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Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

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Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#391
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's important to be pragmatic here. I'm (slowly) in the process of moving away from 'big tech' services where I can, but I still plan to use them where it makes sense (WhatsApp, Discord, YouTube). I'm also evaluating e-mail for a small business and we might be going with Microsoft, even though I would never choose them for my personal e-mail (I left some comments on that topic recently). Taking back our priv…

If you want just an email provider I cannot recommend Fastmail enough. Entirely painless, just works and the web UI is fast.

Fastmail looks great from a UX perspective, but the problem is that they store your e-mail in the US, which I don't want.

I'm currently with Soverin, but I'm not completely satisfied with them. If anybody has recommendations for good email providers in the EU, I'm interested to hear them!

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#393
post #354
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I thought that losing access to my gmail would be pretty bad, but now that I think about it, I don’t see anything particularly troublesome if it happens tomorrow, let alone catastrophic. Can you give some examples?

If you owm the email's domain you can switch the domain Mx record and continue just fine. But over the years a lot of accounts end up tied to Google SSO and if you are just using a plain old @gmail and have tied all your accounts to it you are probably in trouble.

I’m not a business. I don’t use domains or SSO. Yes, I use my gmail address as a login to many websites, but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). And I do export my gmail inbox every year as a backup.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#395
post #378
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just copy-righted or copy-right disputed content. Share the access to download option and you will soon find groups repeatedly exploiting this. Pirated content being accessible for 60 days for free is already pretty good.

Good points, and all easily manageable via a few adjustments to the rule. If it's cporn or other felony content, then fine, shut it all off. For anything else, allow download only from the last three IP addresses the owner personally logged in from, plus two (if they've moved or are nomadic), plus maybe the same two or three last logged-in-from MAC addresses. Limit to three successful copies downloaded, then shut off…

The reason felony content is a problem is due to liability issues, but it doesn't only apply to that. The lines aren't always clear, so they would probably err on the side of being overly aggressive to be safe. Can you relax that paranoia legislatively somehow?

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#396
post #371
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth a try but I’ve tried doing this before and they said it’s outside the scope of paid support.

Yet it's not outside of the Law. At least in Europe, they MUST give all your data back.

Assuming you mean the GDPR, it only obligates them to share the data they have. If their response is "we don't have that data any more", then the GDPR won't help you.

It opens them up for a massive claim if it later turns out that they really did have the data somewhere, though.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#397
post #393
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you owm the email's domain you can switch the domain Mx record and continue just fine. But over the years a lot of accounts end up tied to Google SSO and if you are just using a plain old @gmail and have tied all your accounts to it you are probably in trouble.

I’m not a business. I don’t use domains or SSO. Yes, I use my gmail address as a login to many websites, but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). And I do export my gmail inbox every year as a backup.

Fair enough, if you feel like you have a handle on your personal situation and are comfortable with the level of risk then by all means don't be worried. When I say catastrophic, I don't necessarily mean catastrophic to your entire life with no way forward. I just mean your digital life will be pretty toast and you'll have to start again on a lot of platforms that don't make the email changeover easy. That's not going to be true for everyone either. If you've got nothing important online, nothing to worry about.

> but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult).

I think this is pretty naive though, this thread is really a story about how automated systems are making the digital world more challenging to navigate and how getting a human to help you is becoming harder in many cases, making those automated decisions final. If all you needed to sign up for something was your email address, it's possible they will have no way to verify you are the owner if you lose access to that, even if you can get in contact with a human.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#398
post #285
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Have you backed up your email? Yes... Every piece of data I have that I care about is backed up following a 3-2-1 model I am also in the process of moving off Gmail due to the Legacy termination. >I don't think users truly understand that now. In my experience user don't truly understanding anything, given that I work in data storage I take is seriously, I am also called on my people on a semi regular basis to reco…

I am CS mayor and would say that I failed to create a system that works reliably for backup. My digital footprint is only something like 2 TB, but none of my devices can store this kind amount of data at once without external HDDs. So doing a backup is a step by step manual and time consuming process of downloading and juggling data, rotating individual backups, etc. I rarely could think of doing it more than once pe…

In this day there is very limited reasons to not have backups,

Even if your devices can not store that kinda of data, and 2TB is nothing IMO... (My home has raw storage online capacity of over 100TB right now, and probably triple that in offline / non-powered on storage)

There are countless economical cloud backup services, and of you are creative ways to put import things into multiple "free" services

For example one person was really concerned about their photos, but they did not want to pay for a proper backup. My suggestion then was at a minimum to use 2 or more of the free photo services, They had a Amazon Prime Subscription, used an iPhone, and had a google account so Prime Photos, Google Photos, and iCloud where all options, picking at least 2 of them would be better than nothing. It would not be a proper 3-2-1 backup, but it would protect against something like random account deletion from one of the providers

The point is, there are creative ways to ensure access to data with out having to have a massive storage array in your home like I do. I value privacy and control more than most, this is also why all my home automation non-cloud based, I dont use Google Home, Siri, Homekit, Alexa etc. and I will never buy a device that requires cloud service to use. But I recognize I am not like most people sadly....

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#399
post #377
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I would describe an off-the-shelf NAS as easy and cheap Only Qnap offers ZFS and Synology offer BTRFS. And none of these file system are default option. ( I dont think they do scheduled scrubbing by default either ) They are also only available on mid range model. Qnap had third or forth security issues with Bitcoin ransomeware. Synology requires lot of work to turn off All internet facing features. To the point the…

TrueNAS uses ZFS by default and they have small SOHO solutions [0], too. [0]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/#Configure

Yes it was pointed out many times on HN, but TrueNAS Mini E starts diskless at $800. Not consumer range or are they consumer friendly. I was originally hoping Kobol [1] will get traction and once they gain economy of scale both in terms of hardware and software. It even has a Built-In UPS! And Things will improve. But the market and supply chain is simply too tough.

[1] https://kobol.io

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#400
post #397
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a business. I don’t use domains or SSO. Yes, I use my gmail address as a login to many websites, but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). And I do export my gmail inbox every year as a backup.

Fair enough, if you feel like you have a handle on your personal situation and are comfortable with the level of risk then by all means don't be worried. When I say catastrophic, I don't necessarily mean catastrophic to your entire life with no way forward. I just mean your digital life will be pretty toast and you'll have to start again on a lot of platforms that don't make the email changeover easy. That's not goin…

Well, if I lose access to gmail the first thing I do will be switching all important online services to a new email.

I’m curious though, which online services would be really bad to lose access to (for you personally)?

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