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Originally Posted by Graham
The fact there is a (small) chance that Google might decide you don't exist, doesn't really alter the proposal. It just equates to the (small) chance that your local storage choice might go belly up sooner than expected.
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It alters the proposal in the sense that depending primarily on the cloud is probably not a wise idea for many people, given not only terms of
paid service but inconsistencies of access (such as New York's last blackout), which is partly why internal storage matters.
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This can be to any storage device or other cloud offering of your choice, and applies regardless of whether your primary choice is Google's cloud or a local storage setup.
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But if I'm going to have secondary/tertiary backups by necessity, then why shouldn't my primary laptop carry its share of the burden? And before you assert that 32/64GB and an SD are enough for any reasonable human being, see below.
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That, of course, is what the 32 GB of onboard storage is for . . . You can fit a lot of novel and entertainment in 32 GB. Certainly enough for several months on the road. And if not, or you're talking lots of movies, get yourself a couple of SD cards, or indeed an external hard drive. . . .
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1. It seems to me that you forfeit your position the moment you insist you know how much storage an individual needs -- let alone when the amount you advocate is considerably less than any other company would ask users to tolerate. You might have valid ideas about the impracticality of indiscriminate data storage or adopting a more zen-like lifestyle, but when it comes to other people and their usage, that's not your (or Google's) call to make. I mentioned the person at the writer's retreat specifically because she told me she needed an even larger drive than her 200GB internal.
2. The point, of course, is immediate access when one is away from one's various backup media. Having the cloud as a
failsafe or additional redundancy is convenient and practical. Depending on it as one's primary source is asking to be entirely dependent on internet access at every moment of use. For those who are less spartan than you or the Pixel user you forecast, cloud-primary storage can be quite impractical in a world in which constant access is still theoretical.
Note the blackouts in NYC which I've just mentioned -- cell phone and internet access was gone even longer than electricity. We live in a time of disasters natural and otherwise, and to expect always to be connected, or that cloud storage is fixed, is asking to be disappointed.
I don't know about you, Graham, but when it comes to daily existence, I think I'm well covered in the disappointment department.
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Another consideration:
Anyone can become unemployed for long periods of time, which means their next cable or ISP bill can become difficult to pay. A person might need to work at home while minimizing bill payments -- paying their electricity and gas, but choosing to do without cable or DSL. At such times, external media might become a musician, filmmaker or artist's way of working, and whatever entertainment they've stored already becomes their entertainment center.
In which case, home access becomes a question of physical media until times improve.
I don't like the idea of that out-of-work user being forced by Google and others to adopt the storage model which best allows them to make money and subject people to ads. We've already seen from the options on an array of Nexus devices that making people dependent on rented storage, and making them pay for relatively insiginificant increases in internal storage -- users who were independent before -- is an idea which Google takes very seriously.
This reminds me of the shell game advanced decades ago by companies here in the States, in which pensions were replaced with stock options. The idea was to force people to enter the stock market who never wanted to risk their savings voluntarily. People complained, but nothing was done and now we live in a less secure world: Workers' savings might vanish whenever stocks fail.