I hate to blame the end user, the consumer, but yeah clearly at least some blame is to be put onto them. As outlined in the article.

To trust Microsoft cloud services & make that a single point of failure is exceptionally foolish....and they were moving all this data off of multiple old drives & consolidating onto one big one. Why not copy-paste? Why did they actually cut-paste, move all that data into the cloud?

If it was truly so "priceless"...just make another copy? Keep everything, always, until other copies are made.

I feel bad for the guy, but come on. That was a problem they themselves created. Clouds are for rain. Assuming this person is at least 40 years old (30 years of photos & work) if not significantly older, they are more than old enough to know better, to just blindly trust cloud storage with everything.

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.

So they moved the files off of drives onto M$? WTF? How do you even get the idea of moving rather than copying?

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.

Another cautionary tale for 3-2-1

30 years of data and no backup system, sheesh.

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.)

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.

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.

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

LMAO