Keeping everything on your own drives should in theory protect you against the unpredictable access of the cloud .. but otoh I've had no fewer than five 2T drives crap out in the last couple of years, all bought in 2017 or 18. Point being, there just doesn't seem to be any way to preserve bits for the long haul, short of RAID. And unless extreme measures are taken from the get go, some bits are going to get lost. Your kids pictures or a major personal software project or the like, will just disappear like so much smoke.
> there just doesn't seem to be any way to preserve bits for the long haul, short of RAID
Gentle reminder that RAID is not backup. Have at least three copies or backups of important files preferably in different locations.
And keeping things on your own drives has its caveats - I work in IT and have seen data loss from sprinkler systems raining down on server closets, leaky AC units, no ability to access email and data for days and weeks due to Hurricane Sandy, and battery backups with dead batteries causing RAID corruption upon power loss, and more.
With that said, your points are good ones and things will inevitably get lost - over the past few years I've plugged in old drives and floppies from the late 90s and old burned CDs from the 00's, some of which have already started decaying, losing unknown files. We are creating so many files and documents that we value but others likely won't. I rest a little easier knowing I still have documents from university, but my children probably won't care or ever want to read my 25 page final paper for my "Civil War" history class or my first Java program (make an elevator!).
This is why I always buy storage in threes: Two drives for ZFS mirrored RAID, one for offline backup, and a really basic rsync script.
Three drives crapping out simultaneously is rare enough that you can pretty much pretend it will never happen. And if you are still worried, there's always online backup services.
Interesting, this has really been on my mind lately with Google suddenly telling me my photo storage ran out of space and I need to pay for space.
I think I'm going to print a bunch of photo albums. Visiting family for the holidays, my mom broke out some albums from almost 30 years ago of my child hood, albums of photos from the 50s of grand parents. It's pretty cool those exist.
Other wise I need to make sure i don't lose any of my drives or accounts or my phone and make sure none of that breaks.
> Myspace is a favela. You've ever been to a Brazilian favela? It basically, politically, represents the structure of Myspace. You've got this remote, distant, old-school Brazilian tyrant. Anti-democratic, wicked mogul, pays no attention to you, supposedly owns the whole show, but the whole shebang is going south in a hurry.
It's been out-competed by some other economy, there's nothing happening there. You have no civil rights in Myspace. You can't go anywhere in Myspace, you can't organize in Myspace, you can't make money in Myspace.
You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug. That's a favela. It's made of instructables. A favela is an emergent structure, it's made out of corrugated tin and breeze blocks.
Every slogan you have here, practically every slogan fits perfectly in a favela. "Action is cheaper than control." That's a favela slogan. It's cheaper to just build the hut and move into it than it is to try to sue you to leave, or get anything done.
"Just fucking do it." That's a favela slogan. "So fix it." That's a favela slogan. "Always in beta." Of course a favela is always in beta. You can't insure it, you can't get title to it, you can't raise kids in it. There's no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It's a slum!
You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it's a slum.
It's not about the $129. It's about companies like Evernote and Reddit hooking users in by offering their services for free for years and then deciding at some arbitrary point "hey, freeloader, time to pay up".
This literally happened to me a few weeks ago.
I purchased an app called Screens last year to remote into my machine at home from my iPad. It's worked great for years.
One day, the app displays a pop-up notification on open recommending that I upgrade to Screens 5 (a free-to-download app) via the App Store, which I did.
On trying to connect to my machine, I discover, surprise surprise, that the only reason for this app's existence is now locked behind a subscription.
(I accidentally purchased the subscription and tried to get a refund immediately afterwards. apple denied the request three times, and the developer can't do anything. I could issue a charge-back, but Apple could counter that by terminating my account and denying the charge-back. Amazing.)
