Because, to me, it make no sense whatsoever…
🧐
Edit: Just to name one example: pCloud
pCloud, under business terms fairly towards the end:
Term & Termination
This Agreement may be terminated by either party at any time, for any reason. This Agreement will remain in effect until Customer’s subscription to the Services expires or until the Agreement is terminated. In the event of termination by the Customer, the Customer will remain responsible for payment of all fees and charges applicable to the period during which the Agreement was in effect.
I just dumped pcloud. Also a surprising increase in fake pcloud emails trying desperately for me to click them. My email provider flags them over real pcloud ones. Still. Someone is spamming the shit out of me for that. I’d say pcloud isn’t worth sticking with.
Edit: For clarity, I never trusted them. Anything I had there was protected with 2FA login and also I used Cryptomator. Still, I am not keeping anything there any longer.
Yeah what I also saw in the terms was that they reserve the right to sell their company without informing users other than through an update in the terms & conditions, and based on play store reviews, they terminate lifetime accounts if they find that you upload copyright protected files, even if you don’t share them with anyone.
Indexing my stuff and comparing it against external databases is a big no no for me.
So far I’m quite happy with sync.com, been using them for well over a decade. Data is fully encrypted during upload, so no matter if the server is ever breached, they wouldn’t get anything useful out of it.
I also got my own nextcloud instance up and running, but it’s with a shared hosting provider where I don’t feel as secure.
In my experience, every “lifetime” digital service I’ve ever made the mistake of purchasing has been a scam.
There are on going costs with running the service so if new customers stopped signing up they would go broke when they run out of money. (i.e. like a ponzi scheme)
Unless they invest your seed capital and pay for your services from growth. This would work when times are good, but could fall apart during any significant financial crisis.
The current offer for the named service is asking for us$800 for 10TB, if they followed the 5% rule that would leave them with us$40 per year to provide the service.
You can easily buy 3 10TB HDDs with that money, plenty of redundancy, no need to have someone else do it.
I mean, cloud is more of an offsite backup solution.
Of course, the hardware you control is better, but fires are quite common, one fire and poof, your data is gome, and most people aren’t rich and don’t have second homes to set up a server in, nor do they have a friend willing to let them set up a server in their house. So cloud it is… 🤷♂️
Depends on where you live, I literally never met a person whose house burned down, but our houses are not mostly wood.
I live in USA. Every house is wood 😓
I see fires happening throught my city all the time (and no, I do not live in California). I think there are houses that got burned that are withing walking distance of me. I think there are one that had a fire right on my block, I didn’t see much, but I saw fire trucks and a lot of sirens, and someone’s house has their window broken, presumably by firefighters looking to see if anyones there.
Having stuff in your home is just not safe enough. I mean, if that’s like arguing “You don’t need home insurance because fires are rare”. Not a good idea to gamble if your precious pirated movies and cat photos are at risk.
Man, the hidden upside of Europe being largely deforested: not enough wood to build houses with.
Only the inner frames are wood here and still covered in plaster wall and such. Most parts of my house are not flammable, let alone a fire hazard.
I know a few people who have a HDD exchange going. A couple of times a year they drop off a HDD with their current backup at a friends house, then take the old one home to use next time.
It offline, so it can’t be accessed easily but its also protected from device failure,power surges, etc.
Its no good as a daily backup but its fine for static data e.g. videos of the kids as they were growing up.
If its just a HDD in a static proof bag it doesn’t take much room and can be stored easily.
Its got issues but it does offer a cheep offsite backup
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Is there anything that can be installed on a hdd that would create your own personal cloud device (that can be accessed over a network)?
I mean if you put those HDDs into like a synology NAS or something you could run nextcloud or syncthing or several other network hosting file tools.
Nice! Thanks!
You can set up a “personal cloud” on a machine in your house that you can use as a “cloud” from anywhere. There are a lot of free software options to achieve such a thing.
“Nextcloud” it a pretty broad way to do that. You can run it from an always-on desktop.
There are a ton of nerds (myself included) who do this kinda thing, and we have our nerd communities on Lemmy and elsewhere. The general term is “self hosted”.
Oh yeah. Get a cheap laptop, pi, or PC. Whip Linux and casaos on there. Instant web based environment for file access. Add jellyfin or Plex for media streaming. Setup a VPN service to access it remotely. Takes some googling but well worth it.
Cool! Thanks!
It sure doesn’t make sense alright, but that’s only because you expect them to actually honour it.
I would read their TOS.
It doesn’t look good
https://www.pcloud.com/terms_and_conditions.html
pCloud has a fourteen (14) calendar days money back guarantee, beginning on the day you have submitted your payment for the Paid services. During this period, you are eligible to request for a refund. If you issue an explicit written request for a refund within the fourteen (14) days referenced above, we will process the refund due to you in full within 30 calendar days, counting from the day you have confirmed your request.
We will usually refund any money received from you using the same method originally used by you to pay for your purchase.
In case you have purchased Paid services through a promotional campaign or provided discount, pCloud reserves the right to decline providing a refund.
I just used web archive to check the site on three random days in 2024 and it looks like they always have a promotion and could claim any purchases are ineligable for the money back guarantee.
Termination
We reserve the right not to provide the Site or Services to any user. We also reserve the right to terminate any user’s right to access the Site or Services at any time, in our discretion. If you breach any of these Terms, your permission to use the Site and Services and your account automatically terminate. If pCloud ceases operation, your account will be terminated and pCloud will no longer provide the Site or Services. If your account is terminated in accordance with this section, you will not receive any refund of any fees paid for the account.
And they can decide to stop your service at any time.
As a wise internet nerd once said: “There no cloud, its just someone else’s computer”
So true in this context lol
Wouldn’t say scam but potentially unsustainable. Some years ago I signed up for a brand new startup Nextcloud service which was priced far too low & went under very quickly. Switched to a hosted Nextcloud provider who had been around a long time (still around). They were really good but after a short time I decided to learn how to host it myself.
Hardware wise you don’t need much, I upgraded to a used Pi5 8GB with fanless heatsink case & added an m.2 SSD. Only 1 user on my instance but I often share folders with others, it’s robust & never once crashed.
If exposing to www you need to keep your network secure. There’s a learning curve but self hosting can be rewarding. Any if you’re lucky you might get to spend hours & hours problem solving when something breaks 😉😁
Price wise, you probably can’t beat an off-site server running in someone else’s basement.
Probably
It doesn’t seem to make sense, but I gave pCloud a chance years ago, and I’ve been using the lifetime plan ever since. I feel like I got my money’s worth, so not too worried if I eventually have to migrate elsewhere.
