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Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

I think this argument conflates “what’s possible” with “what’s reasonable”.

In a complex modern society, we can’t all be expected to have backup plans to the Nth degree.

Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable.

It’s why we have regulations and ombudsmans for healthcare, transport, finance, water provider, electricity providers, communications providers etc.

Oddly missing from that list is critical technical infrastructure providers like Microsoft, Apple and Google.

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I actually really like the idea of a Digital Services Provider Ombudsman, who you can go to if you feel like you've been wronged by a big tech corp. They have a "way in" that consumers potentially don't, and they have the capacity to levy fines in certain circumstances. I love this! What's preventing this from happening, other than no governmental pressure to make it happen? I might write to my MP...

Yeah that’s a great idea

> However you have to create a trust model where your fault allows you to have a service helping you with it while a fault at the service provider will allow you to restore data from your end too, getting the best of both worlds.

This is why I suggested to have a dual model. Leveraging the cloud and services is really a good choice as long as you have backup systems running independently as well. Your backups may not be as powerful and full fledged as the main provider but in case of emergencies like these, you still own your data and hardware and don’t panic.

In this example a weekly backup of iCloud to a drive connected to a pi with rsync could be a simple solution. 6tb is not even that much given that 500$ gift cards are being used by the author. The backup is not great but it is easy to see why it’s also necessary to own your data.

That is in no way a reasonable suggestion. You’re suggesting a raspberry pi (first red flag) along with a command line program. This is not reasonable in any sense of the word. Imagine me suggesting that everyone should be set up their own unraid server to make sure they can still stream movies and videos if Netflix goes down. Imagine me telling you you should set up a foundry to build your own engines because you can’t trust big car manufacturers. This is the case with everything in your life

Regulations exist because it’s impossible for any one person to handle everything that needs to be handled.

>That is in no way a reasonable suggestion. You’re suggesting a raspberry pi (first red flag) along with a command line program. This is not reasonable in any sense of the word.

Uh, the guy writes programming books for a living.

But since he's all-in Apple he could just use Time Machine to some sort of NAS and get a more streamlined version of the above.

It’s not reasonable because you’re assuming that 1) they have the time to set up that network infrastructure 2) their skills align with that 3) they have the knowledge to do so 4) they live in a country without strong regulations that would make such a thing unnecessary.

Just because you know objective-c doesn’t mean you know a damn thing about raspberry pis, backup programs, NASes, or anything else. It doesn’t mean you know or want to manage your own network infrastructure. They’re a Mac app programmer, not a Linux professional, not a micro-computer professional, not a network engineer, not a sys admin.

Time Machine wouldn’t work here, because it needs the files locally and he’s already stated he doesn’t have a 6tb drive.

1. I am pretty sure OP could manage to plug in an ethernet cable. 2. Again, he should be able to manage to set up a computer and plug in a USB drive, even if not familiar with the particular OS. People are not that narrow 3. I am pretty sure he could manage to install and run some backup software on his devices 4. I assuming you are missing a not there, but regulations have clearly not solved the problem, in fact its likely AML regulations caused it.

> he’s already stated he doesn’t have a 6tb drive

Someone who uses a $500 gift card to renew subscriptions could afford one

So that solves it for OP, but not for every single other person out there who's not as tech proficient and relies on iCloud for backups.

Which is not an unreasonable thing at all considering it's literally marketed as a storage solution for your photos, and a top of that even encourages users to store originals only in the cloud.

It won't solve for people that only own an iOS device but setting up a Time Machine backup is aggressively recommended by OS level notifications for every macOS users.

A simple usb hard drive will actually do, no need for a NAS. The only action required to implement proposed solution is to check "Keep all data on this Mac" in both photos and iCloud Drive settings. And to be extra cautious add a second backup drive from another vendor (to be extra extra cautious don't use Time Machine for the second drive).

For the specific case of thoses that don't have a big enough internal drive they might need to store data on an external drive. But if you do have 6TB of pictures you normally should ask yourself if a RAID1 or RAID6 is not warranted at this stage.

In conclusion it's not a binary decision there is lot of room between "I solely rely on the cloud" and "never trust the cloud".

> Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable.

Bad analogy. A better one would be having a torch in case of power cuts (done that) having some extra food in the house in case the grocery delivery fails, having some basic medical supplies in the house, having mobile internet connection in case your broadband fails etc.

Having backups of your stuff is an emergency fallback

Ordinary backups don't aim to replace the full service. When you have a stock of food, you don't have enough to last you a lifetime. You have enough to weather a storm. The equivalent for tech would probably be having an offline copy of your "essential" data, but not of every photo you ever took. It would protect you from temporary internet disruption, or if a provider suspended you for a few days, but not if they banned you completely with no recourse.

> Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable.

I’m feeling attacked. Here I was thinking my lifelong work of self sufficiency for my family was completely reasonable until you came along. Thanks a lot!

Best take in this whole thread

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