Keep a local backup of anything important you’ve entrusted to online services. There’s no guarantee that, years from now, those services will honor the terms you agreed to.
Backed by new investors, including singer Justin Timberlake, Myspace (after dropping the capital ‘S’) has been rebranded as a music-streaming service, with a new sleek interface, and an iPhone app for radio play and animated GIF creation.
The new Myspace has shown signs of life, attracting 31 million unique visitors and one million app downloads since a high-profile relaunch last month.
However its owners do not appear to want those loyal users, who stuck around even when MySpace became a tarnished brand, to spoil the party for its new target audience of young “millenials”.
Furious users complained that Myspace has erased all of their blogs, private messages, videos, comments and posts, when they try and log-in to the new site. —The Independent.
The trick is to use a known entity with a track record of success, and financial viability that supports longevity. And and SLA doesn’t hurt either as it incentivizes the provider to honor those agreements. But that may be rare for consumer based cloud services.