I think we need a clever saying to rattle off every time someone gets burned by relying 100% on a cloud service (either the software screws up user data or suspends their account, without recourse) without backups/alternates.
Not your drive, not your data?
I don’t know, I’m not creative.
As in: two external drives, unplugged, one in each hand, each with a complete, usable copy. Bonus points for storing them in separate buildings miles away from each other.
It is somewhat too tough, and I haven't yet said it to anyone in his/her face. In my mind I think it often.
Not your bits, not your beats.
Imagine being a 40something and having your kid come home and say "Are our family photos backed up locally, redundantly on a rotating schedule with a tested disaster recovery plan?" "An untested disaster recovery plan isn't a disaster recovery plan".
There is no substitute for self-hosted.
People that care enough to keep a library of music after the popularity of Spotify are the same people to leave the ecosystem permanently when this kind of stuff happens.
He has ripped a lot of it onto a local hard drive. I can see how he might think Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files. It seems a failing of modern technology that he needs to understand backup in the sense of bits on a magnetic disk is different to being able to access the files as a network stream. I imagine many tech companies are quite happy to let the confusion continue.
As you say, this is effectively what happens most of the time. The quality and consistency is so high that nobody's going to notice a few flipped bits.
But for a niche album - a semi-official bootleg of an obscure 70s prog rock band - it goes wrong more frequently. It can't find the original album, but finds one the algorithm it thinks is close enough, but is actually a studio recording of a tribute band.
Many albums get remastered.. most of these cloud services will just drop in the new version and the old one is gone. IIRC Apple might be pretty good about this, but you still don't want to surrender control.
In any case there have been many albums where the remaster has worse audio quality than the original. If you bought the original you might really want to hang onto that version.
The most egregious form of that kind of thing is things like movies like Star Wars where the later editions are different edits of the movie. If you wanted the original you wouldn't be happy your copy was swapped out with the new edit.
In the case of music this is often just remasters having a lot more dynamic range compression and heavily boosted levels, but that can still be very objectionable.
Reminds me of that post about the parents banned from gdrive after syncing a picture of their child's genitals (for medical purposes, verified) while sending it to a doctor. I'm pretty sure they're still permabanned and without access to their data. I think they even took his phone service, Google Fi away.
Someone with money in the game needs to pounce on this, even if it's another for-profit like synology etc they would at least get the mentality that storing things you care about in the cloud is foolish at best.
But every exception that you acknowledge and address degrades that miraculous functioning. Exponentially.
So there's a strong incentive to let 99% accuracy be good enough. And to let the exception-cases go completely to oblivion.
Backing people's files up for them on my USB storage makes me feel like the aircon repairman in the Terry Gilliam film, Brazil.
80% of the effort should be spent on how to handle the thing the automatic system didn’t.
I mean the system restore process is embarrassingly good (or was when I left the ecosystem): replace dead HDD, boot off installation media, attach the TM drive and say "yes please" when it asks you if you want to restore everything. The options you list are aimed at the "power user" and burdens them accordingly.
A backup doesn't help when a service is silently changing your files.
Once you realize a file isn't right, you look into it and discover that it was automatically replaced by the service three or four years ago. It is not reasonable to expect anyone - even a tech-literate person - to keep 300 hard drives around for a decade or more, and audit every change made on them hour by hour.
As for carefully monitoring your backup software to keep track of when files change, 1) I think we're getting even farther into the "not reasonable to expect of ordinary users" range here, and 2) if I did somehow happen to notice that a bunch of music files had changed, I'd be a lot more likely to assume that Apple Music had updated their ID3 tags than that it had completely rewritten the music!
Correct. Just to be clear, though: Apple Music does not do that.
Especially a problem with flash storage since it really isn't designed for long-term storage without being plugged in.