The reason why we choose a small number of days to download your content is simply because when you used the app, the photos remained on your phone.

We're monitoring who's downloading their content and who's not. If we see that there are a large number of users who still haven't downloaded their content, we'll adjust that date.

Given over 6 million people are still without power right now, and may be without power still in a week, that might be more of a concern than it'd otherwise be.

Also classy is the "It's been real" signoff at the end. Kind of a stain on the startup team to end so abruptly and with so little respect for their users.

This might be a use case for Amazon's Glacier.

When you go out of business, save each user's data separately and send them an access URL. The user can pay Amazon to retrieve it if they want it back.

Does Glacier support moving the frozen data from one account to another?

I doubt paying to retrieve your data would go over much better.

It is infinitely better than your data just suddenly being deleted before you had a chance to get it. At least you get to decide if retrieving it is worth the cost. Also, you can "pay" for Glacier using time/patience because you can download 1gb/mo for free.

All that said I don't think Glacier is set up to deal with a situation where one party inserts a ton of data owned by many other parties, so this is all very theoretical, but IMO it would be great to have something like this.

If my data isn't worth $0.12/GB to me I can't see being too worked up either way.

After reading the pricing and FAQ a bit more, it looks like there will have to be a 3rd party in the middle. There doesn't seem to be a "reader pays" option in Glacier.

There. I registered data-morgue.com. Now, if I can just get a free week…

I'm not sure this will be a popular sentiment here, but I think we might want some sort of consumer protection laws dealing with things like this. Have a sort of mandatory cooldown period for (paid?) web services after a notification of cessation (or maybe a major restructuring?) of services. Somewhat like an eviction notice.

Of course people will argue that regulatory action is unnecessary: if sudden terminations are an issue, people will naturally flock to services which guarantee due notice through terms of service.

I'm so liberal I'm practically a socialist, but I don't see how you could have this sort of regulation without it having a chilling effect on new services. Generally when an event like this happens, the company behind the service is dissolved, so who is even on the hook for keeping the data available?

This is a very real practical problem. I basically never use any SaaS app that isn't at least as established as, say, Basecamp and if enough people think like me you've got a horrible chicken and egg problem. I'm not sure how you fix it, but I don't think it is via laws.

One way to fix the chicken/egg problem is to start off by decoupling the data storage from the application.

Disclaimer: I'm the lead developer on OpenPhoto which does just this.

http://theopenphotoproject.org

An argument that rests on the assumption that people read and pay attention to the TOS?

I would love to see someone make that argument and try to keep a straight face at the same time.

Caveat emptor. Also never trust that a single copy of anything won't vanish like a fart in the wind one day. If stuff is important to you, keep your own copies.