and contract issue.
That's pretty much the very core of what governments are there to deal with.
Why should the government be interfering with contracts betwen individuals, except in very specific cases where those contracts violate other laws (slavery, dumping toxic waste, etc)?
There is nothing here that individuals cannot freely negotiate themselves. That's pretty much the very core of what governments should not be involved with.
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There's negotiating, verifying, enforcing, and punishing. I'm not quite with you about customers being able to negotiate contracts, let alone verify obligations are being met, and they certainly can't enforce them, nor punish if required.
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If the problem is what happens when the cloud provider dies (as it is here), then the questions are going to involve bankruptcy law, and therefore by definition, government. You can't say to leave the government out of this when the government is the one who decided in the first place that the data can be sold by the cloud provider if they go bankrupt.
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the data this question is asking about is all physically located someplace,
In the pile of hard drives at the local computer recycling center, no doubt.