I really wish the author hadn't mentioned the bit about the 6TB of data! The whole situation is awful, but that part distracts from the real point - at least among the kind of audience who is...
Exemplary
I really wish the author hadn't mentioned the bit about the 6TB of data! The whole situation is awful, but that part distracts from the real point - at least among the kind of audience who is going to care about this at all.
Leaving your only copy of whatever data in the hands of a corporation is like leaving a backpack on the seat of a parked car: you should be able to assume it's safe, you're not the one who bears the fault if something does happen to it, but we ultimately do live in a world where thieves break car windows and corporations lose/lock away your data. The victim isn't at fault, but the fact they could probably have foreseen and mitigated the issue ends up taking focus in the conversation.
Skip that part - not in a misleading way, just in a hypothetical world where they don't care about the lost data, or where they did have a backup on a USB drive - and the story is still just as bad. They've lost access to their developer account - something that's outright necessary for their job specifically because of Apple's walled garden - and they're being given no recourse to follow up. They've lost access to iMessage, which could well have been a primary means of communication. They've lost significant workflow and UX features on their devices; they may even be unable to sell or service the hardware, since it'll be linked to an account that they can no longer access and release it from.
They're stuck in this Kafka-meets-Neal-Stephenson situation through no fault of their own, with no recourse except signal boosting the story enough that it catches the eye of someone with the power to make real human decisions rather than just following a generic script, and the most serious consequences were unavoidable*. All because companies have decided that even deflecting 99% of customer service requests with a generic, semi-automated non-answer wasn't enough: the cost of an escalation team to make actual judgment calls in that remaining 1% apparently isn't worth it either, so anything that falls outside the lines like this just goes into an eternal, unsolvable loop.
This isn't inevitable. This isn't necessary. This isn't something that a person living a normal life can reasonably protect themselves from. And this is exactly what laws and regulations are supposed to be created for: providing recourse to people harmed through no fault of their own, and pre-emptively limiting the likely harm from entities that concentrate significant power over communications, finance, business, employment, and so on.
*OK, the author could have chosen not to work on Apple software at all, 15 years earlier into their career. And convinced all of their family, friends, and professional contacts to use a different communication method. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that forcing Apple to have a regulated process to resolve issues like this is probably the more reasonable ask.
Regulations won't even be discussed unless Apple looses everyone's data. In 2007 the government waited until they literally tanked the entire world economy to do anything, and even then they...
Regulations won't even be discussed unless Apple looses everyone's data.
In 2007 the government waited until they literally tanked the entire world economy to do anything, and even then they didn't do much. Regulations don't protect the people, regulations protect the government. The government won't do shit until they themselves are at risk.
On the one hand- this sucks. On the other.. This is why you don't trust a single corporation (derogatory) to hold all of your data. You're at their mercy if they decide, using their obscure and...
On the one hand- this sucks.
On the other.. This is why you don't trust a single corporation (derogatory) to hold all of your data. You're at their mercy if they decide, using their obscure and convoluted rulesets, that you are now persona non grata. Nobody is big enough to not eventually be on the receiving end of their fickle and immoral behaviour.
As an aside, how on earth do you have 30 THOUSAND dollars worth of hardware and not a combined 6TB across it?? A 22TB hard drive can be bought for a couple of hundred dollars if you get recertified drives.
You're not wrong… but after 20+ years in tech, I've no idea what the serious alternative is. Put your data in a NAS? Good luck, self hosting is a full time job Do regular local backups? Okay, at...
You're not wrong… but after 20+ years in tech, I've no idea what the serious alternative is.
Put your data in a NAS? Good luck, self hosting is a full time job
Do regular local backups? Okay, at best you're saving some things, but the inconvenience if something happens is still massive. Also, good luck, cause not all your data is easy to back up. Can you do it programmatically?
Deduplicate your data across Google, Apple & more? Congrats, now you're trusting even more corpos with your data and who knows what they're all doing with them. If anything, you're adding risk, not removing it.
Any & all solutions increase costs, burden, and often
I think the best solution is to pay for a Google Workspace account to use with your own domain, which is what i do. It gives a good balance between centralization and liability.
I don't think it's ever really fair to tell people "this is why you shouldn't put all your data in the trust of apple" without a reasonable alternative to the question: "I have terabytes of life data to manage. This is impossible to handle it all by myself. What service will help me with this without turning this in a whole Project?"
It's incredibly easy to buy a hard drive for cold storage and just copy all your stuff onto it in one go. It's one thing to set up regular backups with redundancy and network accessibility, but if...
Put your data in a NAS? Good luck, self hosting is a full time job
It's incredibly easy to buy a hard drive for cold storage and just copy all your stuff onto it in one go. It's one thing to set up regular backups with redundancy and network accessibility, but if you just need to make sure your photos from 2019 aren't going to be lost forever due to corporate fuckery, simply copying them onto a drive and putting it in a drawer somewhere is enough for most people. In the linked article they're specifically talking about 6TB of family photos, which is a frankly trivial thing to back up if you have 6TB of HDD storage available (and if they can afford AUD$30,000 work of Apple devices, they can afford to drop a few hundred on drive space).
You and everyone else is responding to me like the guy actually just lost some photos. This is clearly not the case. The amount of self hosting needed to actually make up for what apple was...
You and everyone else is responding to me like the guy actually just lost some photos. This is clearly not the case.
Yeah it’s easy to back up photos and email once. It’s not TERRIBLY difficult to set up a cronjob to do it regularly (though you won’t know if that one stops working because some access token expired and you didn’t set up lifecycle alerts … oops my backups stopped three years ago guess I’m fucked).
But then you still don’t have access to your damn email address anymore do you? Okay, so you have to switch to an email on your own domain. Then you find out that you used “sign in with apple” at some point and you’re fucked on that front so guess you just lost those accounts forever, oh well.
We’re just at photos and emails here and there’s a dozen ways it can go wrong already. And I know you guys have enough knowledge to know we’re not going to pretend it’s a good idea to self host the actual email servers.
What about apple’s password manager? Gonna have to put this somewhere else too. I use 1Password which does local backups and is resilient to 1P being a bad actor — Apple doesn’t, to my knowledge, implement that. And 1P isn’t self hostable, so… keepass with syncing? I’ve done that before. It’s annoying as hell. But whatever, it’s just syncing to your drive…
Shit, right, the “drive”. It’s not enough to set up a NAS, you generally want something you want to share. If you used iCloud for this, congrats all your share links are gone forever and it’s not like there’s any backup of those.
So you used nextcloud for this because you know better than that. When you did all this setup three years ago you tried to install the version provided by your synology only to find it hadn’t been updated this century and you did a custom install. Of course you never updated this since then, completely missing there was a major vulnerability to update for, so now in good conscience you check and oops … people uploaded illegal porn to your drive and now the police is at your door Just Asking Questions. Not to mention that access wasn’t configured quite correctly by default so your private files were visible to everyone who knew how to access them.
Doesn’t sound like you eh? You know better. You set up vulnerability alerts, auto updates and what the hell, you even know enough to set up a deadmanswitch alerting system for when these stop working.
Well congratulations then, because you’re a systems engineer. Most people can’t do this stuff.
You ask why people seem to take a hostile tone, but I feel like you did set the tone here. Just pointing it out. Also, like I pointed out elsewhere, there are plenty of in between solutions. Most...
Doesn’t sound like you eh? You know better. You set up vulnerability alerts, auto updates and what the hell, you even know enough to set up a deadmanswitch alerting system for when these stop working.
Well congratulations then, because you’re a systems engineer. Most people can’t do this stuff.
You ask why people seem to take a hostile tone, but I feel like you did set the tone here. Just pointing it out.
Also, like I pointed out elsewhere, there are plenty of in between solutions. Most of which can be used as reasonable assurance you will not be locked out of data without having to be a system engineer. Mitigating the risks of being locked out doesn't mean you need to fully self host ALL THE THINGS yourself. This seems to be the result of you yourself moving the goalpost entirely in that direction. And to be completely honest, I am not sure why?
If you are really not sure what I mean, here are some examples of you taking it to one extreme spectrum.
And I know you guys have enough knowledge to know we’re not going to pretend it’s a good idea to self host the actual email servers.
Email hosting by a variety of well established hosting providers is a thing. This ranges from extremely easy by using their domain to slightly more complex and coupling your own domain. Which involves setting a few DNS entries once using instructions from the mail provider.
What about apple’s password manager? Gonna have to put this somewhere else too. I use 1Password which does local backups and is resilient to 1P being a bad actor — Apple doesn’t, to my knowledge, implement that. And 1P isn’t self hostable, so… keepass with syncing? I’ve done that before. It’s annoying as hell. But whatever, it’s just syncing to your drive…
Again, no need to self host. You already have local backups by using 1Password. Risk mitigated, you have provided the solution yourself.
Shit, right, the “drive”. It’s not enough to set up a NAS, you generally want something you want to share. If you used iCloud for this, congrats all your share links are gone forever and it’s not like there’s any backup of those.
If someone takes care to have backups of important things elsewhere, they can still use most things Apple during daily use. Those links you shared being gone does suck, I agree. But the data behind those links will still be around. The original comment you replied to basically suggested just having a local copy of all that data. They didn't even suggest that it needs to be a NAS or even accessible over the internet.
So you used nextcloud for this because you know better than that. When you did all this setup three years ago you tried to install the version provided by your synology only to find it hadn’t been updated this century and you did a custom install.
Of course you never updated this since then, completely missing there was a major vulnerability to update for, so now in good conscience you check and oops … people uploaded illegal porn to your drive and now the police is at your door Just Asking Questions. Not to mention that access wasn’t configured quite correctly by default so your private files were visible to everyone who knew how to access them.
This is an oddly specific, somewhat fear mongering hypothetical. Unless this is an example from personal experience, in which case I feel for you. I agree that fully self hosting critical things is a pain, even more so if you want them to be accessible from the internet. Which I generally advocate against with anyway. But this also comes back to what I already said, you can have both a local backup (potentially on a NAS if you like) and use iCloud.
Regardless of where you are sharing your files from, you still want a backup anyway. Like... backups are a good idea. To be frank, you seem angry at the idea of setting up backups in the first place.
Sure, of course. I don't want to make it sound like it's a bad idea to do any of this stuff, and there's plenty that I think people should just do. To give you an example, you can automate Google...
Like... backups are a good idea. To be frank, you seem angry at the idea of setting up backups in the first place.
Sure, of course. I don't want to make it sound like it's a bad idea to do any of this stuff, and there's plenty that I think people should just do.
To give you an example, you can automate Google Takeout with just a few clicks and it's pretty accessible even to non-tech-savvy people. You choose what services you care about, you choose frequency and where it gets saved, and you choose the format. It's super super neat. I have no idea if Apple has anything remotely close to this, but it's one reason why I prefer the Google ecosystem.
What I'm fervently against is the "the guy should just have done X" mindset. Yeah, he should have... but very few "common mortals" know about the risks tied to being on a single provider. Even fewer know about the simple solutions such as Takeout. How will you react when this happens to your grandma? Because if it's any different to how the reactions now, then what's the point? Pointing to some poor sod nelson-style "HAW-HAW, you trusted Apple!"?
That's fair. Though I don't think most people were responding from a place of schadenfreude to be honest but rather a desire to make other people aware that you should have backups combined with...
That's fair. Though I don't think most people were responding from a place of schadenfreude to be honest but rather a desire to make other people aware that you should have backups combined with various ways to achieve it.
And to be honest, the author of the blog post "should" have known better. The fact that they and many other people don't is all the more reason to have discussions about it as much as possible. Even more reason to talk about alternatives, ways to mitigate the risks, etc.
Some people, in that process, suggest solutions that are not for most people. Other people make reasonable suggestions. Like, for example, having a local copy of a bunch of your data. And yes, not all data can always easily be covered. But, and I can't keep stressing this enough, having some of your data backed up is better than having none of your data backed up.
I am still not sure where the hyper focus on self hosted solutions came from. That, to me, seems a distraction from the fact that it is actually fairly accessible to get the basics right for a lot of people's data.
No, this misrepresentation of my argument, which doesn't mention photos at all. It's immaterial to my argument whether the data is photos or anything else. 6 TB of data is 6 TB of data, whatever...
You and everyone else is responding to me like the guy actually just lost some photos. This is clearly not the case.
No, this misrepresentation of my argument, which doesn't mention photos at all. It's immaterial to my argument whether the data is photos or anything else. 6 TB of data is 6 TB of data, whatever its content and wherever you keep it. A 6 TB platter disk costs < $300.
Yeah it’s easy to back up photos and email once. It’s not TERRIBLY difficult to set up a cronjob to do it regularly (though you won’t know if that one stops working because some access token expired and you didn’t set up lifecycle alerts … oops my backups stopped three years ago guess I’m fucked).
You're overthinking it. Copying files is basic computer literacy. Doing it automatically is a minor convenience on top of that. Doing it using a globally accessible network service is another inconvenience on top of that. If for a lack of technical know-how you have to pick either access to "20 years of digital life" or slighly more convenient means of copying files, what is the wise choice?
But then you still don’t have access to your damn email address anymore do you?
Why not? I don't see how trying to redeem a gift card for buying music and software should render my email account inaccessible. Then again, my email provider is an email provider, not a massively integrated everything-service.
What about apple’s password manager?
Don't use it? Why should your phone manufacturer be your OS developer, your cloud backup provider, your email provider, your software store, your music store, your file sharing application, your software publisher, your authentication provider and the arbiter of whether you have access to your passwords?
It's an idiotic concept. Even children intuitively understand the wisdom of not putting all eggs in one basket, but otherwise sensible adults just sort of forget this when it comes to online services. I don't expect everyone to be wise, but I vehemently disagree that it's "unfair" to point out that it is unwise.
It’s not enough to set up a NAS, you generally want something you want to share. If you used iCloud for this, congrats all your share links are gone forever and it’s not like there’s any backup of those.
Seems like a minor inconvenience on top of having lost access to your data yourself. They key difference here is that if you still had access to your own data, you could find some other way to share it, with no shortage of alternatives. With all eggs in Apple's basket it is of course only Apple that can provide that service, leaving you at their mercy.
Doesn’t sound like you eh?
No, it doesn't sound like me. It doesn't sound like my 80 year old uncle either. Understanding that your cloud backup server is not an alternative to having local copies of your files, but a safety measure in addition to that, is not rocket science. It's not beyond the grasp of an average person.
Your idea that in order to have redundant copy of 20 years of your digital life, you need to be a "systems engineer", set up and maintain a NAS, cronjobs, self-host keepass etc. sounds more like a inclination on your end to tinker with stuff like that for the sake of long-term convenience. I give you that it's less convenient to mind your own business than to let someone else do it for you unless you are technically inclined. That's how Google and Apple get people to make such bad decisions. But if you value "20 years of digital life" and 6 TB of data, maybe that slight inconvenience is worth it.
Regardless, the author isn't some computer illiterate schmuck, but a computer scientist, software developer and technical writer. Their problem is clearly an unhealthy level of trust in an amoral megacorporation, not a lack of a technical proficiency. He calls himself "effectively an evangelist", and it boggles the mind that it would not occur to him after putting it in those words that this isn't a normal relationship to have with an entity which is realistically incapable of caring about his existence.
Who are you writing this for? You’re not writing it for people like him - as you said, he’s clearly overinvested in the ecosystem and that’s much more of a trust problem than anything else. You’re...
Who are you writing this for?
You’re not writing it for people like him - as you said, he’s clearly overinvested in the ecosystem and that’s much more of a trust problem than anything else.
You’re not writing it for me or people like me; I’m feeling reasonably safe with a good amount of balance between control over my data and convenient trust towards a couple different corporations that could still give me a severe headache were they to block my access.
You’re also not writing it for the people who self host everything already, and who are already doing things “the proper way”.
I’m trying to put a modicum of reality checks in this conversation. Like, most people are given a phone and ways to work with that phone, they use the passwords app, they use the mail app, they use the browser, all of it is somewhat seamless and next thing you know they’re over invested in an ecosystem. This is the case for MOST PEOPLE. The argument that THIS guy should have known better is out of place because it doesn’t solve the root issue, which also affects those who are not “evangelists”. He just happens to be able to make noise, whereas Tina Churchgoing Neighbour just says “my phone suddenly stopped working and I lost everything”.
So tell me again why the “right” solution is to have computer-literate people become digital preppers? Isn’t there a deeper issue to work through there?
I'm replying to you, as you can already tell. You said that you 'don't think it's ever really fair to tell people "this is why you shouldn't put all your data in the trust of apple" without a...
Who are you writing this for?
I'm replying to you, as you can already tell. You said that you 'don't think it's ever really fair to tell people "this is why you shouldn't put all your data in the trust of apple" without a reasonable alternative to the question'. I responded to you both to argue that
it is fair regardless of whether I can present reasonable alternatives
that there are reasonable alternatives
that the author if anyone should have known better than to trust Apple with their data
Each of these points stand on their own.
You’re not writing it for me or people like me
No, I'm not responding to "people like you", but to you specifically. I struggle to interpret this as anything but a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters and further misrepresent the argument that I've already stated clearly. Please stay on track: "who I am writing this for" is irrelevant to the content and validity of my argument.
I’m trying to put a modicum of reality checks in this conversation.
Reality check: you shouldn't put your data in the trust of Apple, because stuff like this can happen. This is fair, because it's evidently true. It's true regardless of whether I can present alternatives, and regardless of whether you agree that the alternatives I present are available or immediately obvious to "MOST PEOPLE". It doesn't somehow become less true because some users may not have considered the implications of trusting Apple with all their data. Consequently, it doesn't become less fair to say it.
Nevertheless, I have presented simple alternatives (i.e. maintaining local copies of your important documents and not using Apple for all of a bunch of services they provide for which there is no shortage of alternatives), none of which require you to become a "digital prepper" in any sense I can reasonably interpret that term. I further argue that the author's ignorance can't be excused by general incompetence.
What's difficult for a novice user, if anything, is to consider the possibility of being locked out at all. WIthout having considered that, there are few incentives to use alternatives to Apple's walled garden. With that in mind, it's not only fair to say that you shouldn't put all your data in the trust of Apple, but helpful and constructive.
That isn't what you originally wrote. But sure, I agree that if you host literally all of your data with Apple's services and want to migrate or back up that data to a non-Apple solution then that...
The amount of self hosting needed to actually make up for what apple was providing to this person is not at all easily matched.
That isn't what you originally wrote.
But sure, I agree that if you host literally all of your data with Apple's services and want to migrate or back up that data to a non-Apple solution then that takes work. You need to manage files, passwords, authentication, email, and all the other stuff you mentioned.
That's not a full time job though. "Full time job" is just rhetorical nonsense. You said "self hosting is a full time job". That's what I responded to. I don't care about the rest of your made up arguments about access tokens or whatever.
I don’t know what crawled up your keyboard to make you so incredibly hostile but I don’t care for it. I’m speaking as someone who did self host a lot of stuff in the past and no longer does it...
I don’t know what crawled up your keyboard to make you so incredibly hostile but I don’t care for it. I’m speaking as someone who did self host a lot of stuff in the past and no longer does it because I now have a job that requires me to prioritise other things. It was fun, taught me a lot, and I can now reasonably say that I can be a systems engineer as well, since I’ve held that very job professionally.
So the arguments are not made up, they’re from experience. If you haven’t experienced them yet, good on you, but you’ll end up in five years writing an article saying something about how you lost your data or whatever, and in the HN comments people will ridicule you for doing all this without following best practices / being more knowledgeable / considering implications etc.
Do me a favor, make yourself a reminder, and ask me in five years how my experience with "backing up my data" is going (or however else you want to describe it). I look forward to demonstrating...
Do me a favor, make yourself a reminder, and ask me in five years how my experience with "backing up my data" is going (or however else you want to describe it). I look forward to demonstrating that all the problems you've had are in fact not universal.
I think there's two kinds of people here, people like me who have been managing their own backups since we were 12, and then people like OP who have likely never managed their own backups, relied...
I think there's two kinds of people here, people like me who have been managing their own backups since we were 12, and then people like OP who have likely never managed their own backups, relied entirely on cloud services for their entire professional lives and literally never had any reason to even worry about managing their own backups. 20 years ago was 2006.
The first type, me, and probably you, lost all our data at the ripe young age of some time in our teens and learned better practices from trial by fire.
The second set of people doesn't experience this until way, way, later, when the damage is well, this amount of damage.
It's your data you want to save, it is up to you to do it. As you can see on this example, even big tech corporation don't care about you or your data even if you stand behind them and spend money...
Put your data in a NAS? Good luck, self hosting is a full time job
It's your data you want to save, it is up to you to do it. As you can see on this example, even big tech corporation don't care about you or your data even if you stand behind them and spend money on their junk. You are nobody for them.
And this is why I run my own NAS with RAID and another one also with RAID on different physical location. And even with these measures I'm still a bit paranoid about losing the data. But if I do lose it, it would be MY fault and not because some automatic system decided that for me or because some support people don't have means to alter the result.
My data, my responsibility. If you value your data, you have it stored and backed up according to your own principle. And as you can see - using iCloud (or other such means) isn't the way. Some people run their own NAS, some have HDD in the drawer, some use USB flash sticks... To each their own. I picked my solution that I described here.
The problem is that it takes time, and every anti-corporate timesink you dive into means less time for all the other anti-corporate timesinks needed to avoid other corporate ratfucking.
It's your data you want to save, it is up to you to do it.
The problem is that it takes time, and every anti-corporate timesink you dive into means less time for all the other anti-corporate timesinks needed to avoid other corporate ratfucking.
I think a lot of people think it is more complex than it actually needs to be. I detailed some valid backup solutions here but the key takeway should be to just not have your data stored in one...
I think a lot of people think it is more complex than it actually needs to be. I detailed some valid backup solutions here but the key takeway should be to just not have your data stored in one location. If all of your data is stored in Apple's cloud, also storing it in another FANG cloud is a perfectly fine approach as well.
If one of them decided to apply their corporate ratfucking you still have your data in the other cloud and vice versa.
The only, real, limitation here is that it will cost more money. But, given the numbers cited in the post I feel like for the author the extra costs of having duplicated cloud services would have been worth it.
I feel like I have to add info based on your comment, especially the cost for the two cloud solution. My NAS is full desktop PC solution. It runs at 50W idle and maxes above 100W if I run it at...
I feel like I have to add info based on your comment, especially the cost for the two cloud solution.
My NAS is full desktop PC solution. It runs at 50W idle and maxes above 100W if I run it at full load.
My other NAS in another location runs mobile CPU on desktop board and does around 25W idle and under 50W full load.
Combined, accounted for actual average load and with cost of elecricity here both cost 200$ a year just to run them.
You can use more power efficient solutions to do your NAS, ie. RPi5 with 4xSATA HAT or some low power Intel board.
I just felt obligated to add this information which may not be apparent at first glance.
EDIT: For anyone who might be asking how the hell the NAS draws 50W idling - desktop CPU, 4 sticks of RAM, ATX board (many things that need power on it), three fans, three 3.5" 7200rpm drives, SATA SSD and dedicated graphics for on-the-fly re-encoding (for Jellyfin media server). I consider it a miracle it idles at just 50W.
GPU is actually pretty tame, even when it encodes, it sips just a few watts by itself. But i know what you meant with C-states. The problem would be the "modern CPU" itself... I use i5-4690. Yes,...
GPU is actually pretty tame, even when it encodes, it sips just a few watts by itself. But i know what you meant with C-states.
The problem would be the "modern CPU" itself... I use i5-4690. Yes, 10 years old CPU I got lying around doing nothing.
Still, the HDDs probably run at 5W each, give it another 5W for all the RAM, 5W for motherboard, 5W for GPU, 5W for CPU and we are at 35W already. And even though I have 80 Plus Gold PSU, it still is ineffective at this low range, so I would add 15℅ losses in that alone and you have another 5W.
It's not unreasonable, I would almost say modern CPU wouldn't do that much better. It would be much more powerful at the same electricity bill, but I don't really have need to buy it as this setup runs just fine and the investment wouldn't ever come back in any way.
Simply put: If you want your NAS to run low on power, don't use (once) powerful CPUs with full ATX board and dedicated GPU. Still 3x 7200rpm HDD would be the heaviest on power draw from all components used. And PSU would be another factor, as I have yet to find 200W PSU that does 80 Plus Gold - so the whole setup runs at some reasonable percentage of maximum load thus in the most effective range of the PSU.
I built my server in a few days including my own case. I set up the software aide in another few days. And since the it runs for around 2-3 years without that much of overhead from me. Phones in...
I built my server in a few days including my own case. I set up the software aide in another few days. And since the it runs for around 2-3 years without that much of overhead from me.
Phones in the family are set up to backup photos and videos on the server immediately
I occassionally run manual backup of the server to my other server.
If people can't find the time to backup their most precious data (gamoly.photos and videos in my case), they deserve to lose them. And backing up by using cloud services isn't actually backing it up, is it? I want to have my data in my hands.
I agree that doing anti-corporate things is timesink. But everyone of us must set the bar for themselves. I'm willing to put time into it.
The domain name is just a name. What you're describing is of course still fully centralized. So I don't see how it strikes a balance at all. Evidently, liability is also a problem whether you...
I think the best solution is to pay for a Google Workspace account to use with your own domain, which is what i do. It gives a good balance between centralization and liability.
The domain name is just a name. What you're describing is of course still fully centralized. So I don't see how it strikes a balance at all. Evidently, liability is also a problem whether you manage your own data or let some corporation do it for you.
I don't think it's ever really fair to tell people "this is why you shouldn't put all your data in the trust of apple" without a reasonable alternative to the question: "I have terabytes of life data to manage. This is impossible to handle it all by myself. What service will help me with this without turning this in a whole Project?"
How is it not fair? It is what it is; you either do the "whole Project" of buying e.g. a big mechanical disk and simply storing copies of your most important documents there (i.e. stuff that only requires very basic computer literacy), or you give yourself conditional access to "20 years of digital life" at the whims of the cloud ecosystem of some amoral megacorporation you have naively trusted with your life.
Solutions increase cost- yes. Functional solutions to problems are never free. But anybody who has 30k worth of Apple products didn't much care for price to begin with. They cared for convenience-...
Solutions increase cost- yes. Functional solutions to problems are never free. But anybody who has 30k worth of Apple products didn't much care for price to begin with. They cared for convenience- for the ability to offload responsibility.
It happens that human society is built in a way in which a failure to properly engage with aspects of it will negatively affect you. If I must care for politics because the alternative is having my life dictated to me by right-ring assholes, then everybody else can learn to take responsibility for their own data, if it is important to them.
I have so much sympathy for somebody in the position that this person is in, but that does not mean that I don't believe it to be somewhat a problem of their own making. Big corporations have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted.
If you are only going to use it in your local network and you have a half decent understanding of network security (eg you don’t trust shoddy iot appliances and have a basic firewall setup -...
Put your data in a NAS? Good luck, self hosting is a full time job
If you are only going to use it in your local network and you have a half decent understanding of network security (eg you don’t trust shoddy iot appliances and have a basic firewall setup - standard on pretty much every router), it really isn’t. A basic Linux box with Samba and whatever other basic file sharing daemon is pretty turnkey after you’ve set it up so long as your distro doesn’t push breaking updates (looking at you, Ubuntu).
I got a used two disk Synology NAS, threw a couple of 8TB drives in it, plugged the Ethernet into the router, and walked through a setup wizard basically. It was trivial to put it in a RAID-1...
I got a used two disk Synology NAS, threw a couple of 8TB drives in it, plugged the Ethernet into the router, and walked through a setup wizard basically. It was trivial to put it in a RAID-1 equivalent and end up with a shared volume prepped for TimeMachine. Now my Mac constantly backs files up to the NAS, for about as much effort as setting up a router or game console.
That doesn't help in the event of catastrophic corporate malfeasance locking you out of hardware, email, etc, but it at least is essentially for the (probably more likely) case of hardware failure causing a loss of projects or photos or such.
Never forget we have only two companies that can fuck up, ban you without recourse or explanation, and basically make it impossible to have a smartphone. (If only Apple's services division was as good as the sales support...they've been nothing but stellar with dealing with computers lost in the mail for me.)
For email I would like to point out that it is relatively straightforward these days to get your own domain and have mail hosted at a good provided like mailbox.org. Note that I said "relatively"...
For email I would like to point out that it is relatively straightforward these days to get your own domain and have mail hosted at a good provided like mailbox.org. Note that I said "relatively" as you do need to set up DNS entries for the domain, but if you are comfortable doing that I do feel that it is one of the biggest things you can do to move out of reach of big tech.
I mostly did when I realized how many of my online accounts are tied to my Gmail address I've had since 2005. Most services require access to the email account for password resets and changing the mail address tied to the account.
Yeah, that's part of what I did during my Google separation. Got a domain and use a mail service that wasn't google. The biggest risk is of course your domain registration lapsing or the registrar...
Yeah, that's part of what I did during my Google separation. Got a domain and use a mail service that wasn't google. The biggest risk is of course your domain registration lapsing or the registrar going under. I can do something about the first one, but not the second. Don't even know what happens in that event actually.
Edit: read on the ICANN site about registrar going out of business or suspended. Looks like it could be a pain, or it could be easy, it depends. It's definitely the weakest part of my step away from big tech, I think. And one I can't mitigate in advance.
I have domain registration setup to automatically renew and am using a fairly reputable registrar that has been around for many years. Of course, that is no guarantee that nothing ever happens....
I have domain registration setup to automatically renew and am using a fairly reputable registrar that has been around for many years. Of course, that is no guarantee that nothing ever happens. But generally speaking there are often signs a company is in trouble and transferring domains these days is really easy as it just requires a transfer token.
Overall though I feel like it is worth the risk compared to having all my eggs in one FANG basket.
Sure. I also have auto renew, it’s really only this darn thread that got me thinking about vulnerabilities in continuity of service, or risk to, my domain.
Sure. I also have auto renew, it’s really only this darn thread that got me thinking about vulnerabilities in continuity of service, or risk to, my domain.
The bigger risk in my experience is services not accepting custom domains or automatically flagging them as spam. There have been many businesses I just can't correspond with via email because...
The bigger risk in my experience is services not accepting custom domains or automatically flagging them as spam. There have been many businesses I just can't correspond with via email because they won't receive what I send, but my partner's gmail address gets to them just fine.
That is somewhat of a risk, but mostly comes down to using a good reputable mail hosting provider and having set up the proper DNS entries. So far I have been using mailbox for a few years now and...
That is somewhat of a risk, but mostly comes down to using a good reputable mail hosting provider and having set up the proper DNS entries.
So far I have been using mailbox for a few years now and a custom domain. In that time I haven't had a single issue with not receiving mail or mail not arriving on the other side.
I've used smaller-scale (reputable) email providers with and without custom domains for about 15 years now and it's been an ever-increasing problem. Several times a site or app wouldn't allow me...
I've used smaller-scale (reputable) email providers with and without custom domains for about 15 years now and it's been an ever-increasing problem. Several times a site or app wouldn't allow me to create an account without using a large provider's domain like gmail or outlook, particularly those relating to job-hunting, claiming my email address wasn't valid.
That’s a little disappointing to hear, because one of the reasons I finally bought a domain this year was because I was sick of websites saying the ‘+’ character makes my email address invalid. I...
Several times a site or app wouldn't allow me to create an account without using a large provider's domain like gmail or outlook, particularly those relating to job-hunting, claiming my email address wasn't valid.
That’s a little disappointing to hear, because one of the reasons I finally bought a domain this year was because I was sick of websites saying the ‘+’ character makes my email address invalid.
I heavily lean into “myname+service@gmail” format when I create a new account, both as a scam-protection measure (if this is a legitimate email from my bank then why was it sent to myname+petsupplies@gmail?) and also to see which service leaked/sold my email address to spammers/scammers.
I’m hoping that by having my own custom email domain, I can do the same one-email-alias-per-service system without being snagged by the ‘+’ character. If too many services don’t even allow my own domain then that’s going to be pretty disappointing.
For what it is worth, I personally haven't run into services out right refusing custom domains. I am having a hard time any service doing that (that I also trust to actually register for). But, I...
For what it is worth, I personally haven't run into services out right refusing custom domains. I am having a hard time any service doing that (that I also trust to actually register for). But, I am EU based and we aren't following the latest trends in enshittifaction I see in some other parts of the world.
And to be honest, I still use gmail as a backup. I personally consider not needing gmail for the majority of my mail a win.
Yeah okay, I can always hold onto my gmail and set up email forwarding if needed, that’s a good point. I’m in Australia, so businesses here are kinda half and half between sensible European style...
Yeah okay, I can always hold onto my gmail and set up email forwarding if needed, that’s a good point.
I’m in Australia, so businesses here are kinda half and half between sensible European style “you want a service, we offer it, let’s not try to make things complicated” on one side and the more American style “can we please harvest your entire digital identity to piss ads directly into your eyeballs, to opt out you need to access our unfindable privacy page at exactly 4:07am on the night of a full moon” on the other.
Ah, that is different from what I thought you were talking about. And to be honest, just shitty behaviour on the side of those services and not really to do with mail traffic itself being the...
Ah, that is different from what I thought you were talking about. And to be honest, just shitty behaviour on the side of those services and not really to do with mail traffic itself being the issue.
Of course, if you are job hunting and need to use those specific services that doesn't really matter. But, I'd also happily use my Gmail account as a backup in those instances.
People often tend to approach this as an "either or" type of deal. I just am happy to greatly reduce my dependency on Google services for things I consider critical.
I was talking about both. Other examples being emails to nurseries that didn't arrive when sent from my address (cc'd to my husband so I know they sent and should have been received), same for...
I was talking about both. Other examples being emails to nurseries that didn't arrive when sent from my address (cc'd to my husband so I know they sent and should have been received), same for multiple small companies (generally tradespeople) who are not technologically inclined nor motivated enough to give a shit about digging out my email or whitelisting my domain.
I don’t think it’s too much to expect a person to be able to add records to a domain. Most domain providers have a very easy interface to allow users to do this. Granted if they accidentally do it...
I don’t think it’s too much to expect a person to be able to add records to a domain. Most domain providers have a very easy interface to allow users to do this.
Granted if they accidentally do it wrong it’s not exactly guaranteed they will have good support to help them troubleshoot.
It's the doing it wrong part that makes it tricky. In principle it isn't all that difficult to edit records as it is just a few text fields for each entry. In practice it isn't always entirely...
It's the doing it wrong part that makes it tricky. In principle it isn't all that difficult to edit records as it is just a few text fields for each entry. In practice it isn't always entirely clear and having a bit of knowledge about DNS records is nice to have.
So I can understand it being somewhat daunting for people.
I tried to set up Samba on my NAS and I couldn't get it to work - I can't tell whether it's Samba breaking, the dolphin integration that's breaking, or the connection between the two that's...
A basic Linux box with Samba and whatever other basic file sharing daemon is pretty turnkey after you’ve set it up so long as your distro doesn’t push breaking updates (looking at you, Ubuntu).
I tried to set up Samba on my NAS and I couldn't get it to work - I can't tell whether it's Samba breaking, the dolphin integration that's breaking, or the connection between the two that's breaking. To be fair it might be easier if I didn't try to do it with Nix. I've been ignoring the thing since I moved and got stuck with a horribly misconfigured router from 2010 and I haven't switched on my NAS in a year or so.
Ironically I chose Nix because I wanted a Linux server that would be fairly turnkey (and very stable - I love the idea of Nix, and if I wait long enough for someone to write the documentation then it might work out well in practice, too).
To be fair Samba is complex to get set up, especially if your distro’s package doesn’t have “common sense” defaults set up. But that’s because SMB itself is a nightmare of options left over from...
To be fair Samba is complex to get set up, especially if your distro’s package doesn’t have “common sense” defaults set up. But that’s because SMB itself is a nightmare of options left over from darker times.
If a user doesn’t care about OS integration I’d suggest using SFTP with private key authentication instead. It’s much easier to set up and it’s more secure.
There are in between options. For example, you can put your data in a hosted nextcloud instance. Or, if you simply want to have a backup for someone relatively tech savvy get something like...
Put your data in a NAS? Good luck, self hosting is a full time job
There are in between options. For example, you can put your data in a hosted nextcloud instance. Or, if you simply want to have a backup for someone relatively tech savvy get something like Hetzner storage and backrest. Or if that is too much simply go for backblaze backup.
Heck, just put your storage in a secondary FANG provided cloud solution if all of the above still feels like it is too much. The important point is to not have all your data stored at a single place.
Synology, Hyper Backup to an S3-compatible destination. Automated to run once a day with incremental uploads. Can set backup retention period. It's a set-it-and-forget-it solution.
Synology, Hyper Backup to an S3-compatible destination. Automated to run once a day with incremental uploads. Can set backup retention period. It's a set-it-and-forget-it solution.
I don't see why having a local backup would be any trouble. I have a Pi hooked up to a 2tb external running rsync and it maintains 4 copies of my Active Project folder. Its set for 5min, 1hr, 24hr...
I don't see why having a local backup would be any trouble. I have a Pi hooked up to a 2tb external running rsync and it maintains 4 copies of my Active Project folder. Its set for 5min, 1hr, 24hr and 3 days.
And only the Active Folder is synchronized to a cloud service because I don't recall ever needing to reference a 4 year old file out of the blue. If I'm referencing old projects, I'll just copy it to active and it's everywhere I need it.
Bulk storage is an off the shelf NAS running TrueNAS with 8tb that's mirrored. Partial sync every midnight and full backup on Saturday night. Runs Jellyfin, Calibre, Samba and immich services if anyone at home needs to access something from the Library.
I do my backups very basically. 8tb storage drive in my PC, another external drive connected via USB that backs up every night. That same 8tb is just a network share that I can connect to with any...
I do my backups very basically. 8tb storage drive in my PC, another external drive connected via USB that backs up every night. That same 8tb is just a network share that I can connect to with any of my other devices. Super simple and maybe not super robust, but it does the job and I'm not worried about data loss.
Here are two common pieces of tech wisdom: You should have backups of your data. You should use a password manager. Consider the password manager advice. When I tell someone that they should use a...
Here are two common pieces of tech wisdom:
You should have backups of your data.
You should use a password manager.
Consider the password manager advice. When I tell someone that they should use a password manager, I don't mean that they should use keepass with a self-hosted gitlab instance. I mean they should use any reputable password manager they can find -- even if it's the one built-in to their phone or browser. Yes, that means my mom could lose access to her passwords if she becomes locked-out of her Apple account. But that risk is so much smaller than all of her accounts being compromised by reusing a password that was pwned a decade ago.
Similarly, when I advise someone to backup their data, I mean they should use anything that works for them. Yes, there is still a risk of being locked-out of their account, but the more likely threat is a hard drive failure or a stolen device.
So sure, the OP is more technically inclined than most and probably could have written some automated backups (my mom, in contrast, definitely could not have). But they were adhering to good advice; they just got screwed by an improbable edge case.
I agree that having any backup is better than no backup. Certainly if the data is also stored locally. But, the latter often isn't the case and even there I do think you can mitigate the risk even...
I agree that having any backup is better than no backup. Certainly if the data is also stored locally.
But, the latter often isn't the case and even there I do think you can mitigate the risk even if you aren't as technically inclined. For example, in other places in this thread I advocated for duplicating your data by using two cloud services.
Going a step further, for essential things like mail and password managers I strongly suggest people using a different service from the one that is their main data storage. Certainly for password managers there are good reputable choices in the form of bitwarden, 1password, etc. They aren't quite as easy as a built in password manager, but once setup they are not difficult to use either.
Mail can be a bit more tricky if you are thinking custom domains, but that isn't really needed if you just want to separate concerns. For example, if all you data is in icloud use Gmail for mail. If all your data is in Google drive consider creating a mail on Microsofts side of things.
To reshare my setup which, I strongly believe strikes a fantastic balance between convenience, cost and ownership: 1Password -- I love em and pay for them through my work, but I believe bitwarden...
To reshare my setup which, I strongly believe strikes a fantastic balance between convenience, cost and ownership:
1Password -- I love em and pay for them through my work, but I believe bitwarden is more accessible at a lower price point. Regardless, I am not using google/apple for password management. And yeah, having this is SUCH a massive gain of time, and accessible enough -- I've set it up for my mom and my girlfriend.
I pay 15 euros / yr for a domain name matching my last name (a .ch purchased at netim.com). I've had this domain for 15 something years now, I can safely share it at the family level, and fully feel like I own it. My email hasn't changed in those 15 years; it has migrated a few times but I've never had to update it anywhere. This is important. Only downside of a .ch domain is it cannot be prepaid for more than 1 year.
I pay for Google Workspace to use that custom domain. This also gives me access to Google support; including billing support if I ever get locked out.
My work also uses Google Workspace on separate domains/accounts. This kind of "over-invests" me in Google but it actually creates a layer of redundancy as I can very quickly migrate data between google accounts if I ever need to, and I can access support through more than one account.
I use an iPhone, but all the icloud crap is turned off and I've paired it with my Google account instead. If there were a high quality open source android-based phone I'd likely be using that instead.
My main computer runs arch linux and main laptop runs w11/wsl.
I set up Google Takeout once a year to dump everything into dropbox.
Setup difficulty ★★☆☆
Maintenance difficulty ★☆☆☆
Reliability ★★★★
Control ★★★☆
Data sovereignty ★★☆☆
Cost / year ★★☆☆
In this thread, I’ve seen “Google Takeout” referenced a few times — can you give me an indication of your usage of Google services, which services you actually use the Takeout for, and the end of...
In this thread, I’ve seen “Google Takeout” referenced a few times — can you give me an indication of your usage of Google services, which services you actually use the Takeout for, and the end of year file size that you have to work with once it’s arrived?
Okay fantastic! Last year I already moved all my photos away from google, so I don’t even have that as a consideration anymore. But your benchmark tells me that my barely-used 2TB external drive...
Okay fantastic! Last year I already moved all my photos away from google, so I don’t even have that as a consideration anymore. But your benchmark tells me that my barely-used 2TB external drive is easily enough to hold onto everything well into the future. Thank you!
Oh yeah absolutely, I'm a pretty active user. Note that I don't backup my Google Drive via takeout so this & photos will be the two biggest ones, everything else will be tiny.
Oh yeah absolutely, I'm a pretty active user. Note that I don't backup my Google Drive via takeout so this & photos will be the two biggest ones, everything else will be tiny.
Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working. Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves; I asked if that means Apple’s supply chain of Blackhawk Network, InComm, and other gift card vendors is insecure, and he was unwilling to comment. I’ll post a more substantive update soon!
I admire the guy for wanting to get to the root of the problem but maybe just take the win and don't go poking the bear right now my dude.
Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves; I asked if that means Apple’s supply chain of Blackhawk Network, InComm, and other gift card vendors is insecure, and he was unwilling to comment.
I admire the guy for wanting to get to the root of the problem but maybe just take the win and don't go poking the bear right now my dude.
One RAID assembly for music, one for video one for retro games. 3TB drives, all connected to an always on security camera PC. I'd love to say that it's something everybody should do, but when 80%...
One RAID assembly for music, one for video one for retro games. 3TB drives, all connected to an always on security camera PC.
I'd love to say that it's something everybody should do, but when 80% of those I talk to don't know what a Western Digital is, how to replace a hard drive (or what it is) and what it takes connect machines on the same network, and have no hope.
Simple UIs, folderless, app-based OS experiences and subscription plans make it impossible for Joe somebody to get into it.
I have everything synced to local NAS with point in time local snapshots and encrypted replication to an offsite S3-compatible bucket, and I still worry about losing the things that I can't...
I have everything synced to local NAS with point in time local snapshots and encrypted replication to an offsite S3-compatible bucket, and I still worry about losing the things that I can't properly secure for myself because they're account based and/or infested with DRM.
Things like Apple IDs, Google accounts, Steam libraries, are easily up there with credit cards and government documents in terms of cost and importance, but if something goes wrong there's a good chance you'll end up talking to a wall.
Oh, absolutely. Support for products and services is terrible today, and has been since before COVID. I used to have misgivings about piracy and buying used, but frankly, it's all that I do now....
Oh, absolutely. Support for products and services is terrible today, and has been since before COVID.
I used to have misgivings about piracy and buying used, but frankly, it's all that I do now. Some outfits deserve and receive my money, but if your market cap is large enough, you won't miss me.
I've heard similar woes from people purchasing gift cards or similar for Nintendo and Steam services, which is arguably even worse. At least for all the data on Apple devices, you /could/ back it...
I've heard similar woes from people purchasing gift cards or similar for Nintendo and Steam services, which is arguably even worse.
At least for all the data on Apple devices, you /could/ back it up yourself (I use a VPS as my primary storage location, then I back that up to two different backup services online, and also to my home NAS, which is itself backed up).
With these other platforms though, if your account is gone, it's gone. Thousands in purchases, and you can't even store these things locally. It's so so risky buying credit or codes outside of the stores own digital storefront.
Mind-boggling. I also have my email on iCloud (no, my home internet's not reliable enough to self-host and I already pay for iCloud+) so I'm in even deeper. I really should be backing up to...
Mind-boggling. I also have my email on iCloud (no, my home internet's not reliable enough to self-host and I already pay for iCloud+) so I'm in even deeper. I really should be backing up to backblaze or something because this is insane.
If you want super cheap but good email service and don't want to self-host, Purelymail's standard pricing is $10/year. They also offer an "advanced pricing" scheme that's based on your actual...
If you want super cheap but good email service and don't want to self-host, Purelymail's standard pricing is $10/year. They also offer an "advanced pricing" scheme that's based on your actual usage. Depending on how much (or I guess how little) you use email, you could end up paying something like $3/year.
I was wondering how to mitigate this risk while staying in the Apple ecosystem. Looks like you can back up an iPhone or iPad to your Mac and then use Time Machine to backup your Mac? Assuming...
I was wondering how to mitigate this risk while staying in the Apple ecosystem. Looks like you can back up an iPhone or iPad to your Mac and then use Time Machine to backup your Mac? Assuming sufficient disk space and you don't use iCloud to "optimize" disk space on your Mac.
It's a little clunky, but better than Google Takeout.
Is it? I'm not sure how having to use a proprietary backup tool on a computer to back up daya on your phone is better than just downloading a single archive with all your data in it.
It's a little clunky, but better than Google Takeout
Is it? I'm not sure how having to use a proprietary backup tool on a computer to back up daya on your phone is better than just downloading a single archive with all your data in it.
Making a backup isn’t enough. You also need to restore it. It’s my impression that restoring data from Time Machine should mostly just work, allowing you to use the same devices and software as...
Making a backup isn’t enough. You also need to restore it. It’s my impression that restoring data from Time Machine should mostly just work, allowing you to use the same devices and software as before. With Google Takeout, can you even restore back to a Google account at all? It seems like you’re stuck doing a clumsy migration to something else.
I actually need to deal with my iCloud drive... I've been storing a bunch of photos there that I haven't looked at in years and WON'T look at for years to come. I'm paying 13 CAD a month for this...
I actually need to deal with my iCloud drive... I've been storing a bunch of photos there that I haven't looked at in years and WON'T look at for years to come. I'm paying 13 CAD a month for this BS and I've been meaning to sort it out for a few years now.
4tb ironwolf HDD ordered and download link requested via privacy.apple.com
There's something that doesn't add up here and I don't really understand why people haven't cottoned onto it. Why on earth would you go buy a $500 gift card in a store to use on your own account?...
There's something that doesn't add up here and I don't really understand why people haven't cottoned onto it. Why on earth would you go buy a $500 gift card in a store to use on your own account? They're not discounted in retail outlets typically and I fail to see how it's easier/more convenient than just using your payment information to pay your subscription costs.
There's also the fact that it's fairly common knowledge that these days gift cards are a huge vector for fraud, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole even to give to friends and family, let alone bafflingly use them on my own account as a proxy for my own money?
I don't like to call someone a liar but to me it seems like something might not be above board with this story.
It's pretty common for credit cards to do store-specific offers: "double points when you use your card at Best Buy this Christmas", or "5% back when you spend over $250 at Walmart before the...
Why on earth would you go buy a $500 gift card in a store to use on your own account?
It's pretty common for credit cards to do store-specific offers: "double points when you use your card at Best Buy this Christmas", or "5% back when you spend over $250 at Walmart before the 31st", or whatever. I'd absolutely take advantage of that kind of offer - and probably get a little dopamine hit too for "winning" - if I knew I was going to be spending a decent chunk of money on whatever service anyway. The US mint literally had to stop selling coins at face value on their website because people would buy a ton of them for the points and then deposit them straight back into the bank!
I also wouldn't personally have been worried about the fraud aspect, even knowing how sketchy gift cards can be: if I had a receipt and card transaction record from a major, authorised retailer I'd expect my worst case scenario to be the irritation of having the gift card balance bounce and having to do a chargeback against the retailer if they somehow messed up and refused to refund it. For all the possible fuckery I would anticipate, I wouldn't expect to be held responsible for fraud if I had the documents to prove I'd done everything right - and I especially wouldn't expect to be held responsible in a way that costs me far more in consequential damages than just losing the original $500.
Because it doesn't really matter, at least not in the way it is being discussed here. If you look at the discussion you can see that most people aren't really siding with the author other than...
and I don't really understand why people haven't cottoned onto it.
Because it doesn't really matter, at least not in the way it is being discussed here. If you look at the discussion you can see that most people aren't really siding with the author other than generic "yikes" type comments. What is being discussed is the fact that if you have all your data stored in one place outside of your control that it is a liability.
Maybe the author did more than they are letting on, maybe they didn't. Fact of the matter is that they put all their data eggs in one basket and had that basket taken away from them. Every now and then you hear similar stories from people having used Microsofts cloud offerings, Googles cloud offerings, etc. Also in those cases we don't know if more has been going on. What we do know is that these companies sometimes lock people out and what is also without question is that it is exceedingly difficult to reach anyone within those companies for any type of sane support if something is happening.
In that context it also makes sense that people focus more the type of discussion that focusses on keeping your data safe from such eventualities.
idk, I think it is relevant. If you've got all your eggs in one basket maybe it's smart to not do things that look extremely fishy to the owner of your basket? I'm a selfhoster myself but I...
idk, I think it is relevant. If you've got all your eggs in one basket maybe it's smart to not do things that look extremely fishy to the owner of your basket?
I'm a selfhoster myself but I understand that that isn't necessarily feasible for everyone. Even if this person spread their data across various services, if they're doing weird stuff that's flagging them for fraud with one service they'd probably do it with all the others as well.
Okay, we have no moved from "they might have done more than they let on" to you now assuming they must have done something fishy. I might be reading it wrong, I think it is not a good mindset in...
Okay, we have no moved from "they might have done more than they let on" to you now assuming they must have done something fishy. I might be reading it wrong, I think it is not a good mindset in general, but it also still isn't all that relevant.
If you've got all your eggs in one basket maybe it's smart to not do things that look extremely fishy to the owner of your basket?
Like buying gift cards the owner of the baskets offers themselves for sale in stores? To you that seems like something people shouldn't do, based on knowledge you already have. Personally I can come up with a few benign (sometimes silly) reasons why someone would top up their account like this, none of them with any malicious intend.
Even if I agreed it is potentially fishy, doing something that looks fishy is not the same as doing something rule breaking.
Which, brings me back to this all being not all that relevant. You seem to agree that companies will lock you out of accounts based on vibes. Which also means that nobody should put their eggs in one basket, regardless of them doing fishy stuff or not.
In the UK I've heard of stores with hanging cards being targetted for gift card fraud, where the cards are taken (stolen), then details read from the cards before being placed back on the card...
In the UK I've heard of stores with hanging cards being targetted for gift card fraud, where the cards are taken (stolen), then details read from the cards before being placed back on the card hangers in the shop. Then when the cards are purchased by buyers in store, the thieves get access to those funds.
That's not the only way that in store gift cards can be compromised either, and I'd never blame a victim for this, it's all on the thieves. Any fallout on people's accounts due to this should be properly and sensitively handled by the tech companies, which is by far the bigger part of the problem.
I’ve had an Apple account since the very early iTunes days, I believe since around 2005 or so, and my family’s financial situation growing up trained me to never trust credit cards or have...
I’ve had an Apple account since the very early iTunes days, I believe since around 2005 or so, and my family’s financial situation growing up trained me to never trust credit cards or have services linked to my actual bank account. I’ve been buying those $20 and $50 “iTunes gift cards” as the only way to buy apps or in-app purchases for literally decades. I think of it somewhat like having my bank account airgapped from my spending, as a way to help mitigate against impulse spending.
Last year, when I finally decided to upgrade my phone, my brother had credit card bonuses which needed him to spend a certain amount within some time limit, so he bought Apple gift cards up to the amount that my phone cost, since I was making the purchase anyway and didn’t care what method of payment.
There’s nothing illegitimate about buying that much Apple credit, especially for someone who already has invested into the ecosystem. I could easily imagine someone spending that credit over a few years on subscriptions for whichever professional macOS or iPad software they needed, so why not get a bunch of it all at once?
I really wish the author hadn't mentioned the bit about the 6TB of data! The whole situation is awful, but that part distracts from the real point - at least among the kind of audience who is going to care about this at all.
Leaving your only copy of whatever data in the hands of a corporation is like leaving a backpack on the seat of a parked car: you should be able to assume it's safe, you're not the one who bears the fault if something does happen to it, but we ultimately do live in a world where thieves break car windows and corporations lose/lock away your data. The victim isn't at fault, but the fact they could probably have foreseen and mitigated the issue ends up taking focus in the conversation.
Skip that part - not in a misleading way, just in a hypothetical world where they don't care about the lost data, or where they did have a backup on a USB drive - and the story is still just as bad. They've lost access to their developer account - something that's outright necessary for their job specifically because of Apple's walled garden - and they're being given no recourse to follow up. They've lost access to iMessage, which could well have been a primary means of communication. They've lost significant workflow and UX features on their devices; they may even be unable to sell or service the hardware, since it'll be linked to an account that they can no longer access and release it from.
They're stuck in this Kafka-meets-Neal-Stephenson situation through no fault of their own, with no recourse except signal boosting the story enough that it catches the eye of someone with the power to make real human decisions rather than just following a generic script, and the most serious consequences were unavoidable*. All because companies have decided that even deflecting 99% of customer service requests with a generic, semi-automated non-answer wasn't enough: the cost of an escalation team to make actual judgment calls in that remaining 1% apparently isn't worth it either, so anything that falls outside the lines like this just goes into an eternal, unsolvable loop.
This isn't inevitable. This isn't necessary. This isn't something that a person living a normal life can reasonably protect themselves from. And this is exactly what laws and regulations are supposed to be created for: providing recourse to people harmed through no fault of their own, and pre-emptively limiting the likely harm from entities that concentrate significant power over communications, finance, business, employment, and so on.
*OK, the author could have chosen not to work on Apple software at all, 15 years earlier into their career. And convinced all of their family, friends, and professional contacts to use a different communication method. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that forcing Apple to have a regulated process to resolve issues like this is probably the more reasonable ask.
Regulations won't even be discussed unless Apple looses everyone's data.
In 2007 the government waited until they literally tanked the entire world economy to do anything, and even then they didn't do much. Regulations don't protect the people, regulations protect the government. The government won't do shit until they themselves are at risk.
On the one hand- this sucks.
On the other.. This is why you don't trust a single corporation (derogatory) to hold all of your data. You're at their mercy if they decide, using their obscure and convoluted rulesets, that you are now persona non grata. Nobody is big enough to not eventually be on the receiving end of their fickle and immoral behaviour.
As an aside, how on earth do you have 30 THOUSAND dollars worth of hardware and not a combined 6TB across it?? A 22TB hard drive can be bought for a couple of hundred dollars if you get recertified drives.
You're not wrong… but after 20+ years in tech, I've no idea what the serious alternative is.
Put your data in a NAS? Good luck, self hosting is a full time job
Do regular local backups? Okay, at best you're saving some things, but the inconvenience if something happens is still massive. Also, good luck, cause not all your data is easy to back up. Can you do it programmatically?
Deduplicate your data across Google, Apple & more? Congrats, now you're trusting even more corpos with your data and who knows what they're all doing with them. If anything, you're adding risk, not removing it.
Any & all solutions increase costs, burden, and often
I think the best solution is to pay for a Google Workspace account to use with your own domain, which is what i do. It gives a good balance between centralization and liability.
I don't think it's ever really fair to tell people "this is why you shouldn't put all your data in the trust of apple" without a reasonable alternative to the question: "I have terabytes of life data to manage. This is impossible to handle it all by myself. What service will help me with this without turning this in a whole Project?"
It's incredibly easy to buy a hard drive for cold storage and just copy all your stuff onto it in one go. It's one thing to set up regular backups with redundancy and network accessibility, but if you just need to make sure your photos from 2019 aren't going to be lost forever due to corporate fuckery, simply copying them onto a drive and putting it in a drawer somewhere is enough for most people. In the linked article they're specifically talking about 6TB of family photos, which is a frankly trivial thing to back up if you have 6TB of HDD storage available (and if they can afford AUD$30,000 work of Apple devices, they can afford to drop a few hundred on drive space).
You and everyone else is responding to me like the guy actually just lost some photos. This is clearly not the case.
The amount of self hosting needed to actually make up for what apple was providing to this person is not at all easily matched. @akir @hungariantoast @text_garden @gary @slomomonday
Yeah it’s easy to back up photos and email once. It’s not TERRIBLY difficult to set up a cronjob to do it regularly (though you won’t know if that one stops working because some access token expired and you didn’t set up lifecycle alerts … oops my backups stopped three years ago guess I’m fucked).
But then you still don’t have access to your damn email address anymore do you? Okay, so you have to switch to an email on your own domain. Then you find out that you used “sign in with apple” at some point and you’re fucked on that front so guess you just lost those accounts forever, oh well.
We’re just at photos and emails here and there’s a dozen ways it can go wrong already. And I know you guys have enough knowledge to know we’re not going to pretend it’s a good idea to self host the actual email servers.
What about apple’s password manager? Gonna have to put this somewhere else too. I use 1Password which does local backups and is resilient to 1P being a bad actor — Apple doesn’t, to my knowledge, implement that. And 1P isn’t self hostable, so… keepass with syncing? I’ve done that before. It’s annoying as hell. But whatever, it’s just syncing to your drive…
Shit, right, the “drive”. It’s not enough to set up a NAS, you generally want something you want to share. If you used iCloud for this, congrats all your share links are gone forever and it’s not like there’s any backup of those.
So you used nextcloud for this because you know better than that. When you did all this setup three years ago you tried to install the version provided by your synology only to find it hadn’t been updated this century and you did a custom install. Of course you never updated this since then, completely missing there was a major vulnerability to update for, so now in good conscience you check and oops … people uploaded illegal porn to your drive and now the police is at your door Just Asking Questions. Not to mention that access wasn’t configured quite correctly by default so your private files were visible to everyone who knew how to access them.
Doesn’t sound like you eh? You know better. You set up vulnerability alerts, auto updates and what the hell, you even know enough to set up a deadmanswitch alerting system for when these stop working.
Well congratulations then, because you’re a systems engineer. Most people can’t do this stuff.
You ask why people seem to take a hostile tone, but I feel like you did set the tone here. Just pointing it out.
Also, like I pointed out elsewhere, there are plenty of in between solutions. Most of which can be used as reasonable assurance you will not be locked out of data without having to be a system engineer. Mitigating the risks of being locked out doesn't mean you need to fully self host ALL THE THINGS yourself. This seems to be the result of you yourself moving the goalpost entirely in that direction. And to be completely honest, I am not sure why?
If you are really not sure what I mean, here are some examples of you taking it to one extreme spectrum.
Email hosting by a variety of well established hosting providers is a thing. This ranges from extremely easy by using their domain to slightly more complex and coupling your own domain. Which involves setting a few DNS entries once using instructions from the mail provider.
Again, no need to self host. You already have local backups by using 1Password. Risk mitigated, you have provided the solution yourself.
If someone takes care to have backups of important things elsewhere, they can still use most things Apple during daily use. Those links you shared being gone does suck, I agree. But the data behind those links will still be around. The original comment you replied to basically suggested just having a local copy of all that data. They didn't even suggest that it needs to be a NAS or even accessible over the internet.
This is an oddly specific, somewhat fear mongering hypothetical. Unless this is an example from personal experience, in which case I feel for you. I agree that fully self hosting critical things is a pain, even more so if you want them to be accessible from the internet. Which I generally advocate against with anyway. But this also comes back to what I already said, you can have both a local backup (potentially on a NAS if you like) and use iCloud.
Regardless of where you are sharing your files from, you still want a backup anyway. Like... backups are a good idea. To be frank, you seem angry at the idea of setting up backups in the first place.
Sure, of course. I don't want to make it sound like it's a bad idea to do any of this stuff, and there's plenty that I think people should just do.
To give you an example, you can automate Google Takeout with just a few clicks and it's pretty accessible even to non-tech-savvy people. You choose what services you care about, you choose frequency and where it gets saved, and you choose the format. It's super super neat. I have no idea if Apple has anything remotely close to this, but it's one reason why I prefer the Google ecosystem.
What I'm fervently against is the "the guy should just have done X" mindset. Yeah, he should have... but very few "common mortals" know about the risks tied to being on a single provider. Even fewer know about the simple solutions such as Takeout. How will you react when this happens to your grandma? Because if it's any different to how the reactions now, then what's the point? Pointing to some poor sod nelson-style "HAW-HAW, you trusted Apple!"?
That's fair. Though I don't think most people were responding from a place of schadenfreude to be honest but rather a desire to make other people aware that you should have backups combined with various ways to achieve it.
And to be honest, the author of the blog post "should" have known better. The fact that they and many other people don't is all the more reason to have discussions about it as much as possible. Even more reason to talk about alternatives, ways to mitigate the risks, etc.
Some people, in that process, suggest solutions that are not for most people. Other people make reasonable suggestions. Like, for example, having a local copy of a bunch of your data. And yes, not all data can always easily be covered. But, and I can't keep stressing this enough, having some of your data backed up is better than having none of your data backed up.
I am still not sure where the hyper focus on self hosted solutions came from. That, to me, seems a distraction from the fact that it is actually fairly accessible to get the basics right for a lot of people's data.
No, this misrepresentation of my argument, which doesn't mention photos at all. It's immaterial to my argument whether the data is photos or anything else. 6 TB of data is 6 TB of data, whatever its content and wherever you keep it. A 6 TB platter disk costs < $300.
You're overthinking it. Copying files is basic computer literacy. Doing it automatically is a minor convenience on top of that. Doing it using a globally accessible network service is another inconvenience on top of that. If for a lack of technical know-how you have to pick either access to "20 years of digital life" or slighly more convenient means of copying files, what is the wise choice?
Why not? I don't see how trying to redeem a gift card for buying music and software should render my email account inaccessible. Then again, my email provider is an email provider, not a massively integrated everything-service.
Don't use it? Why should your phone manufacturer be your OS developer, your cloud backup provider, your email provider, your software store, your music store, your file sharing application, your software publisher, your authentication provider and the arbiter of whether you have access to your passwords?
It's an idiotic concept. Even children intuitively understand the wisdom of not putting all eggs in one basket, but otherwise sensible adults just sort of forget this when it comes to online services. I don't expect everyone to be wise, but I vehemently disagree that it's "unfair" to point out that it is unwise.
Seems like a minor inconvenience on top of having lost access to your data yourself. They key difference here is that if you still had access to your own data, you could find some other way to share it, with no shortage of alternatives. With all eggs in Apple's basket it is of course only Apple that can provide that service, leaving you at their mercy.
No, it doesn't sound like me. It doesn't sound like my 80 year old uncle either. Understanding that your cloud backup server is not an alternative to having local copies of your files, but a safety measure in addition to that, is not rocket science. It's not beyond the grasp of an average person.
Your idea that in order to have redundant copy of 20 years of your digital life, you need to be a "systems engineer", set up and maintain a NAS, cronjobs, self-host keepass etc. sounds more like a inclination on your end to tinker with stuff like that for the sake of long-term convenience. I give you that it's less convenient to mind your own business than to let someone else do it for you unless you are technically inclined. That's how Google and Apple get people to make such bad decisions. But if you value "20 years of digital life" and 6 TB of data, maybe that slight inconvenience is worth it.
Regardless, the author isn't some computer illiterate schmuck, but a computer scientist, software developer and technical writer. Their problem is clearly an unhealthy level of trust in an amoral megacorporation, not a lack of a technical proficiency. He calls himself "effectively an evangelist", and it boggles the mind that it would not occur to him after putting it in those words that this isn't a normal relationship to have with an entity which is realistically incapable of caring about his existence.
Who are you writing this for?
You’re not writing it for people like him - as you said, he’s clearly overinvested in the ecosystem and that’s much more of a trust problem than anything else.
You’re not writing it for me or people like me; I’m feeling reasonably safe with a good amount of balance between control over my data and convenient trust towards a couple different corporations that could still give me a severe headache were they to block my access.
You’re also not writing it for the people who self host everything already, and who are already doing things “the proper way”.
I’m trying to put a modicum of reality checks in this conversation. Like, most people are given a phone and ways to work with that phone, they use the passwords app, they use the mail app, they use the browser, all of it is somewhat seamless and next thing you know they’re over invested in an ecosystem. This is the case for MOST PEOPLE. The argument that THIS guy should have known better is out of place because it doesn’t solve the root issue, which also affects those who are not “evangelists”. He just happens to be able to make noise, whereas Tina Churchgoing Neighbour just says “my phone suddenly stopped working and I lost everything”.
So tell me again why the “right” solution is to have computer-literate people become digital preppers? Isn’t there a deeper issue to work through there?
I'm replying to you, as you can already tell. You said that you 'don't think it's ever really fair to tell people "this is why you shouldn't put all your data in the trust of apple" without a reasonable alternative to the question'. I responded to you both to argue that
Each of these points stand on their own.
No, I'm not responding to "people like you", but to you specifically. I struggle to interpret this as anything but a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters and further misrepresent the argument that I've already stated clearly. Please stay on track: "who I am writing this for" is irrelevant to the content and validity of my argument.
Reality check: you shouldn't put your data in the trust of Apple, because stuff like this can happen. This is fair, because it's evidently true. It's true regardless of whether I can present alternatives, and regardless of whether you agree that the alternatives I present are available or immediately obvious to "MOST PEOPLE". It doesn't somehow become less true because some users may not have considered the implications of trusting Apple with all their data. Consequently, it doesn't become less fair to say it.
Nevertheless, I have presented simple alternatives (i.e. maintaining local copies of your important documents and not using Apple for all of a bunch of services they provide for which there is no shortage of alternatives), none of which require you to become a "digital prepper" in any sense I can reasonably interpret that term. I further argue that the author's ignorance can't be excused by general incompetence.
What's difficult for a novice user, if anything, is to consider the possibility of being locked out at all. WIthout having considered that, there are few incentives to use alternatives to Apple's walled garden. With that in mind, it's not only fair to say that you shouldn't put all your data in the trust of Apple, but helpful and constructive.
That isn't what you originally wrote.
But sure, I agree that if you host literally all of your data with Apple's services and want to migrate or back up that data to a non-Apple solution then that takes work. You need to manage files, passwords, authentication, email, and all the other stuff you mentioned.
That's not a full time job though. "Full time job" is just rhetorical nonsense. You said "self hosting is a full time job". That's what I responded to. I don't care about the rest of your made up arguments about access tokens or whatever.
I don’t know what crawled up your keyboard to make you so incredibly hostile but I don’t care for it. I’m speaking as someone who did self host a lot of stuff in the past and no longer does it because I now have a job that requires me to prioritise other things. It was fun, taught me a lot, and I can now reasonably say that I can be a systems engineer as well, since I’ve held that very job professionally.
So the arguments are not made up, they’re from experience. If you haven’t experienced them yet, good on you, but you’ll end up in five years writing an article saying something about how you lost your data or whatever, and in the HN comments people will ridicule you for doing all this without following best practices / being more knowledgeable / considering implications etc.
Be that guy, I don’t care 🙃
Do me a favor, make yourself a reminder, and ask me in five years how my experience with "backing up my data" is going (or however else you want to describe it). I look forward to demonstrating that all the problems you've had are in fact not universal.
I think there's two kinds of people here, people like me who have been managing their own backups since we were 12, and then people like OP who have likely never managed their own backups, relied entirely on cloud services for their entire professional lives and literally never had any reason to even worry about managing their own backups. 20 years ago was 2006.
The first type, me, and probably you, lost all our data at the ripe young age of some time in our teens and learned better practices from trial by fire.
The second set of people doesn't experience this until way, way, later, when the damage is well, this amount of damage.
It's like viruses/diseases
Catch them young and will heal and have immunity for life. Catch them old nad it'll be a medical disaster.
It's your data you want to save, it is up to you to do it. As you can see on this example, even big tech corporation don't care about you or your data even if you stand behind them and spend money on their junk. You are nobody for them.
And this is why I run my own NAS with RAID and another one also with RAID on different physical location. And even with these measures I'm still a bit paranoid about losing the data. But if I do lose it, it would be MY fault and not because some automatic system decided that for me or because some support people don't have means to alter the result.
My data, my responsibility. If you value your data, you have it stored and backed up according to your own principle. And as you can see - using iCloud (or other such means) isn't the way. Some people run their own NAS, some have HDD in the drawer, some use USB flash sticks... To each their own. I picked my solution that I described here.
The problem is that it takes time, and every anti-corporate timesink you dive into means less time for all the other anti-corporate timesinks needed to avoid other corporate ratfucking.
I think a lot of people think it is more complex than it actually needs to be. I detailed some valid backup solutions here but the key takeway should be to just not have your data stored in one location. If all of your data is stored in Apple's cloud, also storing it in another FANG cloud is a perfectly fine approach as well.
If one of them decided to apply their corporate ratfucking you still have your data in the other cloud and vice versa.
The only, real, limitation here is that it will cost more money. But, given the numbers cited in the post I feel like for the author the extra costs of having duplicated cloud services would have been worth it.
I feel like I have to add info based on your comment, especially the cost for the two cloud solution.
My NAS is full desktop PC solution. It runs at 50W idle and maxes above 100W if I run it at full load.
My other NAS in another location runs mobile CPU on desktop board and does around 25W idle and under 50W full load.
Combined, accounted for actual average load and with cost of elecricity here both cost 200$ a year just to run them.
You can use more power efficient solutions to do your NAS, ie. RPi5 with 4xSATA HAT or some low power Intel board.
I just felt obligated to add this information which may not be apparent at first glance.
EDIT: For anyone who might be asking how the hell the NAS draws 50W idling - desktop CPU, 4 sticks of RAM, ATX board (many things that need power on it), three fans, three 3.5" 7200rpm drives, SATA SSD and dedicated graphics for on-the-fly re-encoding (for Jellyfin media server). I consider it a miracle it idles at just 50W.
50w still sounds a little high for that setup with any decently modern CPU. Have you checked that the GPU isn't messing with your C-states?
GPU is actually pretty tame, even when it encodes, it sips just a few watts by itself. But i know what you meant with C-states.
The problem would be the "modern CPU" itself... I use i5-4690. Yes, 10 years old CPU I got lying around doing nothing.
Still, the HDDs probably run at 5W each, give it another 5W for all the RAM, 5W for motherboard, 5W for GPU, 5W for CPU and we are at 35W already. And even though I have 80 Plus Gold PSU, it still is ineffective at this low range, so I would add 15℅ losses in that alone and you have another 5W.
It's not unreasonable, I would almost say modern CPU wouldn't do that much better. It would be much more powerful at the same electricity bill, but I don't really have need to buy it as this setup runs just fine and the investment wouldn't ever come back in any way.
Simply put: If you want your NAS to run low on power, don't use (once) powerful CPUs with full ATX board and dedicated GPU. Still 3x 7200rpm HDD would be the heaviest on power draw from all components used. And PSU would be another factor, as I have yet to find 200W PSU that does 80 Plus Gold - so the whole setup runs at some reasonable percentage of maximum load thus in the most effective range of the PSU.
I built my server in a few days including my own case. I set up the software aide in another few days. And since the it runs for around 2-3 years without that much of overhead from me.
Phones in the family are set up to backup photos and videos on the server immediately
I occassionally run manual backup of the server to my other server.
If people can't find the time to backup their most precious data (gamoly.photos and videos in my case), they deserve to lose them. And backing up by using cloud services isn't actually backing it up, is it? I want to have my data in my hands.
I agree that doing anti-corporate things is timesink. But everyone of us must set the bar for themselves. I'm willing to put time into it.
The domain name is just a name. What you're describing is of course still fully centralized. So I don't see how it strikes a balance at all. Evidently, liability is also a problem whether you manage your own data or let some corporation do it for you.
How is it not fair? It is what it is; you either do the "whole Project" of buying e.g. a big mechanical disk and simply storing copies of your most important documents there (i.e. stuff that only requires very basic computer literacy), or you give yourself conditional access to "20 years of digital life" at the whims of the cloud ecosystem of some amoral megacorporation you have naively trusted with your life.
Solutions increase cost- yes. Functional solutions to problems are never free. But anybody who has 30k worth of Apple products didn't much care for price to begin with. They cared for convenience- for the ability to offload responsibility.
It happens that human society is built in a way in which a failure to properly engage with aspects of it will negatively affect you. If I must care for politics because the alternative is having my life dictated to me by right-ring assholes, then everybody else can learn to take responsibility for their own data, if it is important to them.
I have so much sympathy for somebody in the position that this person is in, but that does not mean that I don't believe it to be somewhat a problem of their own making. Big corporations have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted.
If you are only going to use it in your local network and you have a half decent understanding of network security (eg you don’t trust shoddy iot appliances and have a basic firewall setup - standard on pretty much every router), it really isn’t. A basic Linux box with Samba and whatever other basic file sharing daemon is pretty turnkey after you’ve set it up so long as your distro doesn’t push breaking updates (looking at you, Ubuntu).
I got a used two disk Synology NAS, threw a couple of 8TB drives in it, plugged the Ethernet into the router, and walked through a setup wizard basically. It was trivial to put it in a RAID-1 equivalent and end up with a shared volume prepped for TimeMachine. Now my Mac constantly backs files up to the NAS, for about as much effort as setting up a router or game console.
That doesn't help in the event of catastrophic corporate malfeasance locking you out of hardware, email, etc, but it at least is essentially for the (probably more likely) case of hardware failure causing a loss of projects or photos or such.
Never forget we have only two companies that can fuck up, ban you without recourse or explanation, and basically make it impossible to have a smartphone. (If only Apple's services division was as good as the sales support...they've been nothing but stellar with dealing with computers lost in the mail for me.)
For email I would like to point out that it is relatively straightforward these days to get your own domain and have mail hosted at a good provided like mailbox.org. Note that I said "relatively" as you do need to set up DNS entries for the domain, but if you are comfortable doing that I do feel that it is one of the biggest things you can do to move out of reach of big tech.
I mostly did when I realized how many of my online accounts are tied to my Gmail address I've had since 2005. Most services require access to the email account for password resets and changing the mail address tied to the account.
Yeah, that's part of what I did during my Google separation. Got a domain and use a mail service that wasn't google. The biggest risk is of course your domain registration lapsing or the registrar going under. I can do something about the first one, but not the second. Don't even know what happens in that event actually.
Edit: read on the ICANN site about registrar going out of business or suspended. Looks like it could be a pain, or it could be easy, it depends. It's definitely the weakest part of my step away from big tech, I think. And one I can't mitigate in advance.
I have domain registration setup to automatically renew and am using a fairly reputable registrar that has been around for many years. Of course, that is no guarantee that nothing ever happens. But generally speaking there are often signs a company is in trouble and transferring domains these days is really easy as it just requires a transfer token.
Overall though I feel like it is worth the risk compared to having all my eggs in one FANG basket.
Sure. I also have auto renew, it’s really only this darn thread that got me thinking about vulnerabilities in continuity of service, or risk to, my domain.
The bigger risk in my experience is services not accepting custom domains or automatically flagging them as spam. There have been many businesses I just can't correspond with via email because they won't receive what I send, but my partner's gmail address gets to them just fine.
That is somewhat of a risk, but mostly comes down to using a good reputable mail hosting provider and having set up the proper DNS entries.
So far I have been using mailbox for a few years now and a custom domain. In that time I haven't had a single issue with not receiving mail or mail not arriving on the other side.
I've used smaller-scale (reputable) email providers with and without custom domains for about 15 years now and it's been an ever-increasing problem. Several times a site or app wouldn't allow me to create an account without using a large provider's domain like gmail or outlook, particularly those relating to job-hunting, claiming my email address wasn't valid.
That’s a little disappointing to hear, because one of the reasons I finally bought a domain this year was because I was sick of websites saying the ‘+’ character makes my email address invalid.
I heavily lean into “myname+service@gmail” format when I create a new account, both as a scam-protection measure (if this is a legitimate email from my bank then why was it sent to myname+petsupplies@gmail?) and also to see which service leaked/sold my email address to spammers/scammers.
I’m hoping that by having my own custom email domain, I can do the same one-email-alias-per-service system without being snagged by the ‘+’ character. If too many services don’t even allow my own domain then that’s going to be pretty disappointing.
For what it is worth, I personally haven't run into services out right refusing custom domains. I am having a hard time any service doing that (that I also trust to actually register for). But, I am EU based and we aren't following the latest trends in enshittifaction I see in some other parts of the world.
And to be honest, I still use gmail as a backup. I personally consider not needing gmail for the majority of my mail a win.
Yeah okay, I can always hold onto my gmail and set up email forwarding if needed, that’s a good point.
I’m in Australia, so businesses here are kinda half and half between sensible European style “you want a service, we offer it, let’s not try to make things complicated” on one side and the more American style “can we please harvest your entire digital identity to piss ads directly into your eyeballs, to opt out you need to access our unfindable privacy page at exactly 4:07am on the night of a full moon” on the other.
Ah, that is different from what I thought you were talking about. And to be honest, just shitty behaviour on the side of those services and not really to do with mail traffic itself being the issue.
Of course, if you are job hunting and need to use those specific services that doesn't really matter. But, I'd also happily use my Gmail account as a backup in those instances.
People often tend to approach this as an "either or" type of deal. I just am happy to greatly reduce my dependency on Google services for things I consider critical.
I was talking about both. Other examples being emails to nurseries that didn't arrive when sent from my address (cc'd to my husband so I know they sent and should have been received), same for multiple small companies (generally tradespeople) who are not technologically inclined nor motivated enough to give a shit about digging out my email or whitelisting my domain.
I’ve made sure all my DKIM stuff is in order, that sometimes messes with spam traps. Fortunately I’ve never had that issue with my domain
I don’t think it’s too much to expect a person to be able to add records to a domain. Most domain providers have a very easy interface to allow users to do this.
Granted if they accidentally do it wrong it’s not exactly guaranteed they will have good support to help them troubleshoot.
It's the doing it wrong part that makes it tricky. In principle it isn't all that difficult to edit records as it is just a few text fields for each entry. In practice it isn't always entirely clear and having a bit of knowledge about DNS records is nice to have.
So I can understand it being somewhat daunting for people.
I tried to set up Samba on my NAS and I couldn't get it to work - I can't tell whether it's Samba breaking, the dolphin integration that's breaking, or the connection between the two that's breaking. To be fair it might be easier if I didn't try to do it with Nix. I've been ignoring the thing since I moved and got stuck with a horribly misconfigured router from 2010 and I haven't switched on my NAS in a year or so.
Ironically I chose Nix because I wanted a Linux server that would be fairly turnkey (and very stable - I love the idea of Nix, and if I wait long enough for someone to write the documentation then it might work out well in practice, too).
To be fair Samba is complex to get set up, especially if your distro’s package doesn’t have “common sense” defaults set up. But that’s because SMB itself is a nightmare of options left over from darker times.
If a user doesn’t care about OS integration I’d suggest using SFTP with private key authentication instead. It’s much easier to set up and it’s more secure.
What's the point of writing something so misleading and hyperbolic? What purpose does it serve?
There are in between options. For example, you can put your data in a hosted nextcloud instance. Or, if you simply want to have a backup for someone relatively tech savvy get something like Hetzner storage and backrest. Or if that is too much simply go for backblaze backup.
Heck, just put your storage in a secondary FANG provided cloud solution if all of the above still feels like it is too much. The important point is to not have all your data stored at a single place.
Synology, Hyper Backup to an S3-compatible destination. Automated to run once a day with incremental uploads. Can set backup retention period. It's a set-it-and-forget-it solution.
I don't see why having a local backup would be any trouble. I have a Pi hooked up to a 2tb external running rsync and it maintains 4 copies of my Active Project folder. Its set for 5min, 1hr, 24hr and 3 days.
And only the Active Folder is synchronized to a cloud service because I don't recall ever needing to reference a 4 year old file out of the blue. If I'm referencing old projects, I'll just copy it to active and it's everywhere I need it.
Bulk storage is an off the shelf NAS running TrueNAS with 8tb that's mirrored. Partial sync every midnight and full backup on Saturday night. Runs Jellyfin, Calibre, Samba and immich services if anyone at home needs to access something from the Library.
I do my backups very basically. 8tb storage drive in my PC, another external drive connected via USB that backs up every night. That same 8tb is just a network share that I can connect to with any of my other devices. Super simple and maybe not super robust, but it does the job and I'm not worried about data loss.
Here are two common pieces of tech wisdom:
Consider the password manager advice. When I tell someone that they should use a password manager, I don't mean that they should use keepass with a self-hosted gitlab instance. I mean they should use any reputable password manager they can find -- even if it's the one built-in to their phone or browser. Yes, that means my mom could lose access to her passwords if she becomes locked-out of her Apple account. But that risk is so much smaller than all of her accounts being compromised by reusing a password that was pwned a decade ago.
Similarly, when I advise someone to backup their data, I mean they should use anything that works for them. Yes, there is still a risk of being locked-out of their account, but the more likely threat is a hard drive failure or a stolen device.
So sure, the OP is more technically inclined than most and probably could have written some automated backups (my mom, in contrast, definitely could not have). But they were adhering to good advice; they just got screwed by an improbable edge case.
I agree that having any backup is better than no backup. Certainly if the data is also stored locally.
But, the latter often isn't the case and even there I do think you can mitigate the risk even if you aren't as technically inclined. For example, in other places in this thread I advocated for duplicating your data by using two cloud services.
Going a step further, for essential things like mail and password managers I strongly suggest people using a different service from the one that is their main data storage. Certainly for password managers there are good reputable choices in the form of bitwarden, 1password, etc. They aren't quite as easy as a built in password manager, but once setup they are not difficult to use either.
Mail can be a bit more tricky if you are thinking custom domains, but that isn't really needed if you just want to separate concerns. For example, if all you data is in icloud use Gmail for mail. If all your data is in Google drive consider creating a mail on Microsofts side of things.
To reshare my setup which, I strongly believe strikes a fantastic balance between convenience, cost and ownership:
Setup difficulty ★★☆☆
Maintenance difficulty ★☆☆☆
Reliability ★★★★
Control ★★★☆
Data sovereignty ★★☆☆
Cost / year ★★☆☆
In this thread, I’ve seen “Google Takeout” referenced a few times — can you give me an indication of your usage of Google services, which services you actually use the Takeout for, and the end of year file size that you have to work with once it’s arrived?
The biggest is Google photos as it’s about 25gb. The rest is data and a couple gb of emails.
Okay fantastic! Last year I already moved all my photos away from google, so I don’t even have that as a consideration anymore. But your benchmark tells me that my barely-used 2TB external drive is easily enough to hold onto everything well into the future. Thank you!
Oh yeah absolutely, I'm a pretty active user. Note that I don't backup my Google Drive via takeout so this & photos will be the two biggest ones, everything else will be tiny.
Looks like it’s been fixed:
I admire the guy for wanting to get to the root of the problem but maybe just take the win and don't go poking the bear right now my dude.
One RAID assembly for music, one for video one for retro games. 3TB drives, all connected to an always on security camera PC.
I'd love to say that it's something everybody should do, but when 80% of those I talk to don't know what a Western Digital is, how to replace a hard drive (or what it is) and what it takes connect machines on the same network, and have no hope.
Simple UIs, folderless, app-based OS experiences and subscription plans make it impossible for Joe somebody to get into it.
I have everything synced to local NAS with point in time local snapshots and encrypted replication to an offsite S3-compatible bucket, and I still worry about losing the things that I can't properly secure for myself because they're account based and/or infested with DRM.
Things like Apple IDs, Google accounts, Steam libraries, are easily up there with credit cards and government documents in terms of cost and importance, but if something goes wrong there's a good chance you'll end up talking to a wall.
Oh, absolutely. Support for products and services is terrible today, and has been since before COVID.
I used to have misgivings about piracy and buying used, but frankly, it's all that I do now. Some outfits deserve and receive my money, but if your market cap is large enough, you won't miss me.
I've heard similar woes from people purchasing gift cards or similar for Nintendo and Steam services, which is arguably even worse.
At least for all the data on Apple devices, you /could/ back it up yourself (I use a VPS as my primary storage location, then I back that up to two different backup services online, and also to my home NAS, which is itself backed up).
With these other platforms though, if your account is gone, it's gone. Thousands in purchases, and you can't even store these things locally. It's so so risky buying credit or codes outside of the stores own digital storefront.
Mind-boggling. I also have my email on iCloud (no, my home internet's not reliable enough to self-host and I already pay for iCloud+) so I'm in even deeper. I really should be backing up to backblaze or something because this is insane.
If you want super cheap but good email service and don't want to self-host, Purelymail's standard pricing is $10/year. They also offer an "advanced pricing" scheme that's based on your actual usage. Depending on how much (or I guess how little) you use email, you could end up paying something like $3/year.
I was wondering how to mitigate this risk while staying in the Apple ecosystem. Looks like you can back up an iPhone or iPad to your Mac and then use Time Machine to backup your Mac? Assuming sufficient disk space and you don't use iCloud to "optimize" disk space on your Mac.
It's a little clunky, but better than Google Takeout.
Is it? I'm not sure how having to use a proprietary backup tool on a computer to back up daya on your phone is better than just downloading a single archive with all your data in it.
Making a backup isn’t enough. You also need to restore it. It’s my impression that restoring data from Time Machine should mostly just work, allowing you to use the same devices and software as before. With Google Takeout, can you even restore back to a Google account at all? It seems like you’re stuck doing a clumsy migration to something else.
I actually need to deal with my iCloud drive... I've been storing a bunch of photos there that I haven't looked at in years and WON'T look at for years to come. I'm paying 13 CAD a month for this BS and I've been meaning to sort it out for a few years now.
4tb ironwolf HDD ordered and download link requested via privacy.apple.com
There's something that doesn't add up here and I don't really understand why people haven't cottoned onto it. Why on earth would you go buy a $500 gift card in a store to use on your own account? They're not discounted in retail outlets typically and I fail to see how it's easier/more convenient than just using your payment information to pay your subscription costs.
There's also the fact that it's fairly common knowledge that these days gift cards are a huge vector for fraud, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole even to give to friends and family, let alone bafflingly use them on my own account as a proxy for my own money?
I don't like to call someone a liar but to me it seems like something might not be above board with this story.
It's pretty common for credit cards to do store-specific offers: "double points when you use your card at Best Buy this Christmas", or "5% back when you spend over $250 at Walmart before the 31st", or whatever. I'd absolutely take advantage of that kind of offer - and probably get a little dopamine hit too for "winning" - if I knew I was going to be spending a decent chunk of money on whatever service anyway. The US mint literally had to stop selling coins at face value on their website because people would buy a ton of them for the points and then deposit them straight back into the bank!
I also wouldn't personally have been worried about the fraud aspect, even knowing how sketchy gift cards can be: if I had a receipt and card transaction record from a major, authorised retailer I'd expect my worst case scenario to be the irritation of having the gift card balance bounce and having to do a chargeback against the retailer if they somehow messed up and refused to refund it. For all the possible fuckery I would anticipate, I wouldn't expect to be held responsible for fraud if I had the documents to prove I'd done everything right - and I especially wouldn't expect to be held responsible in a way that costs me far more in consequential damages than just losing the original $500.
Because it doesn't really matter, at least not in the way it is being discussed here. If you look at the discussion you can see that most people aren't really siding with the author other than generic "yikes" type comments. What is being discussed is the fact that if you have all your data stored in one place outside of your control that it is a liability.
Maybe the author did more than they are letting on, maybe they didn't. Fact of the matter is that they put all their data eggs in one basket and had that basket taken away from them. Every now and then you hear similar stories from people having used Microsofts cloud offerings, Googles cloud offerings, etc. Also in those cases we don't know if more has been going on. What we do know is that these companies sometimes lock people out and what is also without question is that it is exceedingly difficult to reach anyone within those companies for any type of sane support if something is happening.
In that context it also makes sense that people focus more the type of discussion that focusses on keeping your data safe from such eventualities.
idk, I think it is relevant. If you've got all your eggs in one basket maybe it's smart to not do things that look extremely fishy to the owner of your basket?
I'm a selfhoster myself but I understand that that isn't necessarily feasible for everyone. Even if this person spread their data across various services, if they're doing weird stuff that's flagging them for fraud with one service they'd probably do it with all the others as well.
Is it not reasonable to expect companies to allow for their customers not being perfect?
Okay, we have no moved from "they might have done more than they let on" to you now assuming they must have done something fishy. I might be reading it wrong, I think it is not a good mindset in general, but it also still isn't all that relevant.
Like buying gift cards the owner of the baskets offers themselves for sale in stores? To you that seems like something people shouldn't do, based on knowledge you already have. Personally I can come up with a few benign (sometimes silly) reasons why someone would top up their account like this, none of them with any malicious intend.
Even if I agreed it is potentially fishy, doing something that looks fishy is not the same as doing something rule breaking.
Which, brings me back to this all being not all that relevant. You seem to agree that companies will lock you out of accounts based on vibes. Which also means that nobody should put their eggs in one basket, regardless of them doing fishy stuff or not.
In the UK I've heard of stores with hanging cards being targetted for gift card fraud, where the cards are taken (stolen), then details read from the cards before being placed back on the card hangers in the shop. Then when the cards are purchased by buyers in store, the thieves get access to those funds.
That's not the only way that in store gift cards can be compromised either, and I'd never blame a victim for this, it's all on the thieves. Any fallout on people's accounts due to this should be properly and sensitively handled by the tech companies, which is by far the bigger part of the problem.
I’ve had an Apple account since the very early iTunes days, I believe since around 2005 or so, and my family’s financial situation growing up trained me to never trust credit cards or have services linked to my actual bank account. I’ve been buying those $20 and $50 “iTunes gift cards” as the only way to buy apps or in-app purchases for literally decades. I think of it somewhat like having my bank account airgapped from my spending, as a way to help mitigate against impulse spending.
Last year, when I finally decided to upgrade my phone, my brother had credit card bonuses which needed him to spend a certain amount within some time limit, so he bought Apple gift cards up to the amount that my phone cost, since I was making the purchase anyway and didn’t care what method of payment.
There’s nothing illegitimate about buying that much Apple credit, especially for someone who already has invested into the ecosystem. I could easily imagine someone spending that credit over a few years on subscriptions for whichever professional macOS or iPad software they needed, so why not get a bunch of it all at once?