What about those that paid for a plan that they will no longer offer for more expensive plans? My plan comes up for renewal this April only to find they don't have mine and replaced it with one that is $30 more....
That is why I wrote "Clever freeloaders don't use a free service as their primary storage solution (
or even a paid-for one - you never know when the company behind it will tank or start screwing you)."
I would never buy any plan from internet companies even if I wanted to: they are notorious for reneging on their promises because they know full well nobody's going to go after them for such a small sum with a lawyer, and across borders to boot for many customers. The only thing that keeps them from screwing you freely is the threat of lost reputation and - at least in the US - class-action litigation. That is to say, not very much.
In short, money you pay for lifetime or long-term access to an internet service is as good as lost, as you never know when the company's gonna fall victim to their unprofitable business plans and close doors, or plain steal your money, with you having essentially zero recourse against them.
You miss the point. I haven't not lost a single image. Nobody has.
Photoshop was not useful for a "storage device". It was useful as a third party link. My only photos were there to link to.
But the 3rd party ljnks to those images are lost. Unless, you pay the randsom.
Did you back up your 3rd party links?
I won't be tracking down every post or blog I've done over the last ten years, try to figure out which pic was there, and then redo my content.
Many people use "the cloud" as their primary storage solution and lose their files when cloud companies goes rogue.
As for broken links, well, that's the nature of the free internet. If you don't want to risk it happen, you need to host your images yourself and that's not free. If some of your blog posts are important to you and you don't want to pay for the safety of your links, then you should be prepared to go back to your old posts and redo the links.
In short, you get what you pay for.
But if you think about it, the true losers when a company breaks your links are the blog site owners. In this case, VaporJoes now has a forum full of broken links that suddenly lost a lot of its value thanks to PB - and *he* makes money out of his site, unlike your with your forum posts. In a sense, ultimately he's the victim of cheap people like us who don't want to pay anything for internet services...