> when the company goes under > when the accounts stop being paid
I've never experienced such case, did you?
Something much more likely is for a person to drop their phone into the toilet, buy a new one, and completely lose access to their only backup which is Google Photos, because they don't own a computer anymore and it is their only device.
I lost the only recordings of my band when Myspace Music died.
At one point, I also had files on RapidShare. They probably weren't of any value, but I have no idea what they were now.
In case you hadn't heard, there's a sizable archive here https://archive.org/details/myspace_dragon_hoard_2010
and I see another collection mentioned on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19569865
What happened to the original files that you uploaded to Myspace?
Why wouldn't you have made any attempt to preserve any of copy of your data anyway? Even if you believed the files would stay online forever, it's surely always more convenient to use local files than re-download every time?
(but also sorry you lost your last physical copy of your memories, that kind of sucks and sorry if my comment comes across as quite insensitive)
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What are you talking about? This is extremely common. Try hunting for some 15+ year old piece of obscure software or especially a driver for old hardware on the Internet and you are always hitting domain parking pages and "file no longer available".