| ▲ | ajross 3 days ago |
| Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services. Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do. |
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| ▲ | samplatt 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| All of mine. Music, photos, copies of important documents, archived sets of email (and gmail) across different eras. My facebook archive export, IRC & IM logs stretching back to ~2000. A lot of it even on SSD, let alone HDD's, let alone "archival media". The spinning rust is mostly used for double- and triple-redundant copies of my music and photos, as well as the usual movie collection. I'm not sure HN is the best place for such... technological anachronistic skepticism? A lot of us ARE going to be storing all that for shits and giggles. |
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| ▲ | josephg 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah I have all this data backed up on a couple different drives. IRC and ICQ logs going back to when I was a teenager. Digitised photos from when I was a kid through to the present day. Source code for projects I worked on from when I was 10. Rips of all the cds I used to own. And yes, email exports dating back to about 2003. I wish I kept more, honestly. It’s a beautiful record. I think my most treasured possession is videos of myself and my parents from when I was young. I’m thinking of sitting my sisters kids down in front of a camera for 15 minutes and getting them to talk about their life. It’s beautiful to rewatch this stuff decades later. It’s transporting. |
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| ▲ | seabrookmx 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". As other commenters have stated, maybe this isn't the best place to ask. I'm definitely in the "almost all of it" camp. I have Diablo II game saves on my desktop that are carried forward directly from my Windows 98 SE box circa 2002-2003. As well as Linux ISO's I acquired on Kazaa while still on dial-up internet. |
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| ▲ | scheeseman486 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Funny you bring up Gmail as a positive example when they reneged on their promise of unlimited storage 5 years ago. Most of my media is backed up on my Unraid server, the most important stuff is backed up on an external drive and I also have some things that exist in the cloud, which I do not trust, which is why it's tiered as least important. |
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| ▲ | ajross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Is your Unraid free and unlimited then? Funny argument, indeed. I'm amazed at the number of people jumping out here to insist that people don't use or value cloud storage because of the existance of one or thirty or whatever kludgey manual solutions. I mean, I know you can store stuff manually. I still have all that junk too! It's fun. But I don't recommend it to friends or coworkers or family or anyone else because... well, duh, as it were. This forum's cherished (and, apparently, deeply insecure) geek cred notwithstanding, THE MARKET walked straight into the arms of the cloud, and has derived immense value from it. Grandmothers have terabyte archives of their progeny's development and will take it to the grave, without needing to puzzle out (sigh) an unraid install. | | |
| ▲ | scheeseman486 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm grandfathered to get unlimited updates, though if they rugpull on that the drives are just formatted as XFS. It'd be a hassle to move to something like TrueNAS, but I could do it even if the OS stopped working. Even if Lime Technology completely disappear one day and make every Unraid USB stick self destruct, I'll still have physical access to the data. Cloud services, like everything else in control of rent seeking companies, are getting worse. That was always the obvious, inevitable trap with all of this, with any system where you pay a subscription for remote access to a timeshare computer. Which isn't to say that it isn't useful, I even use it, but I don't rely on it. You didn't frame your initial post around the market of grandmas, your rhetoric was targeted to those reading your post; "How much of your personal data", "do you still have your email". | | |
| ▲ | ajross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > You didn't frame your initial post around the market of grandmas, your rhetoric was targeted to those reading your post; "How much of your personal data", "do you still have your email". Uh... that's wildly and seemingly deliberately mischaracterizing what I wrote. Seriously? The very next sentence falsifies your interpretation, quite explicitly. Why would you cherry pick like that? | | |
| ▲ | scheeseman486 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | You were talking to an audience of tech nerds, as was the original blog post we're all discussing. All of your counter-arguments in you original post were appeals to that base and merely suggesting that Gmail users outside of the Hacker News sphere exist doesn't really change that. Given that, bringing up the needs of grandma and her family photos is a non-sequitur. We clearly aren't talking about that, more considering the wider effects of a tech industry having centralized control of and gating access to customer data and processing and the ways that has caused a lot of exploitation and enshittification. But clearly you're avoiding talking about any of that, which is why the only thing in my post you engaged with is a bunch of handwringing that I misrepresented something you said (I didn't). |
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| ▲ | bee_rider 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have all my music from 2009, shuffled from drive to drive. It out-survived my subscriptions to on-demand music streaming services (I do Pandora for discovery but don’t like the feeling of building an Amazon streaming “library” that will actually vanish when I stop paying). I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though. |
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| ▲ | Terr_ 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Uhhh, me? My home directory has 20-30 years of documents, photos, emails, the email address itself, instant-messaging logs, etc. Even a downloaded zip of every comment I ever made on Reddit. (But not HN, I should look into that.) The primary exception would be Google Photos pictures which were auto-uploaded from my phone that I haven't curated and downloaded yet. I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support. > on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Hold up, is this OR or XOR? It sounds like you're trying to add unreasonable (dis-)qualifiers. TFA isn't saying one must boycott "the cloud" and erase all data, it just advocates that you retain an independent copy. > Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services. I think that's conflating different use-cases. * Having a regular offsite backup into S3 isn't that different from when the data was rsync'ed to a Linux machine I paid for an account on. Any cloud-ness is a remote implementation detail, not a change in the consumer relationship. * In contrast, "all my photos are in the cloud and my friends and family can collaborate on shared albums" is different, it permanently moves the locus of control. |
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| ▲ | ajross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > * In contrast, "all my photos are in the cloud and my friends and family can collaborate on shared albums" is different, it permanently moves the locus of control. No, it doesn't. You're fooling yourself. All the criticism of "cloud" providers is predicated on a presumption of bad faith on the part of the provider. Do the same to Amazon and Dropbox and you get the same risk. More actually, since you're not just storing photos but raw backups that might end up with chat logs or password or authentication tokens or whatever. All you're saying is that you trust party A but not party B to give you the same service. Which is fine, your trust is yours to give. But it's not an indictment of the technology behind the service! | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You're still against against a strawman. Please re-read this part of TFA: > Don’t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the Cloud, blow whatever you want into the Cloud. The Internet’s a big copy machine, as they say. Blow copies into the Cloud. But please: (1) Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. ____________ Here's an analogy for how I feel things are going. Keep in mind the differences between: (1) a kind of product-offering, (2) the people offering it, and (3) an underlying set of technologies that could be in multiple products. * Alt-TFA: "Fuck Asbestos - Everyone's selling asbestos pillows which are dangerous and being pushed by amoral sociopaths. Don't use them without a respirator." * Alt-ajross: "All your criticism of asbestos is predicated on a presumption of bad faith by the providers. Stop being mean to asbestos. Asbestos can be useful." * Alt-Terr_: "All asbestos pillows are still terrible no matter who's selling them." ____________ > All you're saying is that you trust party A but not party B to give you the same service. No, applying logic I choose is a fundamentally different service than accepting data into logic they choose. | | |
| ▲ | ajross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > You're still against against a strawman. No, I was arguing with you, who posited that the difference between Dropbox and iCloud Photos was the "locus of control" and the "change in consumer relationship". That's not an argument about data reliability, it's an argument from trust. And it didn't make sense to me. |
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| ▲ | kaibee 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I still have hour long techno/house mixes that I downloaded from some dude who was trying to get into DJing in 2008/did house shows or something, because we played on the same garry's mod server. They don't exist anywhere else on the internet as far as I could possibly find. Searching his dj name doesn't bring up anything. |
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| ▲ | samplatt 3 days ago | parent [-] | | A UK trance artist called Deathboy left directory-traversal open on his website about 23 year ago. Since then I've had a lot of mp3's that he's never released or put on albums, which is sad because a lot of them are pretty great. Similarly (also from ~2003), the (Australian) ABC's website held a lot of recorded breakfast radio show clips from when Adam & Wil hosted it, getting the awesome comedy band Tripod [0] to write songs in an hour. Many of these were released on their CD's, but nowhere near all of them. Eventually that ABC server was shutdown due to lack of government funds. There's a very good chance I'm the only one on the planet with these excellent songs & interviews from those shows. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripod_(band) | | |
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| ▲ | ratdragon 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| All of mine, but I guess I'm an exception to the rule. |
