The death of free Evernote is just one example of how our datafied lives are entangled with the fates and whims of tech companies. In August, users on X (formerly known as Twitter) lost three years’ worth of photos. And last month, Google Drive started hemorrhaging files, with some users losing years of data. Our digital life has become increasingly impermanent and is mostly outside of our control, making the threat and pain of digital loss ever more acute.
This is not the first time, nor the last time, data loss, especially the one that was not our fault.
And true, sometimes if we Googled how to backup our files, it will recommended you to store the files in the cloud, in some sort of storage service like Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud Drive.
Sometimes the technology also a curse, with today’s advancement, for example the camera getting good, and of course the quality of the photos are great too, and it has a bigger file size obviously, that contributed to how much space we should allocated. As a quite sentimental person, sometimes i kept even the “ugly” photos, or “unprepared scene” photo, it’s just captured the moments with all of the candidness, to make it more realistic.
Then came the bills, and it can be expensive, currently i’m using Google Drive and iCloud Drive to backup my files, iCloud specific for my mac and iPhone, and it recently almost hit the maximum threshold, i was hesitant pay more to Google and Apple, now i have external drives to backup my files, that too almost filled up, 3TB storage space was not enough, need to purchase another, but it also came with its own risk, the drive might stop working, i’ll eventually lost my data, for now the data in the cloud still secured, no dataloss like many other user’s experienced.
Redundant backup might help, but expensive. so for now, selecting which files that i can afford to lose, and obviously my family photo collections is not the one, maybe i’ll consider buy more space (and external drive) it if hit the threshold.