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What Happens To Your Files When a Cloud Service Shuts Down?
MrSeb writes "Megaupload's shutdown poses an interesting question: What happens to all the files that were stored on the servers? XDA-Developers, for example, has more than 200,000 links to Megaupload — and this morning, they're all broken, with very little hope of them returning. What happens if a similar service, like Dropbox, gets shut down — either through bankruptcy, or federal take-down? Will you be given a chance to download your files, or helped to migrate them to another similar service? What about data stored on enterprise services like Azure or AWS — are they more safe?"
And if you're interested, the full indictment against Megaupload is now available.
...if the answer is "backup"?
If you can afford to lose the data, it's fine to have it in the cloud.
If you can't, you are SOL if you don't have a backup - one that is not in the cloud.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The foolishness that is millions of users trusting a single giant computing grid owned by a single private corporation was stupid in the first place.
it is everyone putting their eggs in the same giant basket
ranging from policy changes to mergers/takeovers/acquisitions to bankruptcies to government intervention - whatever you can imagine. its a single point of failure and your important stuff is gone.
moreover, these cloud stuff are utilized for making collaboration tools work. so if cloud is gone, there goes your entire communication in between your team, company, clients, workgroup, whatever.
its strategically stupid. run your own cloud if you want. dont put your stuff on another company's turf. its dangerous.
Read radical news here
Has Megaupload been found guilty of anything? If not, why has their site been shut down? If copyright laws apply to the internet, then why doesn't due process?
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
Exactly - redundancy is built into Dropbox, which is one of the benefits of the system and why I use it despite all its flaws.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
It sounds hauntingly familiar to what happens when a DRM licensing server goes down. (And also due to a company folding/retiring the service.)
Clearly, we need a magical, distributed, self-healing data storage system. I think I've heard of one or two of these (can anyone provide links, if they exist?) but I guess they haven't been popular enough to be remembered. (And I'm not talking about mere P2P; I'm thinking something more like distributed, redundant storage with the structural resilience of BitCoin.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Reminds me of the old saw, "Neither your life nor your property are safe when the legislature is in session."
I don't even trust GMail to keep my e-mail store forever, but download them to my own copy of Thunderbird each day. GMail is probably not going away any time soon, but what would I do if for some reason they shut down my account? Customer service for issues like this at Google isn't exactly stellar. If you don't have your own backups of what you have in the cloud, you are asking for trouble.
There is nothing magic about the "Cloud". From a practical perspective it is little more than a remote hard drive. A cloud provider going away is very much like a hard drive failing.
But once the SOPA-esque laws and treaties become The Way That Things Are (tm) - and unless things change drastically, they eventually will - and once the Great Consolidation has run its course - what choice will there be?
Check your premises.
Seeing as Dotcom was arrested in NZ, you may want to fly to a less US-friendly locale. I hear Venezuela is lovely this time of year.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Well, the summary specifically references a developer's forum where I can sympathize (being a developer) with people modding Android ROMs or whatever and uploading such binaries for distribution to others. I guess the people who run the forum don't really get a say in any of this. However, as a software developer, I can imagine a third option for files that are user generated (and for the most part legal).
... perhaps a hash of the date, checksum and filename? It would then maintain a key-value pair of these megaupload links to your internal URIs and also a directory structure of these URIs as the files. Now, say megaupload is a very unreliable/questionable service or goes down and now your forum is worthless. Well, you can always re-spider your site and replace all the megaupload links with links to your cloud hosting of these new files or work out a deal with another third party similar to megaupload where they would accept the file and URI and return to you the URI paired with their new URL. Then it's a matter of spidering your site and replacing the megaupload links with your new service's URLs.
Now XDA-Developers is going to have tens of thousands of once helpful posts that now lead to a broken link. How could they have avoided this? Well, I'd imagine that someone could have written an internal bot for their forums that would harvest links to the external megaupload. They then could have subscribed to megaupload, downloaded said linked files and created a local cache of their files purely for their own use on a small RAID. Now the last thing the bot would need to do is take the megaupload URL and develop some unique URI
It's a pain in the ass but let's face it, some forums could perish when their codependence on megaupload is fully realized in a very painful manner. And I don't think that's a fair risk to the users who have created hundreds of thousands of posts.
My work here is dung.
...for a client, I'm not going to fool them into believing its any more secure than offsite copies in C level officer's homes or other safe location with physical access. In fact, given what happened with Megaupload, I'm not sure I could, in good conscience, convince a customer that cloud computing is secure for them.
i am so very tired....
zip file? Don't you mean RAR? No self-respecting pirate uses zip.
Prime example evidence #1 of how SOPA breaks the cloud.
A single complaint that a cloud service has a copyright file can result in a takedown of the entire cloud. Stranding all clients of that cloud.
Thanks to the government and their extra-judicial processes, they have broken the notion of internet provided services.
RAR? What is this the early 2000's? Don't you mean 7Zip?
One part of their duty is to not commit illegal activities that gets them closed down.
At this point, it has not been demonstrated whether Megaupload has committed any illegal activities (remember the presumption of innocence and all that). The problem is that it's not unfathomable for an entity to be taken down in this fashion regardless of whether they actually commited any crime; especially if SOPA/PIPA or any similar legislation ever gets passed.
I've been watching the hype over cloud-this and cloud-that for several years with an increasingly cynical eye. Perhaps this incident will help convince a few others to look pass the trendy buzzwords and actually THINK about what can happen. For example:
1. Drives seized, eventually end up for sale to the public, random people now own your data.
2. Cloud provider hacked, dangerous random people now own your data.
3. Drives seized, feds download all your data and start going through it to see if they can make a case against you. (Oh, you don't think they can? Keep in mind the words of Cardinal Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.")
4. Drives seized, someone decides to make a few extra bucks selling your data to your competitors. Or spammers. Or phishers.
5. Drives seized, someone graciously decides to let you "have your data back", but what you get back is not what you think it is -- it's been quietly, carefully modified. Maybe your research statistics have been subtly corrupted; maybe there's malware in it; maybe it's missing a few key pieces here and there.
When you use a cloud provider, all you've got is your best hope. And "hope" is not a valid security strategy.
The legitimate users of the service have lost real property
No they haven't. It has been argued time and time again on this very site that the idea of "intellectual property" is nonsense and that the loss of data does not deprive you of anything real. If it's a legitimate argument for people who download music and movies, then it's a legitimate argument in this case. Or else it's inaccurate in both cases. You can't have it both ways.
A huge part of the whole cloud approach is that it is an approach to data storage that comes with all of the redundancy built in. The idea is that it's expensive to run your own redundant data stores, keep them secure, etc. So, one basically outsources it to the cloud.
Now we're in a situation where the manner in which some subset of the users of a given cloud can bring the entire thing down for everyone, resulting in the loss and exposure of everyone's data.
Let's consider for a minute AWS. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of companies that exist pretty much solely in AWS space. They rely upon the cloud for their existence. AWS is a lot more reputable than Megaupload. However, at the end of the day, the same problem potentially exists with storing things in the AWS cloud.
And if this can happen to one company, it can happen to any, including the "more reputable" ones like AWS. Especially with the SOPA-esque laws and treaties being pushed.
This will absolutely break the cloud model. It renders all the advantages of the cloud moot, and in fact, opens up a completely new security hole (that of unwarranted seizure and or destruction of data by government agencies, or perhaps even rival corporations with an accusation of illicit content). Disney thinks that MyLittleComic is storing their data in JoesCloud? Accuse JoesCloud of hosting illicit data, get the whole thing nuked.
This results in loss of business (at least in the USA); it makes it harder for the smaller firms and startups to be viable; and it further entrenches those corporations that are big enough to pay the appropiate bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbyist donations in Washington DC.
Finally, I would never, ever argue against due diligence. I would, however, claim that for a number of organizations that cloud use IS due diligence. And I'd still maintain that a good number of folk's fourth amendment rights were just tossed into the crapper.
Check your premises.
its the difference between going from 1 copy of data to 2 or 0
No they haven't. It has been argued time and time again on this very site that the idea of "intellectual property" is nonsense and that the loss of data does not deprive you of anything real. If it's a legitimate argument for people who download music and movies, then it's a legitimate argument in this case. Or else it's inaccurate in both cases. You can't have it both ways.
The discussions you're referring to were about making more copies of the data. This discussion is about taking offline servers with copies, many of which were probably the last accessible to the original uploader. This is akin to BBC scraping its archives in the 1970s. Good luck getting the surviving copies back from those who downloaded them before server shutdown.
If I were to physically deprive an artist of his or her only copy of his or her intellectual property, then we'd be making an apt comparison. As it is, it seems like you're just trolling for the **AA. In the Megaupload case, I would guess that with the amount of data taken down, at least one person, probably thousands, have been deprived of their only copy of data, which is real property. If I download a copy of Michael Jackson's Thriller album from LimeWire, I'm not depriving anyone of anything.
I'm not defending copyright infringement here, I'm just pointing out your terrible logic.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I know cloud storage is trendy and all, and maybe I'm just an old fogey, but things like this just confirm my feeling that you should keep your stuff local. There isn't a lot of functional difference between a local storage appliance and storing your stuff in "the cloud". You can even outsource administration if you choose. The difference is, you won't lose your stuff due to the suspected bad behavior of some other company.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What Happens To Your Files When a Cloud Service Shuts Down?
They're toast.
That was the easiest "Ask Slashdot" ever. What's the next question?
No, really. That's all there is to say about it. Everything else either follows from there, is trivially obvious, or is pure speculation, ranting, off-topic or trolling.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
My copying your file doesn't remove the file from you.
You deleting my file removes the file from me.
Even if your premise is correct, the situations aren't the same.
If you honestly managed to avoid being aware that this was an incredibly risky proposition, I feel sorry for you.
Then feel sorry for the thousands of small businesses who can't afford their own IT shops and have to farm their IT services out to consultants. If the consultant says, "We can host your data in the cloud so that both your office in Spokane and the one in Portland can access it without an expensive leased line and two dedicated file servers and save you a ton of money" it sounds like a good idea. "The Cloud" is the big buzz word, being pushed by some very respectable companies like IBM, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and the person who they're paying to be the expert recommends it. System works fine, they save a ton of money, they sell widgets or insurance, they're not IT experts. They're the ones who are going to get screwed, and royally.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Don't be naive. Their crack team of security hackers will "open your zip file" and find kiddy porn, letters to Al-Qaeda, homemade explosives recipes, and blueprints to JFK and O'Hare.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I am surprised that NAS's haven't caught on very well. I have had one since 2007, and have been living in "the cloud" ever since. I can access all of my data over the internet, and it also serves as a nice little low power web server that can run gallery and various other apps. It can stream media, and I can even kick off a bit torrent movie download at work, and then watch it when I get home. All the other functions are really just gravy, as I originally bought this set up to replace a large old power hungry pc that was acting as a file server to supplement my roommate and I's meager laptop drives. I am protected both by RAID 1 and an external USB hard drive that I do a full backup to on a weekly basis. The only thing I am really missing is having a backup kept off-site, which I could do if I was willing to swap out disks, or pay for a service that would allow me to do an online backup.
Its a little pricey (about $400 for disks + the NAS itself) and requires some knowledge to set up properly, but I have no real space limitations, upload/download limits, and I can add or disable features as I see fit. Oh and of course, mine runs linux on top of a low power arm CPU.
Ok, so pay a little extra and buy 2 external USB hard disks instead of just the one and every few days/every week you rotate the disk through an offsite location the feds wont know about or find.