One can only hope word will get around, and people will wake up to the fact that "the cloud" is not a fairytale place of infinite storage and security where you no longer have to worry about database backups because "it is in the cloud"
But have people ever worried? From what I remember from before the cloud became popular, and from people who maintain the old habits, people never really worried, they just kept their precious files in a $10 USB flash drive or 5-year-old HD and then flailed around when it broke.
Certainly. But on a bad drive, usually some amount of data could be recovered. If some cloud storage disappears, it's immediately over.
Also, one other factor that may be important to the discussion is that the USB drive was private. Now somebody hacks a cloud service and your data is potentially in a Bittorrent swarm the next day. Seeing what people put on the net nowadays, I don't think they realize the difference.
Isn't that partly down to how marketing breaks the world for us. Marketing tells us you can "keep all your files safe on a USB drive" (or whatever) and that the cloud is the perfect place to store data that wouldn't be safe at home and other such insidious lies. Some people believe all that.
Perhaps that "safe" needs an addendum to be truthful, "MTBF is 5years at which point usually 2% of drive data is corrupted; this is not a suitable backup solution" or "our cloud storage facility has lost some data from 1% of all our users (2100 users) in the last year; 5.2% of users in the last 5 years" ... now that would be revolutionary.
Even if marketing had managed to convince people that USB flash drives never stopped working, it was obvious that all files would be lost if the drive got lost, stolen, smashed or soaked. I frankly don't think we can pin this on marketing.
Some people have, but most businesses did. Today I am seeing more and more business being sucked into the "cloud" hype and foregoing all locally controlled and owned systems.. This is very very very dangerous.
