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Comment by NoSalt | Hacker News Reader

Ever since Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. started offering "free" online storage for photos, ever since streaming started to be popular, I have ALWAYS extolled the virtues of µSD card slots in phones and owning your own media (i.e., purchasing CDs and DVDs). Many people would give me a hard time about this, calling me a Luddite, but I will never lose access to my photos, music, or movies ... unless it is the end of the world as we know it, which I happily have on R.E.M.'s Eponymous album.

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Highly recommend setting up your own photo hosting and backup. People love Immich, but ente.io is also great! Much better than trusting your photos to a single microSD card which may die at any moment.

Why would anyone call you a luddite for advocating for MicroSDs? Of course the reason SD were pushed away (at least for Apple) was to offer cloud backup as the only option with no alternatives.

Of course the reason SD were pushed away (at least for Apple) was to offer cloud backup as the only option with no alternatives.

Except that no part of what you claim is true:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...

Does anyone actually do this? I’m looking to reduce my reliance on iCloud but I’ve kept my backups there so far as it always seemed onerous to have to plug in and trigger the backup manually. And easy to forget, too.

> Does anyone actually do this?

Yep. I've been using an iPhone since 2012, so about 14 years. I do a local backup to my Macbook and then perform upgrades via USB, I don't do over the air upgrades. I also don't sync my photo albums into iCloud. I do have iCloud backups enabled also. It's not even a concern about privacy, per se, it's a question of whether or not I actually control my data if its not in my possession. More copies is good for resiliency.

I regularly back up the photos on my phone (which is admittedly not an iphone, but also does not have a microsd slot) to a local file server in my house. I don't need a microsd slot to control my data.

The iPhone has never had a microsd slot, many years before icloud existed.

From my experience with SD cards in mobile phone when I worked in a Telco, most customers didn't actually know how to use them. Because in many cases plugging in the SD card didn't magically increase the base storage of the device, they actually needed to know how to store things on it.

But that's a separate issue altogether

I just wish it was possible to buy decent ųSD cards. Even really expensive ones sold in reputable stores die all the time. Sure they work just fine if your goal is to write photos into it, never delete anything and get a new one once it fills up, but anything more write heavy typically kills my SD cards within months. SSDs last decades.

An SD card should only ever be treated as a local cache for data you can replace or will soon move to more permanent storage. Even if you had the best card in the world you could still lose or have your phone stolen.

I wish library of things had tape writers and readers. Magnetic tape storage is quite cost effective for data backups and archiving.

I have been using the same µSD card since 2016 with no issues.

Watch ... it'll fail on me later today. :-D

The one in my dash cam has been going for a year or two now. I pull video off it fairly regularly. It's the branded rove 4k one.

Maybe that one is specifically made to work for that application. Are you confident that you could go out and buy a replacement SD card in a general electronics store and get something which would be as robust?

The one in my dash cam is a SanDisk you can buy anywhere. It's got a good two years on it, works fine. Same in the Pi-hole, it was so long ago that I don't remember when I put that card in. More than three or four years, I'm pretty sure.

In fact, though I don't use a lot of SD cards, I don't recall having one go bad. I'm sure it's happened, but obviously not often enough for me to remember.

But in reality MicroSD card are easily to lose. And setting up an NAS is still a bag of hurt. Not to mention the lack of ZFS / BTrFS on cheaper model, and no ECC RAM your data will likely be corrupted half way through the decade.

We still don't have an easy solution to this problem.

Nothing really wrong with being a Luddite. The Luddites weren't anti-technology or anti-progress. Rather, they opposed deployment of technology in the workplace which they believed would reduce their pay, reduce the quality of their output, and make it easier to exploit vulnerable people such as children. They were, basically, doing the same thing as software engineers who argue that AI mandates are making their lives worse and making the quality of their employers' software worse.

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