Most people around me are either subscribing to or are part of a cloud storage plan. They usually pay each month around 4€ to keep their media, phone backups, passwords and messages saved in the cloud. From a bigger perspective, this is a great product that prevents people from owning physical hardware that could be stolen or corrupted. The main issue I have with this offering is that people are willing to pay this product for their entire lives.
Most people wouldn’t want to rent a physical storage unit because they can store things at their home or sort what’s useful and what isn’t. The key difference between the physical and the digital storage is the price. If people had the option to store all of the items they could ever accumulate in their lifetime inside a storage unit, everyone would accept it - because we are all a bit of a hoarder.
This is why I call this a “life-sentenced subscription” - once people are used to it, they will never have the will to go back and sort out their files and photos. Their destiny is to pay for the product until their final breath.
For me, this situation kind of sucks. Why? Because these people thinks they need this storage - and this is what Apple, Google, and others want you to think. But in reality, who really needs to have their phone backed to the cloud? Who needs real-time access to hundreds of gigabytes of photos? I find the free tier of most offerings to be more than enough for a standard person, and when you combine the free tiers of Google Drive and iCloud (15GB + 5GB), you have plenty of storage for your day-to-day operations.
Don’t hoard digitally if you don’t hoard physically. You need more space? Right, get a hard-drive. Of course a hard-drive can be stolen, which is why you need to save your data in multiple places. In my case, I have a SSD with a backup on a hard drive, and a third copy of my data is on my phone (but not synced in the cloud!).
If you are tech-savvy, it’s totally in your capacity to get rid of these cloud subscriptions and create a great ecosystem inside your home. But if you are not and you don’t want to bother with the IT stuff, I guess cloud storages are for you.
I like tech, and I even more like the opportunity to live without a lifeline on tech giant. My wife and I have a simple setup which allow us to store things safely without paying any cloud subscriptions. We are using a Raspberry Pi and two hard drives (because hardware can fail, and we need a spare for backup). For photos, we use Immich (an open-source software that replicates Google Photos very well) and for files we use Filebrowser. When we take a photo, a first copy is stored on the phone, and later it gets synced by Immich to my SSD, and then during the night it’s copied to my hard drive. Honestly, I can’t imagine a case where I could lose my data on every devices that hold a copy. And if it happened, my photos from my last vacation would likely be the least of my problems.