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
>> you bust someone for having child porn, you shouldn't have to keep hosting child porn.
Alternative question: if Google decides I had child porn on my account and deletes it, how can I prove that it wasn't a child porn?
It's my data, and until someone proves in court that the law was broken, how can they delete it on a basis of breaking the law? It would be offensive even if it happened due to human misunderstanding, but getting banned on an account I paid for, because their algorithms are shit -- that's beyond any reason.
You'd expect that there should be a support line and you should be able to resolve it by reaching a human but Google sucks
For stuff like email and cloud there are plenty of alternatives and no dominance of a single company over the market, so I believe that it would be a bridge too far to mandate Google to provide support or "banning banning accounts"
Rather just they hold onto banned people's data for a while and let them download it
Funny example of Google banning account over what they determined to be CSAM.
I specifically remember Google banning a father because they detected medical photos of his son that were for his doctor. And then refused to reinstate his account!
Honestly, I'm not going to entertain these hypotheticals.
Given that Google has banned an account of a dad for having pictures of his son he was going to share with his doctor under the reasoning of "CSAM" I don't trust Google to be the Judge, Jury, and Executioner.
They're not hypotheticals. Google is big. It happens every day.
It's reasonable for Google to have automated systems for this, reasonable to deny service arbitrarily, and they should not obligated to provide customer support. They're a bad service in a competitive market for the cloud. So don't use their services.
The point being that, assholes or not, while you shouldn't be entitled to their service, you should be entitled to your data, and deleting it arbitrarily should be considered infringing on that.
What a ridiculous straw man, nobody has argued that Google should be forced to host child porn.
When we sign up, the deal is that they store our data securely and indefinitely as long as we pay for the service. Why should they be allowed to unilaterally break contracts and set deadlines that wipe out our data without a legal due process after paying them for 30 years?
We supposedly live in a democracy where we should have laws that the common person wants, so I'm asking you, why should we be happy with your version of the law?
Why shouldn't we demand a law that prohibits them from wiping our data without a court decision or a signed waiver from the account owner? Failing that, they should be on the hook for compensation of 10 times of the total amount we paid for the service since inception, or $1 million* (for the sake of the argument), whichever is higher.
Where's the straw man? If you discuss "banning banning accounts", this is one (edge?) case.
>"Why should they be allowed to unilaterally break contracts"
In the case of the user infringing on the terms of service, they're just backing out through the regular exit clause following a breach that was on your end.
Without breach of service, in most legislations contracts with an indefinite duration must have provisions that allow either party to terminate the contract with reasonable notice.
Forcing them to hold onto your stuff for a month until you can figure out another provider or a way to self-host is reasonable notice. Maybe 3 months? A year?
>Why shouldn't we demand a law that prohibits them from wiping our data without a court decision or a signed waiver from the account owner?
Because that would be a burden for anyone willing to launch software that host any kind of user data
that would be a burden for anyone willing to launch software that host any kind of user data
if dealing with consumers is a burden, then you should not start a business. the same argument is being made against right to repair and having spare parts available or against the ability to download all your data. or have it deleted. and yet that is being made law in several places. any provision to protect consumers is a burden. that is a non-argument.
the question here is one of balance and appropriateness. if you go bankrupt, storing and making the data available for all users for another year is a burden. but if you have millions of users, keeping the data around for a few blocked users until their violation can be proven is not a burden. especially because you can potentially still continue to charge for the subscription.
>the same argument is being made against right to repair and having spare parts available
Just as valid back then. There's nothing wrong with the argument. You have to evaluate it every time. For right to repair we just decided it was worth it.
I don't think this is worth it. A few months to dl your stuff is enough. Companies shouldn't need to host things that go against their terms of service when they ban you for infringing on their terms of service. It would be nonsense.
> 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).
It is smug because the average person is not a geek running a micro rack in their basement (nor does the average person possess the time, means or expertise to spin up and maintain all such should they even want to).
It is smug because, to GP's point, a dismissal of a very real problem with hyper-consolidated markets that allow the most powerful entities on earth to abdicate their responsibility, and foist it upon the people least equipped to handle it, all in the name of "personal responsibility".
You don't have to be a geek, you don't need a rack, you don't need much time to do this. Just buy some external drive and copy at least something there. We're talking about "30 years of irreplaceable photos and work". Doing a backup one time a year would save 90%+ of that data in case of problems, without any need for technical knowledge or dedicating significant time to this.
I agree that the companies should not be allowed to just lock you out of your data like that, but even if there was a strongly enforced law mandating companies to not do this, you still should have some backup. Many things could happen, and doing a simple backup is a very small investment which can save you from losing 30 years of data (even if the risk is very small).
Getting backups right _is_ difficult and can easily be quite stressful. Yes, having some external drives here and there with files would of course be helpful. But then, should you encrypt them in case of theft? Where to keep them in case of fire? What to do with "old" backups (can I trust the drive to live more than 2 years? 5 years?), copy them over to new drives? But what then with duplicated files? I think having backups in the cloud is currently the best "backup and forget" strategy
> Getting backups right _is_ difficult and can easily be quite stressful.
My point was that something is much better than nothing, and you don't need 99.999% reliability in your setup to greatly reduce risk that you're exposing yourself to when keeping 30 years of data in only one place.
> But then, should you encrypt them in case of theft?
Depends on the nature of the data. I guess that most of that 30 years worth of data didn't need encryption, and copying only insensitive data is an option. On the other side, cloud account, or device logged in to the cloud account could be stolen too.
> Where to keep them in case of fire?
That's irrelevant if we're talking about backing up data stored on cloud service.
> What to do with "old" backups (can I trust the drive to live more than 2 years? 5 years?), copy them over to new drives? But what then with duplicated files?
Aside from some unlikely issues, yes, drives should last at least a couple of years. In the 5+ year timeframes I think you could just buy a new drive (bigger/cheaper/more reliable than the last as the technology improves). If we're talking about a lazy strategy of backing up the data once a year, even deleting everything on a drive and copying everything again isn't that bad. Better than nothing.
> I think having backups in the cloud is currently the best "backup and forget" strategy
But we're not talking about having the cloud as a backup. The issue here is having the files only in the cloud, with no backup. For a non-technical person, cloud as a backup is great, but here we have a case where a person had all their data only on the cloud, and then lost access to the cloud. If the cloud was only a backup (or a way to sync/access the data on other devices), but the data would still be present on some private device, there would be no problem.
The mistake of the OP was to not buy the new drive right away and copy his data locally. No basement rack needed, just a USB hard drive. They wrote about owning multiple drives and having collected data over the course of 30 years, so they weren’t completely nontechnical either.
So I definitely agree about being smug. This isn't funny and you can approach this with empathy and understanding for how soul-crushing this is for this person.
And also, you do not need a rack of homelab gear to do backups. I have an AV rack (somewhat undermining my point I accept), 16U, bolted to my laundry wall. Within it is a network switch, my ISP's routing gear, my Phillips hue controller, and 3 PCs. One is a dedicated Minecraft box (shut up), one is my universal Ubuntu box for miscellaneous automations + plex, and one is a Windows 10 box that handles my DVR, file shares, and backups.
The actual backups themselves are scripts that run nightly and move data from the misc. PCs to the big one, along with some syncthing shares that do the same, and then the lot is backed up offsite with a backup vendor's application. I grant if you were setting this entire setup up from nothing, it would be a decent amount of work. However I also point out, this is all off the shelf batch files and OSS. This is hardly what I would call engineering, and that's by design, I wanted it to very simple.
So, big empathy, big understanding, I would give this dude a hug if I could. AND, people should take this as a lesson to not just shove all their shit into a monolith and call it a day because it's cheap and easy.
Aren't the govs that are voting in all over the place on right wing side all for 'personal responsibility' and no gov coddling? But sure, I am absolutely for rules for these companies, having a number to call with a human etc and not actually bring allowed to not offer that because the service is free or cheap and the company very large so no one thinks it will matter.
Drives are very cheap these days and it seems he had most of it local but went full cloud.
There’s good advice and there is “being an asshole.” Unfortunately, many HNers don’t read their emails as the recepient does and they sound very preachy and condescending instead of helpful unfortunately(or maybe it’s on purpose.)
Your last sentence is exactly what the OP is talking about.
> 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).
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.