If you only have one copy, you have zero copies.

Another cautionary tale for 3-2-1

If the data is "irreplaceable", you shouldn't keep only a single copy of it.

30 years of data and no backup system, sheesh.

The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially "free" to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it's awesome.

Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.

Hate to victim blame, but what a moron. Microsoft is definitely at fault here, but so is this guy.

He "moved" the data to OneDrive. Why the fuck would anyone do that? He wants to migrate to a new larger drive, but why did he feel the need to delete stuff before verifying that his data has safely been migrated to the new drive? A single drive to store anything important is very dangerous in itself, but this is a different level of stupidity.

I had few TB migration at the start of this year. I vehemently follow the 3-2-1 rule for anything important. (I actually do more copies than that for personal photos and documents.) But I still have the old disks just in case. I can't fathom doing something like this. Maybe I'm overreacting, but ffs it's stupid.

I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later.

I'm assuming that the reason that he didn't just do the transfer to a new drive instead of to OneDrive (which seems like it'd be more-straightforward) is because the new drive was going to also be a system disk, not just hold his data.

I think that it would have been a good idea to get a second new drive and have done that transfer just so that there's a backup. I mean, it doesn't really sound like the user was planning to wind up with a backup of his data, or for that matter, that he had a backup to start with.

Maybe OneDrive locking the account was unexpected, but drives can fail or be inadvertently erased or whatever. If you've got thirty years of irreplaceable data that you really badly want to keep, I'd want to have more than one copy of it. The cost of a drive to store it is not large compared to the cost involved in producing said data.

Your data in the cloud should be at best being another backup, in addition to your local backup you do regularly. And even that is a stretch, because those companies can analyze your data on the cloud too. Man, people have so much trust in companies like Microsoft.

This is why I run my own NextCloud instance that backs up locally and via offsite rotation.

Sure, I could still lose it all, but it would be 100% my own fault if I did.

Remember that cloud backups is the last location, the 1 in 3-2-1. You should have two local copies already on top of your cloud copy

Another one to the list:

Google Flagged Parents’ Photos of Sick Children as Sexual Abuse

Google uses Microsoft’s PhotoDNA screening algorithm

This happened to me a few years ago (W10) with OneDrive but I had another copy and gave up quickly trying to engage with MS.

I use Lunix Mint now anyway, that was another reason for moving from Windows at the time.

Lol, people pay for these subscriptions for years only to find out they can't even use them. Reminds me of employees that spend years being loyal only to find out their employers don't give a shit about them.

The OneDrive subreddit was a riot with users complaining about lost data and nerds answering with "achually you don't know how to use it!"

It took a lot of work, but I pulled everything I could find down from cloud storage providers and started hosting my stuff locally.

It’s nowhere near as convenient or intuitive, but goddamn if these stories don’t keep popping up everywhere. If you don’t physically have your data in hand, consider it lost. It could be gone at any moment for any reason. If you’re hosting your stuff in the cloud, do yourself a favor and at least back your stuff up locally on top of that, but my honest recommendation is to ditch these companies completely and invest in learning how to host your stuff locally.

It kills me to see people losing their stuff. Where are their backups, for crying out loud!!

Never trust microsoft with anything important. Ever.

Jokes on them, I've got way too much illegal shit to just hand it to the cloud. Local storage ftw.

Err... that's a joke, of course, haha ha.

DumbDrive

And this is why I have never used OneDrive.

Garenteed they uploaded something unsavoury in all that data. That is like the only way to get your account instantly closed by uploading files.

Saw a YouTuber recently have the same issue after they uploaded a WhatsApp chat dump to google drive to share it with a translator for story. Turns out there was stuff in it that got the Google account blocked, which included the channel.

They should've got a big SSD instead. Shitty!