Discussion
Just saw someone whose Google account was shuttered. They’d been… using Sheets to track movies they’d watched.
A question people should ask themselves, but rarely do: What would you do if, tomorrow, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, and every other cloud provider you use closed your account without warning? Then maybe spend some of today safeguarding against that eventuality.
I have moved away for cloud provider and it seem to be the best choice for i am afraid to loose data to such an arbitrary decision.
Next step is a NAS in the home, but it's going to take some time to get all the drives.
Google blocking my account would be rather painful, but mostly survivable.
I've since vowed to never be stuck with Google.
https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2024/04/backing-up-my-life-synology-nas
I've still got to use Google for slides for now though. Unless you can suggest a good alternative (not LibreOffice)?
Google merely serves as a nice collaborative editor.
But the Univetsities' overreliance on Microsoft365 is frightening.
My data. My rules.
https://mastodon.infprocess.com/mx/p/74350265
⏳ Time is limited!
⚡️ Don’t delay — act now! ⚡️
The one thing I'd have trouble with is Joplin, since I use Joplin Cloud to sync my notes on desktop, laptop and phone. I'd also lose some of my iTunes music—the songs with password protection on them—but with the upside that I'd never have to log in upon firing up iTunes again.
Sadly, not only are people bad at evaluating risks, many don't even understand things enough to even know there's a risk.
I've had things go sideways since I got my comp sci in '90. Old computer nerds became late adopters. I've never used 'the cloud' aka someone else's computer.
i already prefered my own clouds or storages, but this sounds scary. and only sheets ! i already heard some youtube restrictions.
I don't use cloud to host files and only have an MS account preferring to use local documents and backing up to a NAS
If MS closed that, I lose a few of my Xbox games and my progress. Nothing important
It’s been fantastic having my laptop and mini synced, and also knowing I have a copy elsewhere.
The weakness is if Apple removes all of my files overnight and the job removes them from the NAS, so I have spinning hdd archives as well.
What would you do if a solar flare or Luddite terrorists killed the cloud? It's not an actual cloud, you know. It's a bunch of vulnerable data centers.
But agreed, you’re only in control of your local data and anything cloud based could go without warning.
All because some automated system thought that discussing his child's medical condition with his doctor constituted child abuse (and because he had those texts automatically backed up to Google's servers.)
NYT did a pretty massive article on it so seems legit:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220823055404/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
Until they receive a warrant, they need to keep their noses out. The fact that they don't should give everyone who still uses their services pause.
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
