alt Hacker NewsCounter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years.
I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated.
Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
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Funny you bring up Gmail as a positive example when they reneged on their promise of unlimited storage 5 years ago.
Most of my media is backed up on my Unraid server, the most important stuff is backed up on an external drive and I also have some things that exist in the cloud, which I do not trust, which is why it's tiered as least important.
Yeah I have all this data backed up on a couple different drives. IRC and ICQ logs going back to when I was a teenager. Digitised photos from when I was a kid through to the present day. Source code for projects I worked on from when I was 10. Rips of all the cds I used to own. And yes, email exports dating back to about 2003.
I wish I kept more, honestly. It’s a beautiful record.
I think my most treasured possession is videos of myself and my parents from when I was young. I’m thinking of sitting my sisters kids down in front of a camera for 15 minutes and getting them to talk about their life. It’s beautiful to rewatch this stuff decades later. It’s transporting.
I have all my music from 2009, shuffled from drive to drive. It out-survived my subscriptions to on-demand music streaming services (I do Pandora for discovery but don’t like the feeling of building an Amazon streaming “library” that will actually vanish when I stop paying).
I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though.
> How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it".
As other commenters have stated, maybe this isn't the best place to ask.
I'm definitely in the "almost all of it" camp. I have Diablo II game saves on my desktop that are carried forward directly from my Windows 98 SE box circa 2002-2003. As well as Linux ISO's I acquired on Kazaa while still on dial-up internet.
Uhhh, me? My home directory has 20-30 years of documents, photos, emails, the email address itself, instant-messaging logs, etc. Even a downloaded zip of every comment I ever made on Reddit. (But not HN, I should look into that.)
The primary exception would be Google Photos pictures which were auto-uploaded from my phone that I haven't curated and downloaded yet.
I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support.
> on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured.
Hold up, is this OR or XOR? It sounds like you're trying to add unreasonable (dis-)qualifiers. TFA isn't saying one must boycott "the cloud" and erase all data, it just advocates that you retain an independent copy.
> Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
I think that's conflating different use-cases.
* Having a regular offsite backup into S3 isn't that different from when the data was rsync'ed to a Linux machine I paid for an account on. Any cloud-ness is a remote implementation detail, not a change in the consumer relationship.
* In contrast, "all my photos are in the cloud and my friends and family can collaborate on shared albums" is different, it permanently moves the locus of control.
I still have hour long techno/house mixes that I downloaded from some dude who was trying to get into DJing in 2008/did house shows or something, because we played on the same garry's mod server. They don't exist anywhere else on the internet as far as I could possibly find. Searching his dj name doesn't bring up anything.
All of mine. Music, photos, copies of important documents, archived sets of email (and gmail) across different eras. My facebook archive export, IRC & IM logs stretching back to ~2000. A lot of it even on SSD, let alone HDD's, let alone "archival media". The spinning rust is mostly used for double- and triple-redundant copies of my music and photos, as well as the usual movie collection.
I'm not sure HN is the best place for such... technological anachronistic skepticism? A lot of us ARE going to be storing all that for shits and giggles.