I have a theory that in ten years or so the tide may turn. That’s enough time for this generation to have lost, or have had to deal with unpleasant migrations of, their valuable data due to online services shutting down... repeatedly.
I don’t know. On the other hand, most older people like myself have had to deal with data loss from failed, obsolete or lost storage devices. There’s still no “one size fits all” very-long-term solutions for consumers.
If the market works its magic, we probably won't go back, but will end up with services that keep getting more reliable with time and outages. If Google/AWS end up with an outage where folks lose business critical data, there will now be a market for extremely high reliability data services. As you point out yourself, not dealing with the hassle of doing backups yourself has been a huge advantage. Ease of use and convenience will trump quality for the majority of use cases and the market will keep shifting in that direction.
If I try to view this from a non-technical persons viewpoint, this shift has been transformative, really. Most folks don't care if their data has been transcoded a million times as long as its still useful and easily accessible. This has protected a ton of businesses and users from being at the mercy of their IT team.
One of the dangerous factors of cloud-first thinking is that it tends to abstract away people's concerns for redundancy. "Oh, CloudBrand handles distributed backups for me in 32 different regions, I checked the box for that." And when CloudBrand has some new scale of failure, it just takes down all your copies at once.
Every service is "extremely high reliability" until it isn't. Sometimes, the causes of failure are even beyond technical ones. Look at the situation with Adobe Creative Cloud users in Venezuela-- the discs and wires are still fine, but customers are losing real value because of legal mandates. Your high availability platform can withstand a network cable cut, but can it withstand a court order?
If you're still thinking local first, it encourages awareness of multiple baskets. iCloud is down? You can still pull the photos off your camera's flash card, or your workstation's SSD, or the external spinning-rust hard disc you used for cold backups, or the third-party dedicated backups service you use...
> If I try to view this from a non-technical persons viewpoint, this shift has been transformative, really. Most folks don't care if their data has been transcoded a million times as long as its still useful and easily accessible.
Until they try to print their photos for the family album and discover that pictures taken by their high-end camera or an expensive iPhone were degraded by successive transcodings to the point they look like garbage in print, and at that point there's no way to fix it.
> This has protected a ton of businesses and users from being at the mercy of their IT team.
And put them at the mercy of third-party vendors. It's a trade-off, but having a local IT team has its benefits.
I don’t know. On the other hand, most older people like myself have had to deal with data loss from failed, obsolete or lost storage devices. There’s still no “one size fits all” very-long-term solutions for consumers.