Windows 11 user has 30 years of 'irreplaceable photos and work' locked away in OneDrive - and Microsoft's silence is deafening
Windows 11 user is locked out of Microsoft account and loses 30 years of data in a cautionary tale that'll make your hair stand on end
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/46381349
The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially "free" to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it's awesome.
Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.
When everyone started getting excited about The Cloud, all I could think about was how stupid it was to trust EVERYTHING in your life to some third-party corporation. What could possibly go wrong?
Hate to victim blame, but what a moron. Microsoft is definitely at fault here, but so is this guy.
He "moved" the data to OneDrive. Why the fuck would anyone do that? He wants to migrate to a new larger drive, but why did he feel the need to delete stuff before verifying that his data has safely been migrated to the new drive? A single drive to store anything important is very dangerous in itself, but this is a different level of stupidity.
I had few TB migration at the start of this year. I vehemently follow the 3-2-1 rule for anything important. (I actually do more copies than that for personal photos and documents.) But I still have the old disks just in case. I can't fathom doing something like this. Maybe I'm overreacting, but ffs it's stupid.
Let me get this straight... They deleted their only other copy of the files from their old drives immediately after uploading them to OneDrive? Microsoft has some fault here, but that is also an unbelievably stupid decision on the user's part. It also sounds like they were planning to copy the files to a single new drive and immediately delete them from OneDrive, which is equally stupid. Are they allergic to having their files in multiple places or something?
It's an awful situation to be in, but it could've been avoided by simply having a second copy of the data, which is pretty much the simplest backup system.
Another cautionary tale for 3-2-1
If the data is "irreplaceable", you shouldn't keep only a single copy of it.
but surely microsoft keeps multiple copies! they are infallible!!
Reminder "the cloud" is someone else's computer. If you're going to use it at least make sure the "someone else" isn't a clown hat like Microsoft.
(This article also prompted me to update the backup of my personal files. I'm not following the 3-2-1 rule; a USB stick is enough. I do like to keep it updated though.)
a USB stick is enough
No, it’s really not. In addition to failing abruptly and often unpredictably, flash based media will suffer from bit rot when left unpowered for extended periods of time.
make sure the "someone else" isn't a clown hat like Microsoft
I mean just about anyone of sufficient size is susceptible to this. Just keep multiple backups.
I mean just about anyone of sufficient size is susceptible to this.
Sure - the bigger the business, the more expendable each user/customer is. And Microsoft is really huge.
Just keep multiple backups.
Two are enough for most people (the 3-2-1 rule); sometimes one. The catch is that at least one of those backups must be off-line, and in a different medium than the original. While you can use the cloud to increase the reliability of the whole system, you should never rely exclusively on it.
30 years of data and no backup system, sheesh.
So they moved the files off of drives onto M$? WTF? How do you even get the idea of moving rather than copying?
"freeing up space on the user's device"
Yes, that's what happened
I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later.
I'm assuming that the reason that he didn't just do the transfer to a new drive instead of to OneDrive (which seems like it'd be more-straightforward) is because the new drive was going to also be a system disk, not just hold his data.
I think that it would have been a good idea to get a second new drive and have done that transfer just so that there's a backup. I mean, it doesn't really sound like the user was planning to wind up with a backup of his data, or for that matter, that he had a backup to start with.
Maybe OneDrive locking the account was unexpected, but drives can fail or be inadvertently erased or whatever. If you've got thirty years of irreplaceable data that you really badly want to keep, I'd want to have more than one copy of it. The cost of a drive to store it is not large compared to the cost involved in producing said data.
I have two drives in my tower that are just for my data. They are just folders of files. And there are two because I lost a chunk of data when the single drive it used to be died. Luckily most of it was also elsewhere, but I did think I had lost half of my wedding photos since I couldnt find the flash drive.
If you had the wedding photos in question professionally taken, it might be that the photographer, if they're still around, might have copies. I don't know whether they retain copies, but I suppose asking can't hurt.
This place says up to a year:
https://www.wanderlustportraits.com/how-long-photographers-keep-photos/
Photographers typically keep photos of their clients for a minimum of 90 days and up to a full year as part of standard practice; however, if this is important to you, review the contract and ask your professional.
This guy says forever:
I keep ALL files on two 16tb drives drives. Those drives never get wiped and I will always keep two copies even when they fill up. One internal on sata for reference and one off site. When I first started shouting, I was cheap and deleted RAWs and just kept high res jpegs. I have clients coming back for albums and I am stuck re-editing the jpegs to match in the albums. Lesson learned. If you do want to consolidate, then keep the RAWs of the editor we jpegs and delete the unused. But that’s more hassle than the cost to store unused raws. You can also rely on cloud source but you never know if you’ll ever switch cloud servers or move onto another business on want to stop paying cloud fees. For the high volume photographers it becomes wise to invest in tape drives. HDD have lives of 10 years. So eventually all those old drives will need to be transferred to newer drives. Budget this into your bottom line
Your data in the cloud should be at best being another backup, in addition to your local backup you do regularly. And even that is a stretch, because those companies can analyze your data on the cloud too. Man, people have so much trust in companies like Microsoft.
Cloud backups are alright from a privacy standpoint as long as you properly encrypt your data. Which also stops your cloud provider from suddenly terminating your account because you uploaded something they don't like.
This is why I run my own NextCloud instance that backs up locally and via offsite rotation.
Sure, I could still lose it all, but it would be 100% my own fault if I did.
Remember that cloud backups is the last location, the 1 in 3-2-1. You should have two local copies already on top of your cloud copy
Another one to the list:
Google Flagged Parents’ Photos of Sick Children as Sexual Abuse
Google uses Microsoft’s PhotoDNA screening algorithm
I hate to blame the end user, the consumer, but yeah clearly at least some blame is to be put onto them. As outlined in the article.
To trust Microsoft cloud services & make that a single point of failure is exceptionally foolish....and they were moving all this data off of multiple old drives & consolidating onto one big one. Why not copy-paste? Why did they actually cut-paste, move all that data into the cloud?
If it was truly so "priceless"...just make another copy? Keep everything, always, until other copies are made.
I feel bad for the guy, but come on. That was a problem they themselves created. Clouds are for rain. Assuming this person is at least 40 years old (30 years of photos & work) if not significantly older, they are more than old enough to know better, to just blindly trust cloud storage with everything.
I can't really completely blame the user here. Microsoft used to market OneDrive as the "last backup you'll ever need". Obviously, this was bad marketing, but a standard user wouldn't know that.
This happened to me a few years ago (W10) with OneDrive but I had another copy and gave up quickly trying to engage with MS.
I use Lunix Mint now anyway, that was another reason for moving from Windows at the time.
LMAO
If you only have one copy, you have zero copies.