Can You Depend on Online Storage Services That Are Free ?

Yeah it clearly shows we cannot simply depend on free service of online storage unless it comes from a some big company. Take Ms skydrive etc..

What about link ? Why DivShare is beginning to suck.

Thanks for the link.

What bothers me the most about this entire situation is how mediamax handled the change over. While they posted about the change over a month before the deadline on their third party blog located off site, at no time did their website mention any changes in service. Someone commented elsewhere that they were still taking new user signups the day before the deadline with no mention that their account would be deleted within 24 hours. I didn’t find out about the change over until a few days before the planned switch. Since I’m medically retired and live off a (very small) disability payout, there was no time to even come up with the money to upgrade. I only had a few days to do so and that was a week before my next monthly check. Pleas to Mediamax went unanswered.

I had about 17 gigs of material on the site. Most of them *.pdfs of old gaming material that folks had donated to me in return for the large amount of online volunteerism that I do with a large number of open source projects. I can’t take tips through paypal since it’ll mess up my medical insurance and disability payments. Instead I had put up a wishlist of many of the game books that I had lost when my ex ran off and left me with an empty apartment.

I was able to get about 750 megs downloaded before I maxed out my account for the month. Most of that material, since I never received the original receipts, is now lost and it’s not I myself and go out and pay for the files.

I do note one bit of payback. Their off site blog was labeled as a splog by blogger. One of blogger’s employees was probably left in the same boat and gave out a little revenge.

I store online small amounts of files at my ISP and web site servers, including Google Pages. But a bit concerned to use a large online storage server, due to instability/closure as what you have described…

I hope Adrive is not the next one.

I too had a bad experience with MediaMax. The company started under the name StreamLoad. I actually had a paid susbscription with them when they changed over from StreamLoad to MediaMax. I joined them because you could create password protected links to your digital content and share safely with your clients.

They did not handle the transition from StreamLoad to MediaMax well and all my clients could not retrieve videos and digital media I used to send them. They asked my to open a new account with StreamLoad and virtually “locked” me out of my old account without proper notification. Sure learn’t my lesson!

Hey, Amit thanks for link.

Streamload/MediaMax/Linkup have been doing that routinely it seems.

But sad to know other online storage companies may not be reliable too.

Hmmmm…a business model based on ransom…

While I can certainly sympathize with those who have now lost vast amounts of valuable files to these dodgy services, the situation begs the inevitable question: why didn’t those users back them up?

Surely, with the low cost of hard drives (your 25GB limit on Mediamax would take up only a small fraction of today’s average HDD), it seems silly to not do this. Are these users relying on the online services as their sole storage location?

I can think of one safe use for such services: to provide a central location for files I might need to access from some remote location. But only if I have a secure backup somewhere else.

Cheers.

I’d seriously think twice about relying on any single system for critical data storage. Redundancy is key to that full restore when you need it! Backup tapes/disks sent offsite, local external magnetic and perhaps online storage. But never just one.

db

I never liked the way this concept was executed. The accessibility is the main reason by we use online storage and thats where the online storage services have their hands on.

Heck, I can’t even rely on the ones that you PAY for. Jungledisk is a friggin’ pain in the arse. I still have yet to get all my stuff up there reliably.

If anyone can afford around $7 USD a month for the web server, you get 600 GB space to store your files moreover you can create your website or blog too.

I think this is a great deal!!

I think i was hijacked by meidamax(or should Streamload or The Linkup,it’s name change so many times)

To answer a few of these:

If anyone can afford around $7 USD a month for the web server, you get 600 GB space to store your files moreover you can create your website or blog too.

That’s for a website. Most hosting ToS’es and AUP’es prohibit using their webspace for file storage. They will remove sites for doing that. Also most of those hosts will not let you use the full amount that they promise. 600 gigs is about the size of a server which costs no less than $100 a month to lease.

Surely, with the low cost of hard drives

Feel free to send me one. I can’t afford it.

Its better to use an external drive instead of a file hosting company.

Agreed but again not everybody and go out and drop down $150 for one.