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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

I discovered it a few minutes ago because I had just purchased a Premium Spotify license and opened Grooveshark to export my collections.

All my favorite songs, albums and bands were listed there, and only there. I used Grooveshark for a few years, and enjoyed it. Thank you for that.

But also fuck you.

Throwing away data like that is unforgivable for a service. Imagine Facebook disappearing with your list of friends, or Google Docs with your documents. Since ownership was transferred, I don't expect to see my data again. And this destroys all goodwill I had.

"The writing was on the wall!" Whose wall? Certainly not mine, not with Youtube and its obviously pirated songs still existing.

Thank you for the generous service, Grooveshark, but fuck you for destroying my music collection.

(no, it's not on groovebackup.com)

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> Imagine Facebook disappearing with your list of friends, or Google Docs with your documents.

Yes, I imagine it on a daily basis. That's how the cloud works. It's happened before, and it will happen again. Any cloud based data is bound to disappear at any second because of a hack (ask Matt Hunan), because of a court order you are not aware of, because of an in-court-or-out-of-court settlement you are not part of and not aware of. Lots of reasons. That's why I don't actually trust the cloud as anything but backup.

Furthermore, anything not backed up offline (even if there's an online backup) is also in danger from malicious actors.

The only person to blame for not keeping a backup (of just the song titles, no less) is yourself. Use expletives if it makes you feel better, though, by all means.

I learned that the hard way a month ago when I found that all my photos from the past 6 years that I had been storing on Dropbox had been mysteriously deleted :(

Storing != backing up

Still trying to let go of ever having those visual memories again. Certainly you're right that it's no one's fault but our own, but that doesn't make the lose any easier to deal with. I do blame Dropbox though, considering I'm a paying customer. When it happened I saw that the actual backup feature costs extra.

Dropbox may be a ok syncing service but it's a pretty shitty backup service given any collaborators can delete your files. Suffice it to say I'll be backing up locally and finding an alternative to Dropbox.

(Sort of a tangent/rant/vent there, but if anyone has a recommendation for cloud backups I'd love to hear.)

No cloud experience myself that sounds useful to you, but BackBlaze seem to be everyone's favorite around here -- but do note that they are purely a "backup" rather than "storage" service.

They delete stuff you have not backed up in the last 30 days. If you have a removable drive that you backed up to backblaze, it must go through their program again once every 30 days, or they will consider this abandoned.

Ask yourself this, now: Why cloud, when $70 buys you a 1TB portable hard drive with ~100MB/sec bandwidth (that you don't have at all unless you live in Japan or Korea, and that you don't get to Dropbox/BackBlaze even if you live there).

Yev from Backblaze here -> You're not wrong. In fact we recommend having an on-site backup FIRST, then moving on to other backup mediums. I wrote a post about it -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/. Online backup is great, but local backup will always be quicker to get data on to and off of!

Do you keep a backup of your list of Facebook friends, your HN posts and "saved stories"?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Any facebook contact I care about is already in my email program's contacts (Thunderbird, local, backed up) and my phone (contacts) - and I prefer to contact them without using facebook as an intermediary.

Whenever there's an interesting story on HN I think I'd want to refer to later, I bookmark&cache it locally.

And posts/comments I deem worthy to save, I do save a copy of locally, although that's about one in fifty I make.

I know that's not common, and furthermore in the event of a global facebookgeddon, it is likely my bookmarks would be useless. But in the case of a local cloudgeddon (see e.g. the Matt Hunan story), I'm mostly covered.

I got off Grooveshark years ago because it was obvious it wasn't going to be around forever, I am actually pretty darn surprised they lasted as long as they did. Either you ignored the signs or were blissfully unaware.

I didn't know about groovebackup.com

Regarding shutdown - I saw that coming - put a few favourite songs into a text file :/

> Throwing away data like that is unforgivable for a service.

Did you consider that immediate deletion of the data might have been part of the settlement agreement, and that there was (for Grooveshark or their owners) therefor not much of a choice to do otherwise?

I fail to see how my list of song titles infringes copyright and requires immediate deletion.

You might fail to see it but it was seen by the lawyers who demanded or negotiated the settlement from the other side of the table where Grooveshark sat. The users weren't a part of the discussion and the winning side--the music industry--was able to get exactly what it wanted because otherwise they'd bankrupt Grooveshark.

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