Am I too old? I only trust hard saving to offline storage. Be that an external hdd or a flash drive.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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people just never learn that companies cannot be trusted...time and time again, they work to steal and claim ownership of your intelligence.
people don't need to learn that. these things need to be regulated. also Google needs to be broken up to like 12 pieces or nationalized. what needs to happen is companies not have this much power ever.
what needs to happen is companies not have this much power ever.
There is zero chance that we can get the oligarchy to surrender power peacefully, so that's not going to happen unless…
^For^ ^legal^ ^purposes^ ^this^ ^comment^ ^is^ ^a^ ^joke^
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Famously Americans did the splitting thing once before with Standard Oil and it was immensely beneficial to the economy in general. Just checked the wiki and it was more than 100 years ago. Unlikely the same laws are still on the books.
There are several companies currently active that deserve the same treatment.
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I'm in university (as an old) and just about everyone from faculty to staff has been pushing me to put everything in OneDrive. I know better, but young people tend to trust that an educational institution is looking out for them.
My freshman year I met teenagers who didn't know what a flash drive is. Most of them have iPads with no storage, one of my classmates was just uploading all her lectures directly to YouTube so she could review them later.
There's nothing wrong with putting everything in OneDrive... as long as you also have it somewhere else.
At work we're told to put everything into OneDrive and we're blocked from using USB drives, or using any other online storage. Fortunately all of the data I use and create on my work computer belongs to my employer, so if they only trust MS with their data then who am I to argue?
Businesses are classic chumps for the Microsoft scam. It's why Microsoft will stop producing new products and just live off the Office suite for another 100 years, easy.
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You don't need to trust to use cloud services, I copy encrypted backups into the cloud. The only risk is that they don't give it back but that's why you have multiple backups.
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Cloud can be a backup, it absolutely should never be your only copy.
But keep in mind they will probably use that data for anything they want, like training AI models. So make sure you are ok with them doing that on any data you put there. This is mostly why I fill my cloud space with incoherent nonsense.
If you want to back up anything important on someone else's server (cloud), put it all into an encrypted blob. It's not a bad idea to use them to put a copy of your files in a different physical location, but also don't trust them any further than necessary.
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The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust cloud companies.
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust companies.
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust.
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It’s worth noting that Google is 100x worse than the baseline level of sucking when it comes to randomly deleting your account with no recourse.
The only time in my life I've seriously considered suicide was when I lost the usb drive that had all my novel notes on it. If a major company ripped everything from me because "reasons", I'd be considering homicide instead.
By the way, git is good for more than just software. I keep my novel notes in a git repository these days.
I do my writing in markdown. Keeps me from being distracted over formatting. Easily converted to HTML/EPUB for review and editing. git + plaintext + pandoc is a dream.
Yes, same here - I do all my show scripts in Markdown. My editor of choice is IntelliJ. For any non-technical writers here, IntelliJ is like what Scrivener wants to be when it grows up.
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Ah yes, the very first lesson I'd teach in my multimedia 'authoring' class: Back your shit up, here's 11 ways to do that; if you EVER tell me you lost your work as an excuse I'm going to LAUGH IN YOUR FACE as I assign you a ZERO.
I never really liked Google, but their whole thing was supposed to be that you never needed to worry about backups.
But as Google so often does, they've decided to screw people over who relied on their drive and office suite.
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I have TWO USB backups.
My brother fucked one up for his Windows XP obsession. Which would be funny, if it were not dangerous.
Justified obsession tbh.
The fuck was this dude watching/writing down for google to think it was related to terrorism or trafficking????
They probably assumed it was a piracy list. To them, piracy is terrorism and trafficking.
guess we just need to wiggle a sheet of paper with a list of book and movie titles to scare googie
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Always, always backup. And frequently! Don't trust your local harddrive (especially if it's a device you frequently take with you), don't trust flashdrives, don't even trust your local fileserver if it doesn't have built-in backups (and even if it does, check that those backups actually work). If it's not saved on at least two physical places (two drives in the same PC/server count, but it's sketchy on its own), it's not backed up!
3-2-1 Backup: 3 copies, on 2 types of media, 1 of which is offsite.
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This is extra bad because they want you to use cloud files in gdrive (I can't remember what the feature is actually called), which doesn't save the content locally on your computer, but puts an icon that will download the content from Google servers when you click on it. This means you have no local backup of your data in your computer backups.
This is also why we're screaming about Windows and it's integrated AI that can scan your drive. What Google is doing here Windows could do in the future with your local files. "That's a nice collection of 2000s MP3s you have aaaand it's gone."
"That's a nice program you have there but the creator has revoked the licensing. So we disabled it until you update your license"
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reads like an ad for that service they plugged
Maybe, but it's a well known writer's tool. I don't think they need to push this angle.
I just realized the other day that one of the updates on my Chromebook automatically installed something called "NotebookLM" on my app bar. Never asked for it. Never even looked at apps on my Chromebook before. But it's there now, and it super secret bloodswap pinky swares it won't steal my ideas or writing. What an odd thing to say on first open.
In the process of degoogling my life. Email and files are gone, but I use GMaps, still.
Google (still) offers a regular backup of your data to download. You can set it up to run at intervals and just download the entire thing. Includes file (and photos), email, messages, etc. It's great for products you forget you were using, and great for an offline backup.
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What a clusterfuck.
I know it's a big jump from Adobe Cloud (which probably used user behavior tracking and their work to train AI) but it is possible to make great stuff with open source apps now.
The newly released GIMP 3.0 is quite amazing considering that it is free. Is it as good as Photoshop? Maybe it lacks all the features, but it's pretty damn good. If you install GMIC, an amazing suite of tools, it gets that much closer. Inkscape is also professional level for vector work now. Honorable mentions to Krita and kdenlive (for video editing). edit: I shouldn't leave out blender, jeesus.
I left Adobe Cloud 9 years ago. Yeah I had to endure a lot of ridicule and weird looks when I told people that I only worked in GIMP, but more recently, the response is less "You're weird" and more "I need Cloud for my job/it's all I know," which is a positive change.
If nobody ever makes the leap, things will stay the same indefinitely. Don't expect market forces to change things.
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There was a cool browser extension back in the days that changed the word "cloud" to "someone else's computer" in the articles on the internet. It changes perspective and eliminates a lot of headache this way.
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Is local storage even safe from big corp just remotely nuking your files? I'm sure there's a secret button somewhere to mass delete photos from people's phones incase they start rolling in the tanks to crush a protest.
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You can download stuff off your Google account here. Select what you want, not all or it might fail. Choose format, and wait for the email.
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