> I'm quite sceptical about relying on cloud services for my data.
I'm quite skeptical about relying on VC-funded or publicly-traded cloud services. An actual non-profit could be a lot more reliable: as long as expenses are less than income, there's no pressure to grow, and it could go on forever.
The big thing I'm skeptical about is growth in data needs. 5GiB free iCloud was more than enough 5 years ago; when I upgraded my iPhone, suddenly all my videos take 8x as much space. $10 for 1GiB forever storage sounds OK now, but what happens in 20 years when a single photo is 500MiB?
If you need more storage, buy some more when you need it. The endowment price should be correspondingly lower.
An interesting side effect is that people are calculating the endowment interest in this thread (a hard thing to do when rates are near-zero and there is a real risk of negative rates in the next 50 years), while the big factor is that storage prices drop dramatically over time.
Imagine if this service had launched 20 years ago. $10 would have bought you .. maybe 20MB? Pretty cheap to store that "forever" now.
I am personally a supporter of this foundation's mission -- more because it gives our civilization an alternative to cloud storage that is not controlled by Big Tech.
However, realistically, I don't think we can assume that storage prices will drop forever. That depends upon continued advances and breakthroughs in science, engineering, and commercialization efforts. I recognize that, ironically, Big Tech help drive storage prices down. It may be a generation, or five, or ten, but the tech advance boom won't go on forever.
I don't know if the foundation will be around at that point. It is pretty ambitious, and perhaps, they may have to change their charter. The founder of the Internet Archive is on the governing board of this foundation, and I can easily see this idea cooked up as, "hey, what if every Joe and Mary can have their own micro Internet Archive?" "People have photos of their great great grandmothers 100 years ago, but everyone's stuff is no digital; what if they could have saved that for their kids? Would they have a place to stash it even after they die? ('cause, you know, no subscription fees) Can you depend on Facebook to memorialize that?" (One of the people on their board is involved in a geaneological company)
I think it is a good vision, although their plan is not without risk. (But what isn't?) We're also depending on our descendants to value these personal, mini vaults of data to keep donating to preserve it (if the endownment model does not work). But you know: we would be dead and it would not be up to us to value and preserve our own history.
I am really surprised at the amount of backlash I see on this forum for it.
> Imagine if this service had launched 20 years ago. $10 would have bought you .. maybe 20MB? Pretty cheap to store that "forever" now.
That's a good point, but I don't think in their favor. At the rate that they're charging, you could prepay for 36 years of storage on S3 (neglecting bandwidth charges, which I know are substantial).
Compounded with your point that data storage costs are tanking, I would actually expect $10 to go even further. Which is also not to mention that they're planning on paying for their costs on interest from their endowment. Turns out I can also put my money in something that generates a profit.
I just don't see the point. They seem like they're trying to build S3 but without any profits, which at best makes them a marginally cheaper option, and at worst, a more expensive and less well featured S3.
They aren't building anything. They are storing data to S3, B2, and Internet Archive [1]. The fact that they are storing to multiple providers means that the costs should be higher than yourself just storing on one provider. That is before taking into consideration that the dividends on the trust need to meet the cost. The return on $10 needs to cover the costs of storing in S3 and B2.
> $10 would have bought you .. maybe 20MB? Pretty cheap to store that "forever" now.
On a macro scale, 20MB is still pretty difficult to store "forever", especially if you need to involve a significant number of trusted people, over a long enough period of time (basically forever), to ensure that it's around.
I'm quite skeptical about relying on VC-funded or publicly-traded cloud services. An actual non-profit could be a lot more reliable: as long as expenses are less than income, there's no pressure to grow, and it could go on forever.
The big thing I'm skeptical about is growth in data needs. 5GiB free iCloud was more than enough 5 years ago; when I upgraded my iPhone, suddenly all my videos take 8x as much space. $10 for 1GiB forever storage sounds OK now, but what happens in 20 years when a single photo is 500MiB?