107
Another one to the list:
Google Flagged Parents’ Photos of Sick Children as Sexual Abuse
Google uses Microsoft’s PhotoDNA screening algorithm
If the data is "irreplaceable", you shouldn't keep only a single copy of it.
but surely microsoft keeps multiple copies! they are infallible!!
So they moved the files off of drives onto M$? WTF? How do you even get the idea of moving rather than copying?
"freeing up space on the user's device"
How can you even move files from a local to cloud storage? Even moving stuff locally from my laptop to my external storage, it copies rather than deletes the source.
Me thinks there is a bit more to this story than is being told.... As I've learnt from +25 years in IT, trust what users say but always verify. They are prone to lying, fabricating or mostly speaking from a place of ignorance so embroider buzz words theyve heard.
Yes, that's what happened
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.
If you only have one copy, you have zero copies.
Let me get this straight... They deleted their only other copy of the files from their old drives immediately after uploading them to OneDrive? Microsoft has some fault here, but that is also an unbelievably stupid decision on the user's part. It also sounds like they were planning to copy the files to a single new drive and immediately delete them from OneDrive, which is equally stupid. Are they allergic to having their files in multiple places or something?
It's an awful situation to be in, but it could've been avoided by simply having a second copy of the data, which is pretty much the simplest backup system.
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.
When everyone started getting excited about The Cloud, all I could think about was how stupid it was to trust EVERYTHING in your life to some third-party corporation. What could possibly go wrong?
30 years of data and no backup system, sheesh.
Another cautionary tale for 3-2-1
Even just 2 would have worked here
Reminder "the cloud" is someone else's computer. If you're going to use it at least make sure the "someone else" isn't a clown hat like Microsoft.
(This article also prompted me to update the backup of my personal files. I'm not following the 3-2-1 rule; a USB stick is enough. I do like to keep it updated though.)
a USB stick is enough
No, it’s really not. In addition to failing abruptly and often unpredictably, flash based media will suffer from bit rot when left unpowered for extended periods of time.
No, it’s really not.
It is enough for my use case, considering the likelihood of my SSD and the USB stick going kaboom in the span of a single month is next to zero; if only one of them does it, I can use the other to recover the data to a third medium.
As long as your data isn't super important that's okay. But if it is, keep in mind that the chance of your USB stick failing when you try to read all the data off it after your SSD fails is fairly high. USB sticks do not do well with long reads or writes and tend to overheat and kill themselves. I'd strongly recommend picking up a hard drive to use as a third backup; a new 2TB drive is maybe $60, and a refurbished one half that.
It's mostly fluff kept for sentimental value. Worst case scenario (complete data loss) would be annoying, but I can deal with it.
That's one of the two things the 3-2-1 rule of thumb doesn't address - depending on the value of the data, you need more backups, or the backup might be overkill. (The other is what you're talking with smeg about, the reliability of each storage device in question.)
I do have an internal hard disk drive (coincidentally 2TB)*; theoretically I could store a third copy of the backup there, it's just ~15GiB of data anyway. However:
- HDDs tend to be a bit less reliable than flash memory. Specially given the stick and SSD are relatively new, but the HDD is a bit older
- since the stick is powered ~once a month (as I check if the backup needs to be updated), and I do a
diffof the most important bits of the data, bit rot is not an issue - those sticks tend to fail more from usage than from old age.
- Any failure affecting my computer as a while would affect both the HDD and the SSD, so the odds of dependent failure are not negligible.
- I tend to accumulate a lot of junk in my HDD (like 490GiB of anime and shit like this), since I use it for my home LAN
That makes the benefit of a potential new backup in the HDD fairly low, in comparison with the bother (i.e. labour and opportunity cost) of keeping yet another backup.
*I don't recall how much I paid for it, but checking local hardware sites a new one would be 475 reals. Or roughly 75 euros... meh, if buying a new HDD might as well use it to increase my LAN.
the chance of your USB stick failing when you try to read all the data off it after your SSD fails is fairly high
Out of interest how high is "fairly high"? I don't think I've ever had a USB flash drive fail!
you don't need the whole usb drive to fail. It's enough if a sector or two went corrupt, and you won't be able to open (or even see) a directory, or copying a file will stop in the middle. maybe files disappear too, and then at best they get recovered to FOUND.001 or such directory without path and name, maybe also just partially, or interleaved with other lost or deleted files' fragments
Maybe I have had failures and haven't even noticed!
Depends a lot on the quality of the stick. I have some that have worked well for years, and had others that failed after just a few writes. You'll probably be fine, but probably isn't good enough for a critical backup.
Yeah I'd definitely agree with not using them for critical backups. I think they're generally fine as long as they're never holding your only copy of something, but then I'd probably say that about every kind of drive...
I wouldn't even say that. Flash drives are good as temporary storage for copying/sharing files, or for stuff you need on hand (like a Linux boot stick), but I'd never include them as part of a backup system.
Do keep in mind that if you've got a flood, fire, or something else happening to your pc, it will be lost. That's why I'd recommend an off-site backup, or at least to somewhere else in the house than where the pc is.
The stick in question is off-site; it sees the PC once per month, then it gets back to the drawer in another room. And regardless of its fate, if I had a flood or fire affecting my PC, in the second store of a brick house, odds are that I'd have far more pressing matters than the data.
make sure the "someone else" isn't a clown hat like Microsoft
I mean just about anyone of sufficient size is susceptible to this. Just keep multiple backups.
I mean just about anyone of sufficient size is susceptible to this.
Sure - the bigger the business, the more expendable each user/customer is. And Microsoft is really huge.
Just keep multiple backups.
Two are enough for most people (the 3-2-1 rule); sometimes one. The catch is that at least one of those backups must be off-line, and in a different medium than the original. While you can use the cloud to increase the reliability of the whole system, you should never rely exclusively on it.
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.
Cloud backups are alright from a privacy standpoint as long as you properly encrypt your data. Which also stops your cloud provider from suddenly terminating your account because you uploaded something they don't like.
LMAO
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.
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.
I have two drives in my tower that are just for my data. They are just folders of files. And there are two because I lost a chunk of data when the single drive it used to be died. Luckily most of it was also elsewhere, but I did think I had lost half of my wedding photos since I couldnt find the flash drive.
If you had the wedding photos in question professionally taken, it might be that the photographer, if they're still around, might have copies. I don't know whether they retain copies, but I suppose asking can't hurt.
This place says up to a year:
https://www.wanderlustportraits.com/how-long-photographers-keep-photos/
Photographers typically keep photos of their clients for a minimum of 90 days and up to a full year as part of standard practice; however, if this is important to you, review the contract and ask your professional.
This guy says forever:
I keep ALL files on two 16tb drives drives. Those drives never get wiped and I will always keep two copies even when they fill up. One internal on sata for reference and one off site. When I first started shouting, I was cheap and deleted RAWs and just kept high res jpegs. I have clients coming back for albums and I am stuck re-editing the jpegs to match in the albums. Lesson learned. If you do want to consolidate, then keep the RAWs of the editor we jpegs and delete the unused. But that’s more hassle than the cost to store unused raws. You can also rely on cloud source but you never know if you’ll ever switch cloud servers or move onto another business on want to stop paying cloud fees. For the high volume photographers it becomes wise to invest in tape drives. HDD have lives of 10 years. So eventually all those old drives will need to be transferred to newer drives. Budget this into your bottom line
I probably should have worded that better. I found the flash drive they were on. They are now on two mirrored hard drives in my tower, the flash drive, and a cloud service.
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
Do mirrored drives in a computer count as 1 or 2 locations? It's physically 2 locations, but kinda act as one for most software type issues.
In a raid? No. A drive that has an application copy it every night or something? Yes.
I believe i have them in a RAID right now. At least I still meet 3-2-1 for important stuff since I have those drives in my computer, various flash drives, an external hard drive, and a cloud spot.
RAID definitely does not count as part of your backup, it's a helpful thing, but the entire array can fail. You still need minimum 2 other copies of your data to be considered safe
BTRFS, with periodic snapshots and scrubbing, in RAID 1, only accessible remotely.
Just saying, that can be a "2".
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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