6 years ago, I had a friend get his Apple ID compromised by an ex-.. He was effectively locked out of his laptop which he'd used his Apple ID to set up and sign in to. No recourse, so it meant that I had to do a full wipe and reinstall, and thankfully his music and photo projects were always religiously backed up to a pocket drive, so he lost nothing. At the point when he went to set up the newly installed OS, I insisted he use a password and NOT his Apple ID to secure the machine.

From then on, I've made it a point to have family and friends NOT use their Apple ID for their computer login credentials. This guy's story only enforces my belief of the foolishness and danger of relegating one's data to a third party's cloud.

If the guy in the linked blog had stored his shit locally - it's not like pocket drives are expensive - he wouldn't have gotten into such a nightmare.

I learned the HARD lesson myself back in 2004 when an iTunes update went sideways and lost my entire music library. poof! into the void it went and I spent the better part of a week re-importing my CD collection to an external drive. Never again.

Sucks for people that fall into these kinds of fiascos with cloud storage. Take my advice: Don't rely on it w/o having local backups.

Prolly preaching to the choir, but...

Big tech does not have walled gardens. It has corrals, full of milk cows. If you're in one of those corrals, big tech will milk you dry, and cull you once the risk associated with you outweighs the predicted benefit from keeping you.

As such, whenever possible/reasonable to do so:

• Avoid big tech companies. They will likely treat you like cattle. If you're looking for options, open source is typically way better.
• If you can't do the above, at least avoid the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). They will treat you like cattle, you can be certain of that.
• If you can't avoid GAFAM, avoid at least their corrals. For example if you have lots of Apple junk, stop relying on further Apple hardware or software; Google is equally crap but at least in this situation it has less power over you, so it's a less worse option. The opposite would apply if you have lots of Google crap.
• "teh cloud lol" is someone else's computer dammit. Once they deny you access, it's as good as gone. Under no moment or situation, rely solely on the cloud for keeping your files safe; keep a local copy. And if the file is so unimportant you're OK losing it because "teh cloud" is denying you access, just delete it.

inb4 "but dat's too hard lol lmao" — play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

That's the risk you run buying into the whole crapple ecosystem.