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I have been using Macs to manage my digital life (personal photos, files, videos, music, notes, documents etc) since Tiger/Leopard days and have been mostly hap

I have been using Macs to manage my digital life (personal photos, files, videos, music, notes, documents etc) since Tiger/Leopard days and have been mostly happy with the experience. But I feel now more than ever before that my decade and half old collection is on shaky ground and at risk of being lost with any given OS upgrade. Lost because of file system or crypto or some such software deprecation/compatibility bug or because of the software apps may become unusable. (Btw iOS 13 upgrade did cause me data loss on my phone – it wouldn't unlock after upgrade because my passcode had a special character that it would no longer accept as input, post upgrade. I had to wipe reset the phone and lost data that hadn't synced yet.) Standards based software engineering seems to be all but dead in consumer apps (it never existed?). Clearly, there is no explicit guarantee of longevity to your data and the metadata (edits, collections, albums, tags, comments) you create upon your own data. This is a really poor way to live one's digital life. Do you think about longevity of your data+metadata? What's your setup deal with this?

kace91 7y ago
I think it's about diversifying. The general rule is 3 copies of your data in different places - for me personally, I keep important data in an external drive at home, another in an external drive at my parent's house (updated less frequently for obvious reasons) and an account in the cloud with a third one. Funnily enough, the cloud account is the one that worries me the most. The data I want to keep includes some indie movies and music that I fear might disappear from the internet (like mixtapes from very indie local groups I listened as a teenager that nobody cares about) and I fear the whole account might be suspended if at some point they set up a copyright filter or something.
- drcharris 7y ago
  Privacy from the vendor, for cloud backups, is barely addressed by most of the cloud storage providers. I find the best solution is to - like many comments here about photo and music storage - stick to older more stable standards that aren't about trying to sell you services. In my case that means a chunk of SFTP-based storage, and rclone to make that storage encrypted at-rest.
lifthrasiir 7y ago
I was really shocked when I tried to upgrade from High Sierra to Mojave about a month ago and found that my work directory was completely gone. It turned out that I rigged the work directory to Dropbox via a hard link, which is emulated in HFS+ as a shadow directory plus a placeholder, and the conversion to APFS broke this emulation. Fortunately for me I had a shortcut to that shadow directory in the Finder and was able to recover it, this time using a plain symlink (less than ideal, sigh), but I now have a big question about Apple concerning about existing users. At least I trust Dropbox more than Apple though...

kace91 7y ago

I think it's about diversifying. The general rule is 3 copies of your data in different places - for me personally, I keep important data in an external drive at home, another in an external drive at my parent's house (updated less frequently for obvious reasons) and an account in the cloud with a third one. Funnily enough, the cloud account is the one that worries me the most. The data I want to keep includes some indie movies and music that I fear might disappear from the internet (like mixtapes from very indie local groups I listened as a teenager that nobody cares about) and I fear the whole account might be suspended if at some point they set up a copyright filter or something.

drcharris 7y ago
Privacy from the vendor, for cloud backups, is barely addressed by most of the cloud storage providers. I find the best solution is to - like many comments here about photo and music storage - stick to older more stable standards that aren't about trying to sell you services. In my case that means a chunk of SFTP-based storage, and rclone to make that storage encrypted at-rest.

lifthrasiir 7y ago

I was really shocked when I tried to upgrade from High Sierra to Mojave about a month ago and found that my work directory was completely gone. It turned out that I rigged the work directory to Dropbox via a hard link, which is emulated in HFS+ as a shadow directory plus a placeholder, and the conversion to APFS broke this emulation. Fortunately for me I had a shortcut to that shadow directory in the Finder and was able to recover it, this time using a plain symlink (less than ideal, sigh), but I now have a big question about Apple concerning about existing users. At least I trust Dropbox more than Apple though...