We're far from the country with the fastest connections, but even here you can get one where it would only take 20 days to upload, and less than a day to download everything, for less than $30/month (and that includes cable TV and a landline with free calls).
The vast majority of us can benefit from this. If not your home computers, then your VPSs or something like that.
Someone downthread quoted 10 days at 100Mbps is fine - when that's two years at 1Mbps a common end to end throughput.
Cloud computing is a massive game changer, but while the economics have changed, the laws of physics and calculus of reliability has not - at some point I cannot imagine not saying "my really important data is, once all is said and done, mirrored across those two physical hard disks in this physical location. Preferably encrypted with this key."
Moving across the network to retrieve from disk is always the slowest part of an operation. This is unlikely to stop being true. And until the entire internet thinks nothing of 10TB as a transfer then storing that much "somewhere" is always going to be far far less reliable than planning a storage stack taking into account topology, relevance, usage and risk.
We used to worry about fitting things into 1KB, not a word doc takes 1MB, neither of which trouble any modern network.
But to me, and I may be wrong, we are in the 1KB internet while these guys are offering cloud storage for 1MB word docs.
The seek times don't matter if you want to read large chunks of data, it's the sustained read/write speeds that do, and it certainly won't take months. Also, I don't think we'll be using magnetic disks for much longer. 1 TB SSD's can be had for <$400 already.
> It's nice to have but the uplift needs to occur throughout the whole network for there to be benefit.
That uplift is happening. South Korea, Japan, and several US cities can already do symmetric gigabit connections to homes at very affordable prices. The world will follow with time.
Despite having a connection that is advertised for 50Mbps down - and I have achieved that speed when accessing hosts relatively close to me - the average speeds I get among all the sites I visit and download files big enough to notice the speed from would appear to be in the 1-2Mbps range.
For example you may want way to backup huge video files, panoramic photos or any other huge files. Obvious solution is your own storage, but usually you'll want at least one extra backup point because HDD these days a lot less reliable than cloud services.
> The upload time / cost must be enormous (on my home DSL it would take all year to upload.
It's sad that not everyone around the world have fast internet connection, but with 100Mb/s it's would take just about 10 days. I personally don't have that fast speed, but from my experience Microsoft OneDrive can handle like 70Mb/s upload just fine.
This is like the fragmented 20TB hard disk (considers the magnetic upper limit) - even if you had a disk that size the seek times would mean months to take the data off.
It's nice to have but the uplift needs to occur throughout the whole network for there to be benefit.