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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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 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.
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.
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.