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| I bet Snapfish might die long before 20 years and won't probably be interesting enough for a buy-out. Google (which includes Youtube and Picasa) will most likely still be around for eons to come, but at some stage you'll have to pay them a monthly fee to store these data, especially the space-consuming private videos that they can't monetize.
Interesting question. My thought on this is that someone will build a storage package with the same scalability, resiliency, redundancy, security, privacy and other features as current online providers, just something you can simply connect to your home network and works like an appliance. I don't see why we should give our personal documents to a third party, or let them scan all our emails and show us so-called relevant ads. I am not comfortable with that at all, but there is no simple solutions to replace them. I have a local backup and storage already, but it takes some semi-expert resources and finances to set them up, and I need a third copie for my most important documents, especially if I want them to be accessible online, so I also use Google Drive and Microsoft Skydrive, that's 25 GB of free storage.
I have mixed up feelings about the whole storage issue: It is a huge waste of money and space when millions of people buy the same albums or movies or books and have to store them either physically or digitally. It would be much better to have a central electronic "library" with all these media, so you can borrow anything you want, build your own song playlist and download it to your portable media player, and especially download any movie you like, not the current low quality digital copies. I mean, Blu-rays are already highly artifacted and compressed compared to the original print, these digital copies or the ones you get when streaming on Netflix or Amazon are appalling. But if it gets monetized, it just won't work, or just for the richest. Culture should be free, like it is in libraries. We need a different scheme to reward artists, and a different scheme to reduce labels and studios to companies providing a service for a fixed fee, not lifetime royalties. I don't see that happening this century though...
Edited by Chimel 5/18/2013 00:30
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Random internet data storage philosophical question
