I’m speechless. So I’m letting this do the talking for me.
Ye Ghods! Why you gotta back up your stuff
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11 responses to “Ye Ghods! Why you gotta back up your stuff”
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I have been wary of Cloud – never used it, although others have urged me to do so.
am so glad! -
Thanks Holly! We can never have too many reminders to back our work up. I try to do it regularly but sometimes I slack off and stories like these always put me back on track.
To share a personal story. I had my laptop stolen a couple years back and I had just finished writing a 50k word novel. Thankfully, I had just back up everything, so no tragic ending here. However, it just goes to show you that you never know when you could loose your hard work or valuable information!
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WAAAY back in the dawn of the internet, Walnut Creek’s http://FTP.CDROM.COM was _the_ public archive for various online cultures, including the DOOM community and the computer-generated music scene. At the time it was the highest-traffic FTP server in the world.
Back around 2001, CDROM.COM was acquired by a company with no history of this type of service, and I don’t recall what set me looking, but I was moved to snoop around their business site til I found their financials. Which didn’t look positive.
Based on that, I believed they would soon pull the plug, and alerted the DOOM archive maintainer (who was also a friend, so I had perhaps more cred than I otherwise might) … he believed me, and pulled a complete copy of our archive. (At the time no one else had enough bandwidth to pull that much data on short notice, but he had access to Shell Oil’s network.)
About a month later, CDROM.COM’s new owners killed ALL the nonpaying sites with NO prior notice. Other than whatever was floating around the world on shareware CDs, or had filtered down to private collections, everything but the DOOM archive was lost. (It was long believed that the music scene archive was gone for good, but some years later someone’s personal copy came to light.)
So, yeah. I trust free online storage about as far as I can throw it.
Trust storage you control, or that you pay for, and never trust just one method. DON’T rely on storage you get only from someone else’s possibly temporary generosity.
And remember that if a for-profit entity offers you a valuable service for free, you’re not the customer — you’re the product.
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“And remember that if a for-profit entity offers you a valuable service for free, you’re not the customer — you’re the product.”
NO SHIT! Thanks for saying this.
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This is not the first instance of lost data… In the past, companies offered free disk space to store files. When the went out of business, without any warning, so did all the data.
This is the biggest reason that I don’t recommend using the new cloud services unless you can get a guarantee of data protection. I will keep all my data backed up locally, thank you. It should be a clear warning that you and you alone are responsible for all of your data. Please back up your stuff before it is also too late for you. This from an ol’ IT guy. (45+ years worth).
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Yes.
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After losing an entire novel to volatile RAM, I always back up at least three times. An overkill perhaps but after losing a years work I wanted to kill the entire world.
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Plus: If it is “out there”, there will be at least one person who is able to get “in there”, which is why I don’t like online storage at all.
Then again. I have only few photos and the rest of my personal stuff is text. I can do a backup – at least of my writing – in a few minutes.-
I like Dropbox. But then, I have a paid account, and Dropbox isn’t exactly online storage. It’s online storage that synchronizes everything you have stored on it onto every device you use it with.
I use it as an adjunct to multiple-times-daily backups across two computers and a couple back-up drives.
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One more reminder that public blogging platforms do not have to respect your stuff. Your carefully curated and nurtured business, whether it’s on blogger, Facebook, Twitter, or WordPress.com can be gone in an instant never to return at the whims of a corporate decision or the decision of some low level cog in the corporate structure.
Unfortunately, this can also happen with a hosting service, but there are avenues of redress. Multiple tested backups on more than one platform are essential.
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Exactly. Free is not free. Someone ALWAYS pays for what you get for free.
This isn’t always awful. Sometimes free is just advertising, giving you the chance to try something that is of interest to you to see if you would be interesting in buying more of the same.
Sometimes, however, “FREE” is the hook to acquire all sorts of personal information about you, and sell it to the sorts of folks who buy personal information for all sorts of things you won’t appreciate.
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