It is just a graphic’s glitch, I think. The stones are positioned as if there are 19 lines, actually, which is why I didn’t notice the lines missing 
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What do y’all use for storage, mainly photos (iphone users need not apply )? I got the mail that Google is cutting up storage and deleting stuff because reasons, and I got reminded I need a better option.
Google Photos has refused to backup my photos forever, and the official Google Support answer was that my account was too old (?!?!?!) to take on some few features from a few years ago, so thing won’t work (yes, even in Google One).
Dropbox syncs photos from my cellphone or not, I have to check moon phase to tell.
I haven’t found any alternative where the price isn’t ridiculous or the storage too small.
I presume Google is doing all this in relation to the outage the other day.
Imagine if they weren’t just storing tonnes of personal data on everyone, most of which I imagine is unwanted, and just focused on storing the info/docs/pics etc people want stored 
In any case, what about Dropbox? Is that expensive?
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It works very irrationally, I’ve lost stuff. 
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Google planned and announced these storage plan changes well before the outages and I think the two are completely unrelated.
The big change is that Google currently allows unlimited storage of photos and videos (via their Photos app), provided that they are recompressed by Google (with minimal quality loss), that does not count against the storage quota of your account. However, starting June 1, 2021, they will start counting all new photos and videos stored via Google Photos against the user account’s storage quota. Accounts have 15 GB of free storage, but many users might use that all up after a few years (or months) depending on how much content they generate and store.
It’s remarkable that it was free unlimited photo/video storage to begin with. I think the motivation behind that was to collect a lot of data to feed their machine learning systems, but now they have more than enough data and don’t want to continue giving away free storage.
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You’ve left out an important part of the changes:
"If you’re inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos, we may delete the content in the product(s) in which you’re inactive." It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that the 2-year window might shrink further in the future.
We always knew (or should have known) that online storage is a different beast than our cupboard drawer, but it’s not like Google isn’t a mega-uber-behemoth corporation and we are just data and profit to them.
In any case, I have paid Google storage (I’ll keep it for now for reasons unrelated), but that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t access one of their flagship services for years and their response is “…oops 
”.
So, it’s not like I get what I pay for, it’s that who can make it right with the giant that is Google?..
And there doesn’t seem to be an alternative either.
And also probably to get everyone hooked and charge after.
FWIW, I also had the paid Dropbox version, but I lost so many files that I had to cancel it.
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Have you tried the normal box.com , without the drop in front?
I’ve been using it for almost a decade (free version) and I have not yet noticed any missing files whatsoever.
Apart from that, external HDDs are my real backups (they are very affordable nowadays) and I have found that it is really rare that I need to go through them to actually find something. Still better than going through online servers though.
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I tried it when it first came out and found it very limited, but I may try it again now.
I had 2 die on me, one with my whole music collection, and the wound never healed completely. 
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Buy hard drive, getting cheaper every year. True they die so backup one for use one for safe.
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Same here - and a lot of the things in there where not backed up anywhere else - but I learned my lesson and now I have three of them, backing up each other (at least on the important stuff)
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I had one die on me with my whole collection of music that I wrote myself or made with my old band. I paid a recovery company about €200, which recovered 80% of the things. Some of the old music I now only have in compressed form downloaded from soundcloud / youtube
Now I have two harddisks with the same stuff on it, but I only sync them every so often (i.e. twice a year or so). Then I had both a second macbook die on me and one of the harddisks, before I had backed up the things that were on it, and again lost music and photo’s. But miraculously a few months ago this second harddisk just worked again, so in the end I didn’t lose anything.
I don’t trust cloud storage more than offline storage, and I want to be able to access my things without an internet connection. The only thing that I shouldn’t trust is myself making backups 
Also, cloud storage is too expensive, I have about 500GB of things to back up…
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I did not realize that backup hard drives fail so frequently. A quick online search revealed to me that there average life is 3-5 years (sometimes a little longer). I am glad you all have talked about this because I am not joking when I say that the one and only thing my family uses to back things up is an external hard drive that is about fifteen years old now. I always thought that they were almost 100% reliable as long they aren’t dropped or something like that.
I will be sure to tell my dad that we need to make some duplicates of the most important things either through the cloud or elsewhere.
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it absolutely doesn’t matter how long drive lives.
What if you will have to run away from meteorite for example? 
There has to be backup far from your home.
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Well, as with anything, there is always a risk. That is why I said almost and not exactly 100%. But yes, this is a good wake up call to look towards more redundancy.
The weird thing with hard drives is that they can fail within a month or survive for decades, there’s no way to know. They can also corrupt themselves, locking you out of the drive, which happens more or less by chance
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The SSD drives are said to last longer now, due to the more robust design in comparison to the HDDs with the “old vintage pickup needle” technology. So, if you are going to buy a new one, I’d suggest getting an SSD external drive. They have smaller capacity and are a bit more expensive, but are more reliable and much faster than the standard HDD, so they are value for money.
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Okay, everyone has me curious now. Any insight into how and why specifically this can happen? I understand how data is stored in a computer with bits and all that, but I don’t know much about this subject.
It is usually the needle that gives way or some other small part that gets dislodged if the drive drops even from a small height or the partitioning.
I had an HDD whose needle was moving erratically and it kept banging on the inside of the box, like a broken piston ( luckily the drive was disintegrating reducing its lifetime like that, but I got my data out with a recovery program ).
Another disk “died” on me when the partitioning (the File Allocation System - FAT32 you might have heard of it like that) was corrupted and while the data was all inside the disk, the disk could not locate it anymore, so you had to format the disk and create a new - empty - File Allocation System.
The File Allocation System is just a special file that the disk keeps the adresses of each data. Imagine it like a treasure map for data.
When you delete something from your disk, the data itself does not get deleted (to save movements from the disk and time), but the adress to the data does (have you noticed that writting a 4gb file takes minutes, but deleting it takes 1 second? That’s why), thus the disk thinks that the space is empty, even though in fact all it did was lose the adress/way of getting it (and this is how file retrieval software works. They scan your disk and re-create files from the data they find inside - if a file has not been overwritten, then it can usually be retrieved). The data gets eventually “deleted” when you install something else on the disk and it overwrites what it believes is “empty space”. Sometimes overwritting data fails and that causes corrupt sectors and/or clusters ( sector = small part of the HDD, cluster = an aggregation of sectors - different in number in each HDD model)
I think that covers the basics for the HDDs. 
The SDDs, as the name implies, use solid state technology and they have no needles and have no moving parts iirc.
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That makes some more sense, so thanks Jeth. And I actually understand a little bit of how that works regarding memory allocation and addresses thanks to some very basic computer science knowledge.