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Lifetime support?

Chuck(G)

Chuck(G)

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Pacific Northwest, USA
I've been getting ads for "Lifetime cloud storage". Pay 100 clams for 20 TB of storage that's guaranteed for life.
You have to wonder if this is a scam. Suppose someone at age 20 ponies up the C-note and stores all of his/her goodies on the lifetime cloud. Can that person expect to see it intact at age 75?

If it sounds too good to be true as a concept, well… it can be. ‘Lifetime’ subscriptions to anything only really last as long as the company does. In this wonderful world of ecommerce, deals are commonplace, and many upstart providers will offer startlingly cheap lifetime subscriptions to drum up business and publicity.
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Reminds me of a shovel I bought with a "lifetime warranty" from the maker. "We mean the lifetime of the shovel, not of the owner". On the other hand, my Le Creuset cast iron cookware really does seem to have a lifetime warranty. I'm on my third Dutch oven from them after the first two started degrading after about 40 years. Replaced with no questions other than "Send us a photo of the damage".

Some magazines in the old days offered a "lifetime subscription" (Popular Mechanics was one such). As far as I know, they honored it as long the publisher was solvent. NAPA used to offer a "lifetime" warranty on their car batteries and had stories about someone showing up over 30 years to get yet another new battery.
 
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What is their annual price? It does look like if by some miracle the company stays in business for 4 or 5 years, early subscribers would come out ahead. Later on, it will be a race between getting new subscribers versus people figuring out that the lack of continuing revenue will soon lead to the company going out of business.
 
www.techradar.com

Best lifetime Cloud Storage deals (April 2024)

Great if you don’t want to pay a subscription every month for cloud storage
www.techradar.com www.techradar.com
Pay once-use forever. In theory. Of course, it's a faulty model. Eventually, the number of new subscribers will be insufficient to ensure solvency.

I wonder if there will be any difference between these and the "free accounts" that turn out to be not so free. e.g. xdrive, photobucket....
 
krebizfan said:
What is their annual price? It does look like if by some miracle the company stays in business for 4 or 5 years, early subscribers would come out ahead. Later on, it will be a race between getting new subscribers versus people figuring out that the lack of continuing revenue will soon lead to the company going out of business.
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My assumption is they expect storage density/price to keep falling such that in 5 years, 20TB will be very cheap.
 
One of the vendors claims that a 2TB SSD costs $700. I wonder what they're smoking. The point is valid, however--a terabyte of storage on a personal computer was pie-in-the-sky only 20 years ago.
 
As we all know "the cloud" is just somebody else's computer. I would never trust someone else to preserve my data, especially not random startups like "Ganso" (who apparently vanished between the time that article was written and now...)
 
They could assume that you will like the storage space and fill it up so they can charge you more for more space.

20TB sounds like a lot now but won't be in 10 years and people can be charged for extra space.

They can also limit speeds up/down and charge more for more bandwidth. Not everyone will use all that space anyway.

And finally, they can comb through all your files and sell it to advertisers yearly $$$.
 
Unknown_K said:
They can also limit speeds up/down and charge more for more bandwidth. Not everyone will use all that space anyway.
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This. Various reviews lament the slow upload/download speed. Several providers have a maximum file size of 1GB--sounds like a lot for 20 years ago, but not so much now.
In other words, degrade or limit performance so that the service is only marginally usable and laugh all the way to the bank.
 
Chuck(G) said:
One of the vendors claims that a 2TB SSD costs $700. I wonder what they're smoking. The point is valid, however--a terabyte of storage on a personal computer was pie-in-the-sky only 20 years ago.
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I wonder if they are figuring in maintenance costs too.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've been getting ads for "Lifetime cloud storage". Pay 100 clams for 20 TB of storage that's guaranteed for life.
/snip/
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The question is whose lifetime? You are reading it as though it is the buyer's lifetime and not the lifetime of the service we are selling you. I suspect that it is not an illegal scam, but rather common sleeze, i.e., how can we write this so people will read it as something other than what it actually is.

Many of us grew up with lifetime guarantees that really did mean something - ever break a Craftsman wrench - go back to Sears and without hesitation, they would actually give you another one.
 
Some years ago TomTom navigators were sold with lifetime updates. Mine has some troubles with its battery and I thought to give to my son and buy a new one. I almost hit the "Buy" button when I read a review about the costs of the updates. It seemed that TomTom stopped with those lifetime updates.
I'll see how long the battery lasts. If possible, I will look for a replacement. In the mean time I will save myself about 45 Euros a year.
 
Reminds me of Microsoft's "plays for sure" and HP's "sure boot" or whatever it's called. Eventually it's swept away.

Making the maximum file size 1G makes the thing useless for videos, so 20T is pretty hard to get to with nothing but Word files and Gif's.

But yes, data collection is everything right now. There's a kid's app that tracks 40 datapoints on the user's face to create a realtime avatar, but that's not the endgame - can you imagine how sophisticated an AI could be at replicating human facial expressions with that dataset?
 
I think that the "lifetime" claims are all just marketing garbage, as "they" decide when the product or service lifetime ends.

After all, we are all dedicated to extending the actual real lifetime of our favorite computers, although "useful" doesn't have to come into that equation :)
 
I confess to using cloud storage to deliver content to clients, but then after delivery, it's gone. No way that I would depend on the cloud for either security or permanence.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've been getting ads for "Lifetime cloud storage". Pay 100 clams for 20 TB of storage that's guaranteed for life.
You have to wonder if this is a scam. Suppose someone at age 20 ponies up the C-note and stores all of his/her goodies on the lifetime cloud. Can that person expect to see it intact at age 75?



Reminds me of a shovel I bought with a "lifetime warranty" from the maker. "We mean the lifetime of the shovel, not of the owner". On the other hand, my Le Creuset cast iron cookware really does seem to have a lifetime warranty. I'm on my third Dutch oven from them after the first two started degrading after about 40 years. Replaced with no questions other than "Send us a photo of the damage".

Some magazines in the old days offered a "lifetime subscription" (Popular Mechanics was one such). As far as I know, they honored it as long the publisher was solvent. NAPA used to offer a "lifetime" warranty on their car batteries and had stories about someone showing up over 30 years to get yet another new battery.
Click to expand...
Any time I hear of 'lifetime' warranties, I'm reminded that the warranty expires when the company does.
 
In some cases, it's much worse. In the case of tools, I've encountered "we warrant it for the lifetime of the tool." How's that for a Catch-22?
 
Chuck(G) said:
In some cases, it's much worse. In the case of tools, I've encountered "we warrant it for the lifetime of the tool." How's that for a Catch-22?
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https://www.ridgid.com/us/en/full-lifetime-warranty

How Long Coverage Lasts

This warranty lasts for the lifetime of the RIDGID tool. Warranty coverage ends when the product becomes unusable for reasons other than defects in workmanship or material.

Sounds reasonable to me.
 
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