For those who’re delicate to tech disasters, you would possibly wish to look away now: A current Reddit thread tells the story of an unlucky person who discovered 30 years of photographs and work locked away and inaccessible in Microsoft OneDrive.
The person made use of their cloud storage account to consolidate recordsdata from numerous laborious drives, which needed to be discarded resulting from a transfer. The plan was to then transfer the recordsdata again from OneDrive to new laborious drives, however earlier than the person was ready to do that, their account was locked by Microsoft—with none purpose given.
It is nonetheless not clear why the account was locked or why Microsoft has up to now ignored the person’s appeals to revive entry, but it surely’s a warning to the remainder of us—and a reminder to place just a few fundamental protections and precautions in place.
Preserve A number of Backups
It was once a reality universally acknowledged that knowledge wasn’t correctly backed up till it was backed up twice, in two separate areas. You may copy your necessary recordsdata to an exterior laborious drive, but when it is in the identical room as your laptop computer, then theft, fireplace, or flood can wipe out each copies on the identical time.
In the present day, having two backups of the whole lot—so three copies in complete—may appear extreme, as cloud storage providers so not often go down. We have all turn out to be used to the concept the info we have logged with Microsoft, Google, Apple, or different suppliers is at all times going to be out there, so we need not fear about it.
