Last week I wrote an article highlighting the danger of relying totally on the storage of photos etc on electronic media.  Liittle did I appreciate that we would caught out by this very thing.  

OPUSalbums.customer xxx wrote me saying.  "None of your downloads work".   The reason:  with almost no warning drop.io, a very widely used file sharing service, had ceased operations.  Bankrupt? apparently not.  Are we talking aout the minnows of the industry?  No!  The key people and the technology had been taken over by Facebook.  What did they care for existing relationships. Nothing it would appear.  They sent out a press release ind an e-mail two days before cessation.  After that all files would be irretrievably deleted.

This causes some aggrevation for us and our customers we have to reload files on to a different server and for a week or so some downloads will not be available. 

What about people who used this service for photo sharing?  Say the service was Photobucket and not Drip.io?  What if those photos had not been stored elsewhere?  What if your business depended totally on its availability.  I am sure that was the case with some companies.

See the news story:  

 RIP Drop.io: When Part of the Cloud Just Floats Away

 "Ad-free and clean, the site was exactly what so much of the internet isn’t: a place for our own making, without any distractions, and serving a simple and crucial purpose. Teachers used it to gather homework assignments, designers used it to send files with clients, music lovers used it to share their mixtapes with friends and crushes. And then, just when we thought our data would live forever, free as a cloud – and our old mp3 mixtapes would always be there to keep us nostalgic – a bigger cloud came along and poof, it was gone. Facebook bought Drop.io and its creator Sam Lessin"

This only emphasises the need to use the printed document as a backup to the electronic one.  Photos have lives of years - see my article.  We have some old sepia prints of family members in the early 1900's.  My own first black and white photos on a Kodak Brownie were in1954; my first digital photos date from  2004.  There were changes in the 50 years - 127 to 35mil, black and white negative to colour transparency to colour negative, helping my dad print and enlarge at home, to mail in service.  Compare that with the changes in digital photography in there have been in those seven short years!  

You cannot rely on the permanence of electronic media.  well printed documents on archival media will keep like the silver halide pictures of yesteryear.