> One very good reason to regularly download backups of gmail And anything else you care about. People were bad at backing up local data, but what they're wor

> One very good reason to regularly download backups of gmail And anything else you care about. People were bad at backing up local data, but what they're worse at is backing up data that is in someone else's hands ("cloud"). Recently I was listening to a tech podcast (Tweakers, Dutch) and they discovered how dependent the presenters were on Spotify for their entire collection of playlists and library that they spent lots and lots of time gathering and curating. The reason I don't have this problem is because I already had this problem: Grooveshark happened to me. My music was all on there, including custom mp3s that I pulled from Youtube. So after spending some time importing all of that to Spotify from memory, I used the API calls to export my data from time to time. These days, people have it easy: just run a GDPR export from the Spotify website. (That reminds me, I should still email the guys at Tweakers.) I guess I also grew up with data loss more than average. As someone who wrote code from ~12 years old, but who didn't understand the rest of their computer well enough to take proper care of it, the family computer guy had to reinstall it a bunch of times and I lost data every time for different reasons (he also didn't really give a damn). And I overwrote an external hard drive once when I thought that backup software would just put the backup there, not clone the disk. And 000webhost cancelled my account one summer. And a hard drive died, then (I actually had a backup!) the backup hard drive was accidentally destroyed by my little brother. In that summer, I lost all code, school documents, game save files, browsing history, chat history, nearly everything I ever did digitally. Taught me a thing or two...