And follow the 3-2-1 rule https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html
Importantly, don’t register the domain name (website url) at the same company your email is with.
It’s turtles all the way down.
What to do if your domain is taken away legally (e.g. via trademark dispute) or due to a random combination of unlucky factors is bought before you can extend it?
Besides what email do you specify when buying domains? Where do you host that email? How do you deal if that email locks you out?
I hope don't say "use me@example.com to register example.com" because that circle seems like a fun thing to solve in a pinch.
As a general rule, using smaller independent providers gives you more resilience and recourse than relying on big tech.
I have up trying to use the correct words, I go with what is currently the trending wording.
It reminds me of these paths that are walked through by people, independently of the paved ones they are supposed to take
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.
Not speaking from experience, or anything.
He said someone socially engineered and took over his Apple account and reset all his devices. He said he had trouble with 1password as it only existed on the wiped device. He had to get a backup from Dropbox which fortunately was accessible on his wife’s machine. I didn’t understand what happened to his Google and Amazon but he had to reset them too.
The only thing I can think of is to have local and cloud backups of your data which is the only thing that matters.
Resilio Sync (using bittorrent) kinda sucks for backing up to a USB hard drive that’s been connected.
SynThing is what I use. Even so. What I would really want is something that “just works” with multiple encrypted backups around the world, deduplication and chunking.
There’s also BackBlaze.
They don't seem to be super trustworthy, at least not as the single copy of all your data.
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.
And closing off the visibility of your content to others, obviously
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.
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.
it's not. and at least in germany you are able to take google to court over this.
they should not obligated to provide customer support
in the EU the right to speak to a human to resolve issues is mandated by law. so they are obligated to provide customer support.
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.
>"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
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.
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.
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.
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!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
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
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.
They are. Hence their freedom to choose not to.
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).
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.
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!
Wait until the EU Commission hears about this.
It's crazy that we need the EU Commission to talk sense into US companies.
Untrue.
How to Install and Log In to Windows 11 Without a Microsoft Account https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...
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."
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).
Trust but v\e\r\i\f\y\ back up on your own media.
Texas just lifted regulatio s to allow fracking run off into drinking water.
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.
> 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
Synology really did a good job of building something non technical people could use as an alternative to onedrive etc.
Cloud as backup #2, a hard drive as backup #1 and another hard drive in another location as backup #3
I'm paranoid about checking online bank/brookerage accounts late at night because this.
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.
Data is far more important than society, regulation, individuals give it mind. Doubly so if the data is technically in another jurisdiction. And it's a classic insurance scenario too - redundant storage seems like money thrown in the fire, but after a disaster like OP's, lost data seems invaluable.
Service providers are at the very least part of the problem. For one, they project a lot of confidence for safety, but protect themselves well legally in case of any event - and automate away as much customer interaction as they can.
A nice improvement would be customer service that takes the issues seriously. But, I realize, that is far more complex and expensive than how it sounds.
theandrewbailey•7mo ago
https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked-Out....
> But one day, you come back to your apartment. It's locked, and won't accept your authentication method. Since your technocrat landlords despise plain old metal keys for some reason (What are you, a peasant?), they provide one of several alternative methods for you to open doors. (Why can't those cyborgs be more like normal people?) They advise you to never share how or with what you use to login to them. Whatever it is, it's not working. You hope there's not an electrical outage somewhere.
> Because you're living in the future, everything is connected to the internet. Like most everything else, your door has a display mounted into it. A message appears, informing you that since you've violated the terms of service, your account has been terminated. You're locked out from all your stuff! There is a customer service robot downstairs, so you try to get some answers from it. Unsurprisingly, the robot is not helpful, not sympathetic, and it won't listen to an unperson.
r0fl•7mo ago
Ontario tenancy laws are so pro-tenant that not even Google could evict a tenant that quickly.
tonyhart7•7mo ago
that's good then, I bet the rent price is pro tenant too
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
Landlords then prefer to keep their apartments empty instead of risking a bad tenant or have very high bar to entry in order to get an apartment.
em-bee•7mo ago
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
You can't fix a supply and demand problem with regulations. Why don't people get this?! I've never seen a place with strong tenant protections that has affordable or easy to get rents. See Berlin as one example of many.
em-bee•7mo ago
in some cities in germany it is illegal to leave living quarters vacant for more than 60 or 90 days.
in hamburg the local government can take over empty living quarters, renovate them and rent them out without the permission of the owner.
I just let my grandma or close friend live there.
you can do that if you have only one place to rent out, but not 10. and besides, then your friend is not living somewhere else freeing up another place and they would enjoy the same rent protection too. so in fact you don't win anything.
Berlin
do you think without the protection berlin would be any better?
maybe instead take a look at vienna which has a model that actually works. two thirds of apartments in vienna are subsidized by the government. and when you build something new, again two thirds of that must be subsidized.
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
Plenty of "rented" apartments sitting empty in Berlin. People don't give a fuck about the laws, if there's no enforcement and the market is in the favor of the landlords.
>maybe instead take a look at vienna which has a model that actually works.
Why is it that people can only name Vienna? Vienna is the exception, not the rule. Hence why it's the only city in Austria doing it and not the whole country. If only there was a switch every city in the world could flip and magically turn into Vienna overnight, but housing in real life doesn't work like that.
Some cities have found a balance by deregulating the market, not further regulating it. There's no silver bullet solution that can be applied everywhere like a blanket. That's why Vienna is the only city people can name where regulations have done more good than bad, because it's the exception as in most other cities regulations have made the situation worse, like Berlin.
>do you think without the protection berlin would be any better?
Have they tried deregulating it for an A/B test to see? Because all people do is just maintain the status quo while complaining it's not working but also psy-opped themselves into thinking that any change of that status quo would be even worse even though they don't have experience with any other model.
em-bee•7mo ago
i don't think this argument makes sense. first of all, the existence of an exception proves that a better way is possible. second the whole point is that vienna has different regulations than berlin. you would have to point to cities that apply the same regulations as vienna but have a different outcome to be able to claim that vienna is an exception that somehow inexplicably works better, and then you could argue that we don't know why vienna is an exception. but the outcome in vienna can very well be explained. it's that the city owns a lot of property and subsidizes new developments. which other city in the world does that? show me a city that applies the same strategy as vienna without getting the same results. i don't think there is one.
BobaFloutist•7mo ago
theandrewbailey•7mo ago