My motive is to ensure that, whatever happens to my own data, the relevant pictures are still available.
If, f’rinstance, Photobucket went bust, the images that they host are not owned by them, and any business picking over the remains could only offer a continuation of free hosting to the existing users, so there’s no guarantee that it would happen. Bear in mind that increasingly large numbers of users will have lost interest or died, and their ‘old’ pcs will go to landfill with their pictures. Nobody else will be allowed to transfer the pictures and I’d imagine that a liquidator would have to delete them.
As far as my own data is concerned, commercial cloud storage is too expensive (and the free cloud that I have only totals about 40Gb, in about five ‘locations’, so I have my own cloud. It’s a server with a 3Tb drive that holds a copy of everything, available through a VPN to the kids and I. DVDs are already too small (I scanned 6Gb of .tiffs today and yesterday), and hard drives are so cheap that it’s more effective to have several backups stored in different places. We have a set of three external 3Tb drives which are for backup only, and we swop when we see each other. I’ve done the best I can do to ensure that the kids and I can’t lose data which ranges from their coursework, music, films, and the rather massive family archive that I’m making at the moment.
When I shuffle off, they’ll probably have no interest in keeping some pictures of old aeroplanes available to the general public. Hence my question.
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