MEGAUPLOAD'S TIMEOUT

If you are only joining us, late yesterday the US Department of Justice shutdown Megaupload, arrested seven employees, & seized assets worth over $50 million (including 82-inch TVs, 108-inch TVs, 14 Mercedes, & other rich boys toys). This immense indictment poses lots of questions, but today we are going to look at of them: What happens to all of those files that people had stored on Megaupload servers?

This morning the net is littered with hundreds of millions of broken Megaupload links. There was no warning, no preamble: In the event you stored files on Megaupload, they are gone at least for now. So you have some idea of the scale of Megaupload, a speedy search on XDA-Developers for megaupload returns some 226,000 hits. There's hundreds if not thousands of forums on the net that are similar in scale to XDA-Developers.

In short, in the event you stored important files on Megaupload, I hope you had an up-to-date backup on your computer.

It is feasible that Megaupload servers will be brought back online, but only if Megaupload & its employees are found innocent & in all likelihood, the trial & sentencing process will take months. Even if Megaupload does return, there is no guarantee that your files will still be there.

There's always been major concerns about cloud services in general, and cloud storage (Dropbox, Megaupload, SkyDrive, iCloud, and so on). The first is privacy: When you upload knowledge to a third party, there's always the risk that they can look at the contents of your files. Some cloud providers securely encrypt knowledge, but plenty of don't. The second issue is knowledge security and integrity: Does the third party keep a tight ship against hackers? What happens if a hard drive fails? What protections have the cloud provider put in place to mitigate against natural disasters, bankruptcy, or being shutdown by the Feds?

The folly of cloud storage

For the most part, the only actual way of ameliorating these concerns is by doing an terrible lot of research before pushing in your chips. Even then, though, you would be hard pressed to discover a cloud storage provider that offers an simple way to migrate your knowledge in case of bankruptcy. If Dropbox decides to close down, the only way to transfer knowledge to another cyberlocker is to download it and re-upload to another service. If you're an enterprise customer using Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, you ought to probably be given help to migrate your knowledge to another provider. In the case of a federal indictment, though, I don't think any cloud provider offers a way out and if there's an earthquake, you better hope that they kept an offsite backup (and you can bet that consumer services like Dropbox or Backblaze).

At the finish of the day, though, the only other option is keeping your own backups on some kind of NAS and maintaining your own offsite backups which is feasible, and how plenty of companies and individuals select to do it, but rife with its own issues. Cloud storage is so simple it is the epitome of fire-and-forget that you forget about the risks and then Megaupload gets shutdown.

So, what happens to my files when a cloud service dies?

Assuming the midden hits the windmill, then, and your cloud storage provider goes offline without notice what happens to your files?

For consumer-oriented services that are more about backup than file sharing Backblaze, for example your files would probably stay in the digital ether, encrypted for all eternity. It's unlikely that a backup provider would ever be shutdown, but it could go bankrupt. In such a situation, you would probably be given a week or month to grab all of your information and then that would be it. There is no chance of Backblaze sending you a hard drive along with your information on, for example.

In Megaupload's case, where some one,000 servers (and thousands of hard drives) were seized, the Feds will probably pore through your files looking for facts that improves their chance of a conviction. It's  guaranteed that Megaupload stored the IP address of file uploaders, and the Feds could pursue individual copyright infringement cases at a later date. If Dropbox was ever indicted of similar charges, the situation would probably be the same.

Finally, at the enterprise level Azure, AWS, Rackspace, etc. It's likely that you would be given ample opportunity to recover your files, and you might even get help in migrating your information directly to another cloud service. In this case, if you're storing terabytes of information in the cloud, you could probably even request that your information be returned by FedEx hard drives.