Would you rather lose all your money or all your data?

I have lost so much data over time it doesn't even bother me anymore. Some data I would never be able to recover or find again, so I've reset my expectations and significantly reduced my data footprint. Long way of saying I would rather lose my data than have no way to use the data.

That said, I do also have backups of critical data (like taxes and banking) in multiple cloud storage locations...that data is more important to me, but can be (painfully) recovered if it does vanish.

taps forehead You can't lose money you don't have.

I'm honestly super terrified about what will happen if I lose access to my password vault. I've got hundreds of passwords that are mainly just a sequence of random characters.

I'd rather lose my data? My grandfather lived through the depression and I guess people from that time had a "you can't eat dirt" mindset when it came to land, so i'd probably follow that with data instead of dirt.

The vast vast majority of my data would be extremely hard to lose forever, and i've had enough hard drive failures that i've moved on from that I really just don't think there's much that's that critical in comparison to being able to put a roof over my head and eat.

I can't buy groceries with data.

I'd rather lose my money, as long as I didn't also lose my things and the ability to make more. It would break my heart to lose recordings of my dad's voice, who passed away years ago, photos and videos of him and others who I no longer get to see or hug. Money can be remade, and I say that as a millennial who only just recently started feeling more financially safe, but losing all those memories would be tragic.

all your data

I'm going to be pedantic for a little thought experiment.

if you lost access to all your data, does that also mean birth certificate, drivers license, cell phone number, all the internet cookies? I guess even if so, as long as you could still pay your bills on time it wouldn't be that bad. It would make it a pain to reset any 2FA accounts. Some accounts like PyPI, GitHub, and Google might be difficult to unlock if you lost access to all your metadata across devices (TOTP, IP address, etc); or does losing all your data mean all online accounts too? If that's the case then you probably lost all your e-banking and electronic money also. Your accounts don't exist any more.

If losing all the data means just local hard drives does that mean my phone and SSDs are safe? If so that doesn't seem that bad at all. I would still have a list of all the files that I lost. Anything that is important is backed up. It just means I wouldn't be able to watch TV or listen to music for a while:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/15icgo7/is_raid_really_worth_it/juuotef/?context=3

I would be disappointed to lose my photos but I don't think I would particularly care about losing anything else. Maybe my contacts. Nothing else seems particularly important, I guess. I don't really see the value of data without money.

My data basically IS my money. So, probably money. I'll bounce back from money loss. Might be a tough few weeks, but the data I have cannot be earned or recreated.

I'd keep the money. If I lose all my data I'll take it as a sign and set up a little off-grid cabin in the woods somewhere and raise chickens

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that I'd rather lose my data. It might be refreshing to some degree to start from scratch. It would be annoying at times, but maybe I'd think about doing things differently. I certainly wouldn't bother signing up for social media accounts.

As for money, I've worked my ass off to save for retirement and I wouldn't want to see all of that go down the drain. Money is important to me for my everyday living as well as future goals.

I recently converted most of my data into money, so I guess I’d keep the money at this point. I would have given you a different answer a year ago.

I'd want to learn more about the terms. Could I transfer the money to my wife's name first? What about a shared account?

There's a similar consideration for photos. I've probably shared the most important ones with others, so I could maybe get them back? If this is just losing data where I'm the only person with a copy, it would be a loss but liveable.

Maybe I should share more with friends while I have the chance :)

For those who are in debt, resetting the balance to $0 would be most wonderful. :)

I recently lost all my 2FA Auth codes thanks to Google Authenticator resetting after an update.

I recovered all of them except gitlab because their support is non-existing unless you are a paying customer.. which you can't even "become" if you cannot access your account.

So, definitely I'll lose data instead of money. I can either recover or find my way back to my data.

Now if you instead talk about "destroyed", that could be basically the same thing.

I have data, but not much in terms of money. If I’m going to lose the data, could I just sell it for money instead?

I wouldn't wat to lose data. I lost some due to hardware failure, I lost some due to not caring enough (actually really lost) and I lost some due to me not being careful and deleting it accidentally by myself.

If I lost all the money, I still have the data and I can earn new money by working.

If I lost all my data (or even just part of it), no amount of money could get it back.