Every month, more than 150 million people use MediaFire to quickly and securely store, organize and share all their personal and professional data in the cloud.

Mediafire about page

Sadly, recent changes in Mediafire’s file retention policy are threatening this long history. The policy has introduced a new definition for Abandoned Accounts. Free registered* users who haven’t logged into their account for 8 months will have account considered as “abandoned”. These accounts will be given a 15-day grace period, where Mediafire will warn the user through two e-mails to log back in if they want to keep their account, and failing to comply will result in a deletion of the account and data.

* free, as in non-premium registered users. Failing to verify an email address on a free account will lead to a termination within 14 days.

Interestingly, the file retention policy page previously used more ambiguous language and this “8 month” criteria has been there for a few months now. The last revision on the page was in May, so assuming the first 8 month countdown has just been initiated, the first wave of account deletions will be triggered on January 11, 2020. Accounting for the 15-day grace period, we can broadcast the hard deadline to be January 26, 2020.

So if you have a Mediafire account, we highly recommend that you log in today, and also once every couple of months for good measure, to keep your files safe!

What about users who’ve lost access to their accounts (forgotten password, change in email addresses)? It would seem that there is no term in the policy to account for these accounts as they qualify as abandoned even if the files they’ve uploaded a decade ago are still being accessed to this day.

Content is retained in accounts based on account activity and not individual file activity.

Current Mediafire Account Retention Policy

In particular many modding communities, such as Mario Kart Modders, are heavily reliant on files which have been kept safe on Mediafire for years. As is to be expected, Archive Team has sprung into action, and is trying to set up a large-scale project to archive Mediafire files, aptly named #mediaonfire.

But there’s something that makes archiving Mediafire files particularly challenging. As you will recall, Mediafire files are shared by links and Mediafire doesn’t really have something akin to a search function. This means that the only way to find a particular file is to find the link from where it was been shared. A high res background might have been shared on a forum, old podcasts on a personal website… Any way you slice it, it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to track even some of these links down.

The good news is that new solutions are being proposed every day. Pyxia’s mf-dl tool allows you to bulk-download the file contents if you know the links for yourself.

So spread the word! Tell your friends to log in to their Mediafire accounts, consider migrating your files to safer services and make a copy of any Mediafire link or files you come across, you never know what might happen!

This change will not apply to Sites, Keep, Blogger, or YouTube.

Google also announced that if a user does not use Gmail, Google Drive, or Google Photos for two years, they may delete the user’s data from the product within which the user is inactive. Additionally, if a user remains above their storage limit for more than two years, their data may be deleted.

These changes align with other recent changes made by Google. For example, starting Friday, November 13, files that have been in a user’s Google Drive trash folder for more than 30 days will be permanently deleted. Additionally, Google recently replaced G Suite with Google Workspace, making unlimited storage only available on enterprise-level plans.

All the while, Google has been increasingly encouraging customers to subscribe to their new Google One service, which provides expanded storage and other Google benefits to customers.