Are you saying you are/would be storing someone else's data "in the cloud" without their consent/knowledge?
I priced out getting an external SSD drive ($300 for 1TB). Its cheaper for me to just buy a year of Dropbox at a time (1TB @ $100/year if paid annually).
You can get a good 1TB HDD for $50.
> Most of planet earth relies primarily on magnetic storage including people outside the data center.
Right. And I'm arguing SSDs are sturdier in that regard when not safe in a chassis somewhere. SSDs can withstand higher shock forces, have no glass platters or mechanical arms that can contact each other, and are not affected by magnetic fields.
Also you could buy 2 6tb hdds [3] for the price of that single ssd and mirror them for another level of redundancy, so in my book they come out way ahead of ssds and cloud storage for backup/archival purposes.
1: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a-sturdy-companion,758-2...
2: http://superuser.com/questions/568336/what-is-the-tolerable-...
3: https://smile.amazon.com/Marshal-7200RPM-Internal-MAL36000NS...
If your proposed backup solution is only used for periodic backups and isn't in constant heavy use 2 $50 1tb drives in raid1 would be quite secure against data loss and last years and for a bonus would be unlikely to be compromised by hackers or mined by the nsa for signs you are a terrorist.
If you project replacing the drives every 5 years your annual cost could be $20 and your up front cost no higher than dropbox. Its even entirely likely that you could get by with a single drive for a annual cost of $10.
Edit: Oh and Clock Sleep timer swipe delete, doesn't work anymore. If I put a Clock into "sleep" and than still woke up after 5 minutes I can't remove the sleeped timer.
The storage upgrade where they can remove forgotten debris files and then migrate your unused files to the cloud is great for most people.
I realize most HN readers have already drawn their saber and are 2/3rds over the gunwale at my suggestion that a computer make a decision about the disposition of a file, but this one feature is going to reduce my "friends and family tech support debt" by about 75%. A couple of clicks and I can fix their full computer. In the process of that I have quietly gotten them to backup their documents to the cloud so when I get the "my computer won't turn on" call I don't have to spend hours extracting and recovering their hard drive because they NEVER backup. Thanks to "apps", I can finally convince people that paying $1.99/mo for cloud storage isn't some evil plan to loot the world economy. People are used to small payments for computer services.