WORLD WORLDAll the time I get advertisements for buying more cloud storage. Why is there so much money in cloud storage? Who is buying these services I used to always think. Then I got married. My wife takes so many pictures, picutres of nothing, 200 pictures of when we go on a hike, 300 pictures when we go on a date, 400 pictures when we hang out with friends 1000000 picutres when we go to a wedding. If you didn't know, the main thing that is getting better in moble phones these days is the phone camera. More mega pixels, higher resolution video capturing, better software processing for adverse shooting conditions. This has lead a to myriad of problems for my wife all rooting from a lack of local flash storage for her photos. This leads to strange behaviors in the phone, poor performance, random shutdowns. It also happens that the hard drive space on her computer is even less than on her phone. When she backs up her phone to her computer, her computer's hard drive becomes completely full. All of these problems could be fixed with just the small $3/month purchase of icloud storage that is more than enough to hold all of her photos and now and far into the future. Seemlessly integrated with apple's ecosystem and viewable on her phone with offline feature for things she wants all the time. The value proposition is compelling and I caved. I went with google photos for their ability to be viewed in a web application on any OS rather than just in apples iOS/macOS only photo applications (though I somewhat regret my decisions because of the better integration that apple photos has), but all of this got me thinking.
When I go home to my parents house the have bins full of memories. Pictures from their childhoods and all of us kids when we were young, all printed out in photo albums. I have seen many of these photos several times and I expect to look at them again in the future, maybe passing them down to my children, and their chi ldren at some point for them to know what their great grandparents were like. I have deleted all of my files at least 2 times in the past 8 years. I have lost all of my music, picture, videos, and documents with just some reckless deleting. I have helped frends recover files from bad hardrives, and I have witnessed people delete things they wanted to keep many times over. Never once have I accidentally deleted a childhood photo book. It's just not the same level of temporality
To view photos on my computer, I need a functioning harddrive with the uncorrupted photo data on it, then I need to have a fully functioning computer (with a motherboard, cpu, ram, power source, I/O if the photo storage is offboard), an operating system to interface with and a program that can read the photo data and display on a screen. All you need to look at a printed photo is the photo itself. The smallest conceived able way to have a photo in digital form in on an external drive and you are a million miles away from actually seeing the photo at that point.
Now let us consider the systems that need to be functioning to access a picture on the cloud. The smallest concieveable way to have a photo on the cloud is quite abstract. In actuality it is 1's and 0's on a computer in a server farm you have know way of known the exact location of, likely only the people who work directly on the systems could even locate it if you asked them to. To see that picture on your screen, with the simplification that a computer is basically all of the things that mentioned to see the a picture from hard storage, you need to have a functioning client computer (my wife's laptop), with a network connection from an ISP (basically infinite complexity already), functioning credential sytem and softeare connecting, a host system, which is likely a server farm with custom, cutting edge, high performance storage, the server farm is a high compelxity facility with lower tolerance on power fluctations, and centeratlized as a target for cyber and physical attacks, All managed by people who don't really care that much about the only baby photos of your children you will ever have.
Digital inflation has minimized the value of our data. While that 1000000th selfie is truly worth nothing, that baby picture of your dad might be the only thing that help you understand he is just like you. It might hold a powerful emotional and psychological importance that losing would really change. KEEP COPIES OF YOUR DATA ON LOCAL STORAGE. Computers are probably here to stay, your data is important to YOU. Act like it. Save your data on a friends server if you can. Redudancey within your home is useless if your house burns down. This is actually a good use of the cloud too. IF YOUR PHOTOS ARE ONLY IN THE CLOUD YOU'RE AND IDIOT. You don't need them all, but you should chose some. PRINT OUT YOUR PHOTOS.