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Comment by ashleyn | Hacker News Reader

This chilling effect is already going on. I'm writing a science-fiction thriller and took most of my notes off Google Drive out of fear that they would misconstrue them as political extremism. If AI is being used for content moderation then this only raises the likelihood that a false positive is identified, devoid of any context, and I lose my entire Google account to an uncontactable bureaucracy.

I made a Nextcloud to host my references and storywriting notes. Nextcloud is horribly buggy, difficult to maintain, and has very poor user experience compared to Google Drive - but at least I don't need to worry about my entire digital life being auto-terminated by an overzealous robot, with no reasonable appeal process beyond "knowing enough people to make a stink".

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Humans can have just as overzealous a response as those robots. In my senior year of high school, I developed a bit of a fascination with historical serial killers and turned in an assignment for AP English exploring the mindset, and my teacher promptly turned it over to the school's counseling service, and I was forced to see a counselor, questioned about violent tendencies, given a 0 on the assignment, and a C in the class. This was the same semester as the Columbine shooting, so I guess schools were on edge about students who might want to kill other students, which I definitely did not want to do, but apparently writing about people who want to do that kind of thing can easily be misconstrued as autobiographical. I almost didn't graduate because of that. Heck, one of my friends was expelled for possessing a switchblade comb because things that looked like weapons were banned. There was no appeal process for these infractions, either.

Honestly, that seems like a feature of many administrative processes, even those administered by government. So far, in the process of trying to become licensed as adoptive parents, my wife and I have been dropped twice now by licensing agencies, without any explanation of why or recourse to appeal the decision. As far as I can tell, the only way to gain the right to appeal a decision is to actually be convicted of a crime.

If anyone doesn't want to deal with hosting Nextcloud, Cryptpad.fr is a free option and in my experience the only issue is it's a bit slow and doesn't work nearly as well on mobile devices as G Suite

So why do you need all your writing notes to be on the cloud? Using multiple devices for work? An editor's request/requirement?

always keep a copy outside of your home. my own writing is replicated on almost every device i have. it's the most valuable to me. more so even than photos which are just memories.

Still zero reason to have on the cloud. You can sync the files between your devices, or even better set up your own home server for close to $0.

Why do people always forget the 'cloud' is just someone else's computer.

Nothing important should ever exist solely on the 'cloud'.

I wouldn't even trust a backup copy sent to email, yet I see that constantly as well.

If you keep your files only on your devices and a home server, you are making yourself vulnerable to scenarios like the one discussed here very recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31652650 ("I've locked myself out of my digital life")

I would recommend none of the above, I was giving OP a better way of having their stuff online.

The article you referenced was getting locked out of accounts. We are speaking of having documents backed up, not google accounts.

The best way period would be to periodically backup to an external HD or even SD cards.

People need to get over this cloud bullshit years ago.

All of these problems have been solved since the advent of the internet, these are all self-imposed problems.

The best way period would be to periodically backup to an external HD or even SD cards.

and where do you store those?

you really want multiple backups, and an encrypted cloud storage is one of them.

I have no trust in the longevity of data on SD cards. What's the expected lifetime of the data on these, and has it been studied/verified?

In a heavy fireproof box along with the birth certificate, and other important papers. If you want extra protection put that box in a larger safe. This really isn’t a difficult question to answer. If you are trusting a third party to store your things, when something happens to their service or they terminate your account randomly you have only yourself to blame.

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