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back to article Blighty competition watchdog pokes pointy finger into cloud storage

Price hikes and last-minute service tweaks to cloud storage offerings have caught unwanted attention from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. The regulator confirmed on Tuesday morning that it planned to carry out a review of the market, following concerns expressed by consumers. It will consider whether practices and …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It will consider whether practices and terms being used by some cloud players breach consumer law.

    Just use the law of Contract instead.

    3 1 Reply
  2. cantankerous swineherd

    review my arse. gather evidence in order to prosecute for fraud.

    2 1 Reply
  3. frank ly

    Why do they do it?

    The only serious use I can think of for personal/domestic cloud storage is for convenient sharing/showing of files to friends and family. Dropbox is good for that and is free for small amounts of storage, as are other providers. I can't understand why people pay monthly to use 'the cloud' to purely store personal photos and music/video collections when you consider that a new 1TB hard drive can be had for about £35 or a 2TB drive for about £55.

    1 1 Reply
    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge
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      Re: Why do they do it?

      If your data does not exist in at least two places then it does not exist.

      1 1 Reply
    2. cs94njw
      Reply Icon

      Re: Why do they do it?

      Because a local hard disk can be stolen, destroyed by power surge, dropped, kicked, become out of date, etc.

      Cloud Storage is a hope that they have surge-protected UPS servers, multiple copies of my data, harder to steal, and accessible for "free" from most places of the world.

      NOTE: I'm just building a home RAID NAS server because I really really don't want to lose my photos.

      0 0 Reply
      1. frank ly
        Reply Icon

        Re: Why do they do it?

        I haven't lost any photos etc for fifteen years. I started with a 250GB drive on my LAN and a 250GB 'backup copy' in a desk drawer; (yes, it should be stored in a friend's house). Now, I have a 2TB drive on the LAN and 2 x 1T backup drives in the drawer. It's not difficult to organise and is resistant to computer madness or single instances of personal stupidity.

        0 0 Reply
        1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge
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          Re: Why do they do it?

          That will work really well once your house is on fire. And that isn't one disk, is it? It's two.

          0 0 Reply
          1. Trigonoceps occipitalis
            Reply Icon

            Re: Why do they do it?

            House fire happened to me, second disk lost at same time as primary. It was a bugger.

            Trigonoceps' elegy:

            Backup

            Backup often

            Keep a copy off site

            0 0 Reply
        2. IHateWearingATie
          Reply Icon

          Re: Why do they do it?

          @frank ly

          I used to do that, but kept a HDD at my in-laws house and swapped it every few weeks. Was a right PITA.

          For a few quid I now use crashplan and have turned the other disk into an on site backup. All nicely scheduled in WHS so I don't need to remember to do anything. I figure the odds of my house burning down AND crashplan losing my data at the same time are pretty small (and yes, I do occasionally check they actually have my data!)

          0 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can't the competition watch dog find out what happened to the El Reg caption competition results?

    0 0 Reply
  5. David Roberts

    Cloud storage?

    What counts as Cloud storage these days?

    Does it have to have "cloud" in the title or does it include traditional web based service like PhotoBucket which was around before the term "cloud" became popular ?

    0 0 Reply

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