The mobile era seems to bring new innovations weekly, if not daily or hourly, but not all of them can last. And so it comes to pass that toay Dropbox has announced it is dropping two of its once-hot services, Mailbox and Carousel.

Users have until early 2016 to back up their stuff and find something else, PC World reports. Both apps were intended as bulk cloud-storage tools — for mail and photos, respectively — so dedicated customers probably have a lot of content stored in them they want to back up elsewhere.

The good news is, there’s time. Mailbox is shutting down at the end of February and Carousel at the end of March, so you’ve got a few weeks left to make sure you extract your data. The company has provided FAQ files for both Mailbox and Carousel to guide users through the process of what they need to know.

While clearly millions of us don’t use these services (because if we all did they’d be thriving, not shutting down), there’s an important take-away for everyone trying to get by in the digital, mobile economy: no app lives forever. Every time a wave of “disruptive” technologies comes along promising to change the way everyone does everything, there are going to be some winners and some losers. Picking the wrong tool means starting over with something else later, and being glad for advance notice and long sunset windows to make sure you don’t lose all your data along the way.

Dropbox to shutter Mailbox email and Carousel photo apps [PC World]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.