I've been trying to think why the growing number of hosted service shutdowns has affected me so viscerally. I expect it's because some percentage of customers of these services will not find about the imminent demise of their data until it's too late.
A good friend of mine had a chunk of her life in a storage locker in the Seattle area. She went to get something out of the locker and found the lock changed--and discovered that all the contents had been auctioned off as abandoned. I can't recall the precise details: a check had bounced? a letter had gone missing? The storage firm said they'd done all the right things, although obviously hadn't.
That's the way this feels. It's as if a storage center had said, "We're going out of business, and we'll be setting the contents of our building on fire. If you get here soon enough, you might be able to pull some stuff out of the blaze. And, by the way, we've taken the liberty of removing all the tags from your boxes, and your CDs from their cases."
Perhaps this may be a requirement after we reach the bottom of this downturn and climb our way up: that hosted service and storage firms may need to develop plans for their demise that are funded through a trust or escrow arrangement.
The next time someone says your data is safe with them because they use 1024-bit encryption and retinal scans of all employees, you might ask: what happens when you die?
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