Having suffered with data loss many times due to failed hard drives, SD Cards, compact disks and a fire accident in my office few years back, it always becomes a scary thought for me to lose my data in my local storage. That made me to keep multiple backups every time at different places. With the advent of cloud services, I found it a more convenient method of backing up my data. Although using the cloud storage service is just a psychological assurance, IMHO, of thinking 'Someone else can take care of my stuff better than me'. It is just like billionaires keeping their money in Swiss banks and paying money to secure it
. But, simultaneously, we have seen many reputed banks failing at times and so are the cloud space providers,
so nothing is impossible in this world.
I used the services of Google Drive to backup my books, Dropbox for my documents and Flickr (1TB) for my photos and videos. When the '360' was introduced, I very doubtfully joined its lucrative offer for 36TB free, after having a careful research about the Chinese company's profile and their other activities.
This venture was promoted by
Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd., a Chinese internet security company known for its antivirus software (360 Safeguard, 360 Mobile Safe), Web Browser (360 Browsers), and Mobile Application Store (360 Mobile Assistant). It was founded in June 2005. Qihoo 360 had 496 million users for its Internet Security products and 641 million users for its Mobile Antivirus products as of June 2014. Qihoo 360's main revenue sources include advertising space on 360 Startup Page, as well as revenue sharing with independent games developers which have published their games on the 360 Mobile Assistant. The revenue breakdown in 2012 was split between the revenue streams as follows: 67% from advertising, 31% from internet value added services and less than 1% from selling third party software. The revenues increased by 96.0% from $167.9 million in 2011 to $329.0 million in 2012. As of January 2014, the market cap was $11.42B.
Therefore it seemed to be a fairly reliable host to me, and after having used their cloud services and software for few months, I found it fairly convenient and easy interface (despite all menus in Chinese only, and I don't understand a single word!
) to keep a second backup of all my stuff at a single cloud with a massive storage at my disposal. The total data I stored there is more than 2.5 TB so far. As I do not share my data with any other guys, it was okay for me to visit
a single host and manage all my data with a simple user-friendly GUI. I have used this cloud for more than 6 years now.
With the unwarranted backfire of '360', now I may have to buy some other cloud space very soon, and transfer my data. I still can not digest the reasons they have declared to stop their services in such a hurry.
