[DaiPlusPlus]

> If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data.

Business idea: cloud archive storage where you pay when you upload data and optionally pay a modest monthly fee for real-time access to stored data, but they'll guarantee to keep your data for you if you stop paying: you'll just need to pay to retrieve that data.

As the long-term archival data wouldn't need to be stored in a data-center: just a commodity tape-library box in a basement in a farm somewhere near a freeway I imagine it would be kinda cheap to run as a business. You could set-up a Foundation or other entity to ensure long-term continuity of operations and have it self-sufficient through an endowment. E.g. a $1m endowment would easily pay for something like this into perpetuity.

[MaxBarraclough]

If offered by an organisation that I can trust to still exist in, say, 40 years time, this might work. Maybe Google/Amazon/Microsoft have this credibility. Maybe. There's no way it would work as a start-up.

You'd also need to charge enough upfront that you can still turn a profit if they stop paying immediately. Asking for upfront payment of 40 years of data-storage fees, might be a problem.

> a commodity tape-library box in a basement in a farm somewhere near a freeway

I'm not a data-storage expert by any means, but that doesn't sound anywhere near good enough. You need to redundantly protect against flood, fire, crime, etc. You'll also need to be able to retrieve data at scale. You're essentially rolling your own Amazon Glacier.

[ValentineC]

There was Permanent.org, three months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943620

[MaxBarraclough]

I agree with this comment on how that project completely fails to provide the necessary assurances of dependable longevity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22944681