It's easy to forget that preserving digital data often comes down to keeping aging physical media alive. Nice practical guide.
Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-)
Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that were scratched up and/or sat on a sun illuminated shelf for years.
I was at a class reunion a few years ago where it turned out, I was somehow the only one who still had (digital) photos from early-to-mid 2000s.
> ... even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.
Or the photos they upload gradually degrade in quality as the company repeatedly plays with re-compressing stuff to squeeze more space out.
People have observed old (10+ years) photos on Google Drive to start getting blurry, having weird artifacts, color banding, etc... IIRC there was an article posted on HN at one point with some particular egregious examples. Techmoan also mentioned this in a video some time ago, commenting that the same thing happened to old YouTube uploads of his from the 2000s.
I also used to back up other PCs to each other somewhat regularly, and sometimes I'd end up with those files back on the original PC in a backup of another. Fortunately, when I switched to borgbackup on Windows as well [1], this massive reduplication of files became a solved problem.
[1] borgbackup doesn't officially work on Windows, but I run it in WSL which does reasonably well for all the files I really care about (i.e. the stuff I've made). When they have particular unusual characters in the filenames, it throws up a warning for that file every time, but otherwise seems fine. I've never bothered investigating whether those particular files restore to the correct filename, because I know I've also backed up the zip file those files have come from and it's just accidental that I've backed up the extracted files as well.
I've never experienced such case, did you?
Something much more likely is for a person to drop their phone into the toilet, buy a new one, and completely lose access to their only backup which is Google Photos, because they don't own a computer anymore and it is their only device.
At one point, I also had files on RapidShare. They probably weren't of any value, but I have no idea what they were now.
and I see another collection mentioned on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19569865
Why wouldn't you have made any attempt to preserve any of copy of your data anyway? Even if you believed the files would stay online forever, it's surely always more convenient to use local files than re-download every time?
(but also sorry you lost your last physical copy of your memories, that kind of sucks and sorry if my comment comes across as quite insensitive)
I advise people to backup their data (emails, writings, pictures, photos, home videos, phone contents, etc.) and worry about their music/TV/film/game collection later.
Most people's personal data collection doesn't run into dozens of terabytes, while most people's media collection does.
You can get portable 5TB HDDs, one or two of them is usually more than enough for most people's own files. Plug them in and backup regularly, e.g. monthly, they last a lot longer that way than if you backup once and throw them in the cupboard.