You may have been sold the idea that your files are safe as long as they are in the cloud. This assurance is why most people rely on services like Google Drive, OneDrive, and iCloud to keep their most valuable data. Many assume other storage methods are more likely to fail.

However, history has shown that the cloud is not permanent. Some of the biggest, seemingly infallible names collapsed. The shutdowns were often followed by traffic surges, stalled transfers, and failed downloads, with users scrambling to retrieve their data. The lessons are fresh in the minds of many, and these examples are a reminder that if your files only exist on someone else’s hardware, you don’t actually own them.

Copy.com

People trusted it because Barracuda owned it

This was one service few would have expected to disappear, especially since the company behind it was Barracuda Networks, a cybersecurity company with an established enterprise reputation.

It ran a very successful referral program that rewarded several customers heavily for inviting new users, and many benefited by accumulating large amounts of storage without paying. In the end, ‘Copy.com became the primary storage for many people, and Barracuda suddenly announced in 2016 that it would shut down on May 1.

There was serious panic and, at the time, internet speeds were considerably slower than they are today, which caused issues for users who needed to retrieve massive archives. This led to stalled transfers, especially with the surge of people trying to recover data. This taught a lesson that corporate backing doesn’t necessarily mean permanence.

Mozy

The service didn’t die overnight — it was eroded by successive acquisitions

Mozy was a pioneer and the reason many ordinary people got comfortable with cloud storage. Its background automated backups made it popular in the late 2000s. Consumer backup habits were still dominated by external drives.

However, Mozy’s popularity slowly disappeared as it went through a series of corporate acquisitions. This started with its acquisition by EMC in 2007. Later, Dell acquired EMC, but in 2018, Carbonite bought the Mozy cloud business. Just about a year later, Carbonite shut down the standalone Mozy service.

While the shutdown hurt several account holders, the migration process was even more frustrating for longtime users. Data wasn’t transferred seamlessly between platforms, and people often resorted to manually re-uploading entire backup sets to Carbonite. This was a painfully slow process for large archives and became a reminder that consumer services can be expendable when ownership changes.

Wuala

Private and encrypted still wasn’t enough

Wuala’s reputation was built around privacy at a time when there wasn’t much hype around encrypted cloud storage. Wuala let acount holders control their keys through client-side encryption, which was a great selling point for privacy-conscious users; they were more comfortable with it than the mainstream alternatives.

However, strong encryption does not equate to a sustainable business. Wuala was first acquired by LaCie, which Seagate later purchased, but the service continued to suffer commercially even though it had a solid technical reputation. In 2015, just months after ending its free tier, Wuala announced a complete shutdown.

Before the shutdown, Wuala allowed customers some time to retrieve their files by putting their accounts into a read-only phase. However, this process proved that even if encryption protects you from hackers, it doesn’t protect against a company that has decided to shut down its servers. Even encrypted files become inaccessible the moment the infrastructure disappears.

CrashPlan for Home

Unlimited backup only lasted until enterprise money looked better

CrashPlan for Home solved a real problem better than the competition, and this gave it an unusually loyal following. It offered unlimited cloud backup for entire systems at a low price, making it a favored option for full computer images and backing up huge media files; at the time, it was the consumer-friendly option.

However, when Code42 announced it was exiting the consumer market in 2017, CrashPlan for Home was shut down. Subscriptions stopped renewing immediately, and the service created a deadline for deleting home backups.

As expected, this created a lot of backlash because several users had multiple terabytes of data stored. It was difficult to move that amount of data. There was a rush to complete transfers before archives disappeared, and several forums were filled with negative comments. But the real lesson here was that even a beloved consumer product may not be financially rewarding for companies.

Bitcasa

The cloud works until the math stops working

Bitcasa promised unlimited cloud storage for a flat monthly fee, something that seemed impossible at the time. It was called Infinite Drive, a service where you didn’t have to worry about capacity limits when storing your digital life. As expected, Infinite Drive was embraced by many who pushed enormous amounts of data onto it.

But the weight of those promises was too much for the business to carry, and the unlimited plan eventually collapsed in 2014. Account holders had a short deadline to recover their files or reduce their storage usage. This timeline was unrealistic for many users who had multi-terabyte archives.

There was so much backlash that a judge even blocked Bitcasa from deleting customer data for the duration of the legal dispute. In the end, despite an extension of the deadline, its consumer storage never recovered. This is a clear reminder that unlimited cloud storage only works as long as the economics make sense for the company.

The backup service you can predict

I understand trusting a cloud backup service. A lot of them have been around for so long that it’s hard to imagine them shutting down. But history has shown that anything is possible, which begs the question: what backup service do you trust? You should trust what you can predict. If you don’t control the server, you really do not control the data, and the day the server shuts down, you’re left scrambling for recovery options.

Self-hosting is an option, but another option is using the 3-2-1 backup technique: keeping three total copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, with one copy kept off-site. In the end, what works best is what you can predict with the most confidence.