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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine Facebook disappearing with your list of friends, or Google Docs with your documents.

Yes, I imagine it on a daily basis. That's how the cloud works. It's happened before, and it will happen again. Any cloud based data is bound to disappear at any second because of a hack (ask Matt Hunan), because of a court order you are not aware of, because of an in-court-or-out-of-court settlement you are not part of and not aware of. Lots of reasons. That's why I don't actually trust the cloud as anything but backup.

Furthermore, anything not backed up offline (even if there's an online backup) is also in danger from malicious actors.

The only person to blame for not keeping a backup (of just the song titles, no less) is yourself. Use expletives if it makes you feel better, though, by all means.

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I learned that the hard way a month ago when I found that all my photos from the past 6 years that I had been storing on Dropbox had been mysteriously deleted :(

Storing != backing up

Still trying to let go of ever having those visual memories again. Certainly you're right that it's no one's fault but our own, but that doesn't make the lose any easier to deal with. I do blame Dropbox though, considering I'm a paying customer. When it happened I saw that the actual backup feature costs extra.

Dropbox may be a ok syncing service but it's a pretty shitty backup service given any collaborators can delete your files. Suffice it to say I'll be backing up locally and finding an alternative to Dropbox.

(Sort of a tangent/rant/vent there, but if anyone has a recommendation for cloud backups I'd love to hear.)

No cloud experience myself that sounds useful to you, but BackBlaze seem to be everyone's favorite around here -- but do note that they are purely a "backup" rather than "storage" service.

They delete stuff you have not backed up in the last 30 days. If you have a removable drive that you backed up to backblaze, it must go through their program again once every 30 days, or they will consider this abandoned.

Ask yourself this, now: Why cloud, when $70 buys you a 1TB portable hard drive with ~100MB/sec bandwidth (that you don't have at all unless you live in Japan or Korea, and that you don't get to Dropbox/BackBlaze even if you live there).

Yev from Backblaze here -> You're not wrong. In fact we recommend having an on-site backup FIRST, then moving on to other backup mediums. I wrote a post about it -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/. Online backup is great, but local backup will always be quicker to get data on to and off of!

Do you keep a backup of your list of Facebook friends, your HN posts and "saved stories"?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Any facebook contact I care about is already in my email program's contacts (Thunderbird, local, backed up) and my phone (contacts) - and I prefer to contact them without using facebook as an intermediary.

Whenever there's an interesting story on HN I think I'd want to refer to later, I bookmark&cache it locally.

And posts/comments I deem worthy to save, I do save a copy of locally, although that's about one in fifty I make.

I know that's not common, and furthermore in the event of a global facebookgeddon, it is likely my bookmarks would be useless. But in the case of a local cloudgeddon (see e.g. the Matt Hunan story), I'm mostly covered.

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