You are on lemmy

I don't see what that has to do with anything.

I trust interests when my interests align with theirs, and I don't when they don't. A social media company profits from ads, so their interests will always lie with the advertisers. I used Reddit because it had the content I wanted (mostly technical and product advice), and I left when it was clear they cared more about profits than customer experience (hated new Reddit and their mobile, which were tuned to deliver more ads).

I'm not on lemmy to "stick it to the man," I'm on lemmy because I hate ads and I dislike Reddit's app. If a company offered me a better experience (the experience here is okay, but still kinda sucks), I'd totally go with them. I value anonymity, and lemmy so far delivers enough content while providing anonymity, so I use it.

With a storage company, my interests directly align with theirs. They want to sell to more storage space, and I want to buy storage space. Them screwing me over means they lose that storage customer. There's plenty of competition as well, so I'm going to pick the one that has the lowest price for the features I need, such as redundancy, resiliency, and availability. Why would they delete my data? That's what's keeping them in business...

That said, I won't go with Google because they have a track record for abandoning products and they're an advertising company, so my interests don't align with theirs. If Backblaze buys an advertising company or something, yeah, maybe I'd bail. But their business is storage, so them abandoning storage customers makes no sense.

your copy may be the only surviving copy

Yeah, if you're trying to preserve things for a century or more, you'll want a lot more redundancy. That means a mix of:

• physical media - preferably something like m-disks, not DVDs
• storage devices in multiple locations with checksumming and whatnot

DVDs aren't going to cut it. If you just want something to backed up in case a digital platform revokes licenses or something (i.e. literally what were talking about), an off-site backup company is going to be better than whatever you roll yourself at home in terms of a mix of convenience, redundancy, resiliency, and cost. That's what they do, and they're pretty efficient at it.

I'm super excited about things like IPFS taking off for reducing the barrier (and cost) for digital backup, but until then, centralized, managed storage is going to be a better bet for most people than a local NAS (or worse, a random USB drive) or physical media solution. The redundancy alone is worth it.