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.
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.
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 weird to characterize giving good advice as smug. Damaging too, since you're actively discouraging the dissemination of good advice.
Really, quite a bizarre case of internet shaming.
Your last sentence is exactly what the OP is talking about.
> Well, the previous poster had to invent a quote. And you're the one name calling here. Look in the mirror my friend.
Yeah, look in the mirror.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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•4h 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•2h ago
Ontario tenancy laws are so pro-tenant that not even Google could evict a tenant that quickly.
tonyhart7•1h ago
that's good then, I bet the rent price is pro tenant too
FirmwareBurner•1h 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.