If you’ve ever tried to leave a cloud storage service, you’ve probably encountered the friction that makes leaving harder than it should be. Incomplete export tools. Months of delays. Files that download in a format only the original app can read cleanly. Or, in the sharpest version of the problem: a bill — sometimes called an egress fee or data transfer fee — for moving your own data out of a service you’re already paying for.
This friction is not accidental. It’s a structural feature of how cloud services have been designed, because every user who leaves is revenue that leaves. The data you’ve stored is, functionally, the hostage that keeps you subscribed.
In September 2025, a piece of European legislation came into full effect that directly targets this dynamic. The EU Data Act creates new rights around data portability, mandates that providers facilitate switching, and schedules the elimination of egress fees. If you store personal files in the cloud — photos, documents, journals, recordings — understanding what it says is worth your time, even if you’re not in Europe.
What the EU Data Act Is
The EU Data Act is a regulation that came into force in January 2024 and reached full applicability on September 12, 2025. It covers a wider range of topics — IoT device data, cloud-to-cloud switching for businesses, and more — but its provisions around cloud storage data portability have direct implications for personal users.
At its core, the Data Act is built on a premise that the GDPR established for personal data and extends further: the data in a service is yours. You put it there. You should be able to get it out, in a usable form, without the service making that unreasonably difficult or expensive.
Three sets of provisions matter most for personal cloud storage users.
The Right to Portability
Under the Data Act, users have the right to access and export their data in commonly used, machine-readable, interoperable formats. The key phrase is “interoperable” — not a proprietary format that only works inside the original provider’s ecosystem, but a format that can be used elsewhere.
This matters because the default export behavior of many cloud services is technically complete but practically useless. Google’s Takeout archive for Photos, for example, exports your files alongside JSON sidecar files containing metadata — but not embedded in the files themselves. The result is a folder that contains your photos and a separate folder that contains their dates, titles, and albums — in a structure that requires a separate tool to reassemble into anything resembling your original library. Technically compliant. Not interoperable.
The Data Act’s requirement for interoperable formats is meant to close exactly this gap. The export should work, not just exist.
The Right to Switch Providers
Providers must facilitate switching between cloud services. This means more than providing an export — it means cooperating with the transition, providing technical documentation of data formats and APIs, and not creating artificial obstacles (confusing UX, extended delays, missing features in the export tool) that make leaving harder than it technically needs to be.
The Data Act also requires that providers make switching available without unjustified downtime or degradation of service. You shouldn’t lose access to your files during a migration, and the process shouldn’t require you to use a period of paid service you’re actively trying to end.
Egress Fee Elimination
This is the provision with the clearest timeline and the most direct financial impact.
Currently, many cloud providers — particularly at the infrastructure layer — charge fees for data that leaves their network. These fees are often opaque, billed in units most consumers can’t readily anticipate, and can make moving a large personal archive genuinely expensive. A 2 TB photo library moving out of some services can cost tens of dollars in transfer fees alone, on top of any storage subscription.
The Data Act requires that these fees be phased out. Transition charges are permitted until January 12, 2027, after which transferring your own data out of a cloud service must be provided free of charge.
Why Data Portability Is a Privacy Issue, Not Just a Convenience Issue
Lock-in and privacy are connected in a way that’s easy to miss when thinking about portability as a feature request rather than a rights question.
Sunk-cost leverage changes your negotiating position. When leaving a service requires you to sacrifice the organizational work you’ve done — recreating albums, re-establishing folder structures, re-tagging files — you’re effectively held by a cost that grows the longer you stay. This gives the service leverage to change its terms, its pricing, or its data practices, because the cost of leaving is always increasing. A service you could leave tomorrow in five minutes has much less ability to erode your privacy over time than one where leaving is a multi-week project.
It reduces the incentive to be honest about data practices. If your data is easy to move, a service has stronger incentive to behave in ways you’d choose if you were making the decision fresh. If your data is effectively locked, the provider knows you’re less likely to act on privacy policy changes you don’t like — and that shifts the balance of incentives away from your interests.
It preserves the right to delete. A meaningful right to delete your data from a service is easier to exercise when you’ve already moved your data elsewhere. Many people fail to delete accounts they’ve stopped using not because they want the service to retain their data, but because they haven’t gotten around to exporting it first. Lock-in extends digital footprints by making cleanup costly.
What This Looks Like in Practice
For personal cloud storage users in the EU, the Data Act creates concrete rights you can exercise:
You can request a standardized export. If a service provides an export tool that produces output in a proprietary format only their software can read cleanly, you have grounds to request a genuinely interoperable format. In practice, enforcement is still maturing — regulators are working through what “interoperable” means in specific contexts — but the legal entitlement exists.
You can request cooperation with migration. If you’re moving your files to a different service, your current provider is required to not create artificial obstacles. Technical documentation, transition support, and API access for bulk export are part of what providers must make available.
You can anticipate free egress by early 2027. If you’re managing a large personal archive and cost has been a barrier to moving it, the timeline for fee elimination is relevant to your planning. After January 2027, data transfer out of EU-regulated cloud services must be free.
Does This Apply if You’re Not in the EU?
This is where honest analysis requires some nuance.
The EU Data Act applies to services operating in the EU — which includes most major cloud providers, because the EU market is too large to exit. As a practical matter, services often apply the more protective standard globally rather than building different user experiences for different jurisdictions, because it’s operationally simpler and the reputational risk of offering fewer rights to non-EU users is real.
This is the same dynamic that drove many platforms to apply GDPR-equivalent privacy practices globally after 2018, even though GDPR technically only covers EU residents.
That said, the Data Act’s provisions are not legally binding for users outside the EU, and companies are not required to provide the same switch-facilitation and portability tools to non-EU users. If you’re evaluating a storage provider and you’re not in Europe, check specifically what export and migration tools are available, rather than assuming the EU-compliant version of the service is what you’ll receive.
Choosing a Provider with Portability in Mind
The Data Act establishes a legal floor. Some providers already operate well above it.
When evaluating a cloud storage service for personal use, portability-related questions worth asking:
What formats does the export include? Files in their original format (JPEG, PDF, MP4, etc.) with metadata embedded in the file — not in a separate sidecar — is a better export than the reverse.
How accessible is the export tool? Some services bury the export under multiple settings menus or make it available only on paid plans or only on the web interface. An export that requires jumping through five steps is a more effective lock-in mechanism than a broken one.
Does the service document its data formats? If your files are stored in a proprietary internal format, you need documentation to use them elsewhere. Providers who publish format documentation are operating with more openness than those who don’t.
What happens to your data after you delete your account? The right to move your data is only fully meaningful if deletion is also clean. A service that retains your data in operational backups for an undisclosed period after account deletion is extending your data relationship beyond what you chose.
For daftei, account deletion initiates a 30-day grace window after which all stored content is permanently and irreversibly erased. Export is available in original file formats before deletion. These aren’t just contractual assurances — they’re the specific behaviors that make data portability real rather than theoretical.
The Larger Shift
The EU Data Act is part of a broader reorientation of how regulators think about the relationship between cloud services and the people who use them. The GDPR established rights around personal data. The Data Act extends that reasoning to the files and content you create and store, regardless of whether they contain classically “personal” information.
The framing is worth noting: your family photos, your journal entries, your scanned documents — these are described in the Data Act’s structure as data that belongs to you, not to the platform. The service is a custodian, not an owner. The egress fee model — where you pay to retrieve what’s yours — becomes legally impermissible under this framing, and the January 2027 deadline is the point where that framing becomes enforceable.
If you’ve been meaning to review where your personal files live and whether leaving would be feasible if you wanted to, the changing legal landscape is a useful prompt to do that now.