I know whenever this happens, a lot of HN-types like to act smug about how "you should have known to not trust a company with your data, do your own backups"
But for everyone else (skipping over the fact that you could have a little more compassion to someone who lost decades worth of important, sentimental data), running your own backups is way more work than should be necessary compared to the mainstream solutions. Especially since most people will likely not hit this scenario anyway, it's just a lottery of the unlucky.
And honestly why are we just accepting that these organizations sitting on infinitely growing wealth can use it to incentivize us to give us all their data for convenience and otherwise worry-free management of it, and then just lock you out one day based on bad algorithms, and offer next to no customer support to resolve it because they don't want to spend a tiny fraction of their operation budget on a department for that?
I'm not sure how you'd enforce regulation on something like that but if we're gonna let big tech run rampant and collect all this data on the population, it seems like the bare minimum to offer a better experience for stuff like this.
> "you should have known to not trust a company with your data, do your own backups"
Hey, yeah, I'm one of those people, and I'm not backing down.
The """cloud""" as solutions of all technical problems ("don't bother with NASes and external drives, just save to the cloud") is mainly dumbing down the average user, and these are the results.
If you don't have your data on (at least) a physical drives in your home, you already lost it.
There's nothing wrong with the cloud and there's nothing wrong having your own NASes and external drives.
The person in question was consolidating from old drives to the cloud, then transferring to new drives, using the cloud as a temporary stopgap before moving to new drives. Seemingly they were trying to do the right thing.
Nobody here is saying the cloud is a solution for all technical problems, just like we're not saying NASes and external drives are a complete solution either.
The average person doesn't have the technical knowhow to setup and use a NAS, perhaps a single external drive and that is fraught with danger.
If you're Google and you bust someone for having child porn, you shouldn't have to keep hosting child porn. Maybe a mandated period to download your data when you get locked out and put in read-only. Say they have to give you a month.
And closing off the visibility of your content to others, obviously
> And honestly why are we just accepting that these organizations sitting on infinitely growing wealth can use it to incentivize us to give us all their data for convenience and otherwise worry-free management of it, and then just lock you out one day based on bad algorithms, and offer next to no customer support to resolve it because they don't want to spend a tiny fraction of their operation budget on a department for that?
We aren't. That's why we tell people not to trust a company with their data.
That's like complaining people telling you to avoid a super cheap space heater are elitist and unsympathetic to those with less money, while at the same time decrying that everyone accepts that the manufacturer gets away with selling a space heater that occasionally burns your house down.
My point is this is a problem of the of the multi-trillion-dollar corporations, and I think they should be in charge of solving it. Not for every one of the ~6 billion people who use the internet to solve for themselves through preemptive measures and self-inflicted inconvenience.
Supposedly our votes are important, and regulation is not impossible.
>(skipping over the fact that you could have a little more compassion to someone who lost decades worth of important, sentimental data)
Someone who lost *access* to decades worth of important, sentimental data. It is extremely likely that 100.000% of their data still exists in its original form. That one word makes a world of difference for my compassion levels. If it exists, access can be restored. My compassion is for the frustration level toward getting a human at MS, which is a different and weirder problem.
> Someone who lost access to decades worth of important, sentimental data. It is extremely likely that 100.000% of their data still exists in its original form.
MS: "Second, we’ll delete Data or Your Content associated with your Microsoft account or will otherwise disassociate it from you and your Microsoft account (unless we are required by law to keep it, return it, or transfer it to you or a third party identified by you). You should have a regular backup plan as Microsoft won’t be able to retrieve Your Content or Data once your account is closed."
Not to mention that companies incessantly push for you to use their services to safeguard your data. Microsoft ENFORCES usage of an online account these days.
They tell you that you need to hand over your money to keep your data safe. The explicitly have things like Vault to keep your special documents even safer!
I agree that what you describe should be done, but until we are there (which likely won't be soon), not trusting big tech and ensuring backup copies of anything important is sound advice.
> And honestly why are we just accepting that these organizations
I suspect that's what people who remind others not to trust these services are thinking, and that's why the reminder. If you rely on these services, you are accepting exactly those bad things. We can equally decide not to accept them by not using the services or, at the very least, by considering them unreliable and acting accordingly (such as not allowing important data to exist solely in them).
> Everything you create should be in git or similar.
Everything you create should be on a machine you control, preferably in a house different from the one where you created it. Version control is optional (and Git probably overengineered for your one-man projects, but that's a different discussion).
Yes - lots of uninteresting discussion about the importance of having backups.
> This feels not only unethical but potentially illegal, especially in light of consumer protection laws. You can’t just hold someone’s entire digital life hostage with no due process, no warning, and no accountability. If this were a physical storage unit, there’d be rights, procedures, timeframes. Here? Nothing. Just a Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence.
^ This is what's worth discussing, not opinions about that guy's backups, or what the cloud is, or that this is known to regularly happen. We're already all tech-adjacent
A good backup strategy is still hard. Over the years, it became clear to me that ther are not only technical but also legal failure modes. So 'a virus ate it' or 'the drive died' are not enough. We now also have 'I sent a photo of my kid to the docter and the kiddy porn alert went off' or 'The Google algo says no' or even 'Someone called the police on my neighbour and they just took the whole building to evidence'.
Also, “the house burnt down” or “the bank sold the contents of my safe deposit box, including the restore key”.
E2E encryption is the only approach I’ll even consider for cloud backup. There’s also the problem where a product manger decides to recompress all your images to save space, or normalize the exif or whatever.
I used to use Amazon Cloud Drive, but then they banned encrypted files, so I moved elsewhere.
Number of people saying that you should just make sure you have backups. That's true, but there's still a role for government to play to prevent this sort of thing. We don't let companies sell poisonous food - why do we let them offer digital services that can be arbitrarily frozen?
I once lost years of Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube, etc., etc., because I posted a meme to their Google Plus social media site. It was a JPEG screenshot of a credit card form, and it said, "This post is only viewable by Google Plus Gold members; sign up now." It just took one click from some apathetic call center moderator, who looked at the post for 0.5 seconds total, to get everything connected with the company insta-wiped. I bought a Synology NAS since then, and now I treat my relationship with any company as very fragile.
If you force people into bitlocker, at least have a setup wizard at the start that forces them to export the key/print the key, or maybe even ask them if they want their stuff encrypted. For a regular home desktop, it's rarely a need and too much hassle
Secondly, why not offer use something like LUKS does just with a password?
TPM is a horrible way to secure things anyway and you need a PIN for true security.
As applies to other major data services providers with shit-useless customer support and arbitrary algorithmic "service" decision-making, DO NOT FUCKING TRUST your data to rest exclusively within anything that they own and control.
Export your email archives, spread your personal files across multiple devices and services, and ideally, keep copies of your files on your own backup HDs or at the very least with one other cloud provider, that also happens to be small enough for you to reach a human if something goes wrong.
At least Microscum can't yet lock one out of their own PC or laptop at this stage. This person trusted too much in their OneDrive service.
To note: looking particularly at people who've let themselves become Google-dependent here, just as much as anyone silly enough to trust 30 years of their work exclusively to fucking Microsoft of all things.
I... wasn't aware of that particular tidbit, but all the more worrisome. At least it was a genuine error and not part of a deliberate Microshit policy of enforcing the ability to lock one's computer down.
BitLocker has rescue codes, or something. I remember using them in such a situation. It was a corporate machine, and I had been instructed to obtain the rescue codes the first thing upon receiving it.
To whoever downvoted this perfectly reasonable range of suggestions that anyone sane should apply given what we all know full well about these companies ability to freeze accounts and comically dystopian user "support", Why? Respond constructively, as adults do, if you have some disagreement.
Readit News
But for everyone else (skipping over the fact that you could have a little more compassion to someone who lost decades worth of important, sentimental data), running your own backups is way more work than should be necessary compared to the mainstream solutions. Especially since most people will likely not hit this scenario anyway, it's just a lottery of the unlucky.
And honestly why are we just accepting that these organizations sitting on infinitely growing wealth can use it to incentivize us to give us all their data for convenience and otherwise worry-free management of it, and then just lock you out one day based on bad algorithms, and offer next to no customer support to resolve it because they don't want to spend a tiny fraction of their operation budget on a department for that?
I'm not sure how you'd enforce regulation on something like that but if we're gonna let big tech run rampant and collect all this data on the population, it seems like the bare minimum to offer a better experience for stuff like this.
Hey, yeah, I'm one of those people, and I'm not backing down.
The """cloud""" as solutions of all technical problems ("don't bother with NASes and external drives, just save to the cloud") is mainly dumbing down the average user, and these are the results.
If you don't have your data on (at least) a physical drives in your home, you already lost it.
There's nothing wrong with the cloud and there's nothing wrong having your own NASes and external drives.
The person in question was consolidating from old drives to the cloud, then transferring to new drives, using the cloud as a temporary stopgap before moving to new drives. Seemingly they were trying to do the right thing.
Nobody here is saying the cloud is a solution for all technical problems, just like we're not saying NASes and external drives are a complete solution either.
The average person doesn't have the technical knowhow to setup and use a NAS, perhaps a single external drive and that is fraught with danger.
And closing off the visibility of your content to others, obviously
We aren't. That's why we tell people not to trust a company with their data.
That's like complaining people telling you to avoid a super cheap space heater are elitist and unsympathetic to those with less money, while at the same time decrying that everyone accepts that the manufacturer gets away with selling a space heater that occasionally burns your house down.
Supposedly our votes are important, and regulation is not impossible.
Someone who lost *access* to decades worth of important, sentimental data. It is extremely likely that 100.000% of their data still exists in its original form. That one word makes a world of difference for my compassion levels. If it exists, access can be restored. My compassion is for the frustration level toward getting a human at MS, which is a different and weirder problem.
MS: "Second, we’ll delete Data or Your Content associated with your Microsoft account or will otherwise disassociate it from you and your Microsoft account (unless we are required by law to keep it, return it, or transfer it to you or a third party identified by you). You should have a regular backup plan as Microsoft won’t be able to retrieve Your Content or Data once your account is closed."
They tell you that you need to hand over your money to keep your data safe. The explicitly have things like Vault to keep your special documents even safer!
Untrue.
How to Install and Log In to Windows 11 Without a Microsoft Account https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...
Wait until the EU Commission hears about this.
It's crazy that we need the EU Commission to talk sense into US companies.
I suspect that's what people who remind others not to trust these services are thinking, and that's why the reminder. If you rely on these services, you are accepting exactly those bad things. We can equally decide not to accept them by not using the services or, at the very least, by considering them unreliable and acting accordingly (such as not allowing important data to exist solely in them).
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
The lack of compassion comes from those of us who know how to use computers correctly getting tired of being told to take this stuff seriously.
Everything you create should be on a machine you control, preferably in a house different from the one where you created it. Version control is optional (and Git probably overengineered for your one-man projects, but that's a different discussion).
> This feels not only unethical but potentially illegal, especially in light of consumer protection laws. You can’t just hold someone’s entire digital life hostage with no due process, no warning, and no accountability. If this were a physical storage unit, there’d be rights, procedures, timeframes. Here? Nothing. Just a Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence.
^ This is what's worth discussing, not opinions about that guy's backups, or what the cloud is, or that this is known to regularly happen. We're already all tech-adjacent
E2E encryption is the only approach I’ll even consider for cloud backup. There’s also the problem where a product manger decides to recompress all your images to save space, or normalize the exif or whatever.
I used to use Amazon Cloud Drive, but then they banned encrypted files, so I moved elsewhere.
Texas just lifted regulatio s to allow fracking run off into drinking water.
Trust but v\e\r\i\f\y\ back up on your own media.
If you force people into bitlocker, at least have a setup wizard at the start that forces them to export the key/print the key, or maybe even ask them if they want their stuff encrypted. For a regular home desktop, it's rarely a need and too much hassle
Secondly, why not offer use something like LUKS does just with a password?
TPM is a horrible way to secure things anyway and you need a PIN for true security.
Export your email archives, spread your personal files across multiple devices and services, and ideally, keep copies of your files on your own backup HDs or at the very least with one other cloud provider, that also happens to be small enough for you to reach a human if something goes wrong.
At least Microscum can't yet lock one out of their own PC or laptop at this stage. This person trusted too much in their OneDrive service.
To note: looking particularly at people who've let themselves become Google-dependent here, just as much as anyone silly enough to trust 30 years of their work exclusively to fucking Microsoft of all things.
tell that to the people that received the dreaded Bitlocker unlock screen after a broken windows update
key is... stored in your MS account
I probably should give up and recycle it.