[timerol]

It's perfectly reasonable for a user to pay a big company for hosting, and then delete their local copies, since they paid for hosting. And then assume that, because their data is publicly available, that they'll be able to download that information.

Getting your photos off of Instagram is easy, according to the top 10 search results for "Instagram photo downloader". But even then, the distinction that you're not paying Instagram for hosting is notable.

[greedo]

All the podcasters I know of DON'T delete their master versions, because podcast hosts routinely have issues where they have to re-upload files.

[duxup]

> and then delete their local copies

I don’t understand this practice. Why would you delete your own local content you probably took time to create and care about….?

This strikes me as just a novice computer user type thing.

[pwinnski]

Or your computer crashed and you're having to rebuild from a failed backup. Or you're traveling away from your backups and need access. Or you upload from one device and usually download to your archive on another device. There are more scenarios in heaven and earth than I could possibly list here.

[duxup]

None of that was described by the author. I have trouble believing they think of it as a backup service…

If they do I think it is just another misunderstanding on the author’s part.

[pwinnski]

That you can't think of a single scenario in which people might want to rely on the previously-uploaded copies of a large binary files is one thing. That you dismiss the several I came up with off the top of my head is another.

[duxup]

I feel like you’re just in another scenario that isn’t in the story.