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Sad, really. My high school years were all on MySpace and I haven't seen them since. It did make me get more serious about personal data preservation as an adult though, so it's not all bad. And maybe some of those haircuts were better left to history.
On the whole, I consider myself lucky to have lost data due to a badly configured 40GB HDD early in my digital life. I was so aggrieved that it inoculated me against data preservation complacency, and in the subsequent 25 years I haven’t lost a single byte. As they say, every safety regulation is written in blood.
The time was 10 p.m., I was done. I hit save. While the application was writing the file to disk, I decided to move the bulky monitor from one side of my desk to the other. Somehow while doing so I hit the power button (or took the power cord with me, I'm not sure). PC went off while writing operations were still on.
The file could not be recovered, and of course there was no other copy.
I spent the rest of the night recreating the essay from memory, and thinking I had been extremely unlucky.
I've never lost any file again, ever.
In the late 90's, advent of MP3 also made people focus more on digital backup strategies until Bittorrent came and people started believing that they could get things back anytime from an ethereal faucet. It wasn't so. The same happened with cloud. People thought their Google Drive was their backup. It wasn't so.
So, even the opposite could be argued: that people's digital backups got worse over the last two decades because they relied too much on third party virtual services that were not as reliable as physical media.
Still, there are big gaps due to prevailing photo-taking habits. Unless you were seriously into photography, people took way fewer photos. Lots of posed pics of family and friends on special occasions, fewer of everyday life. I have like 2 pictures of my undergraduate projects.
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Messages, select user, click the user icon to get to the info page, click Photos, Edit, Select, Download -> photos are in the Photos app and you can do what you want with them. Not the easiest operation, but hardly jealously prevented.
Self-reply addendum - individual photos can be dealt with with a simple long-press, no need for delving into the info page for the user.
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Very easily. Even without Apple software, connecting to a Windows PC with a USB cable, iPhone will present itself as a digital camera so you can import photos with the built-in Microsoft photos app or file explorer. You can also use Apple’s Windows software. On Mac, even without iCloud, you can sync photos “the old way” just like iPod synced content used to do. The photos app will transfer photos over USB or WiFi and…
I was surprised that exporting from Photos on iOS to an SMB share on a local network Just Works.
Obviously none of this is massively impressive to anyone who has used Android including myself, but a lot of the assumptions surrounding iOS and iPadOS being inflexible are somewhat outdated.
They're in iCloud, backed up to my NAS at home, backed up to another cloud vendor, backed up to two different external hard drives, stored in separate locations, as well as archived on Blu-Ray M-Disc media, also identical copies, stored next to the external hard drives.
They're not exactly "great quality" most of them, us being early adopters of digital cameras (2000'ish), so 1.5 megabit, up to 3.5 megabit for our last "real" digital camera. There are some Canon EOS 500D SLR photos in there as well, but we continued to shoot our old an trusty analogue SLR cameras for years after that.
These days it's all phone pictures anyway. I don't think I have more than a handful of SLR quality photos of the kids.
On the whole, I consider myself lucky to have lost data due to a badly configured 40GB HDD early in my digital life. I was so aggrieved that it inoculated me against data preservation complacency, and in the subsequent 25 years I haven’t lost a single byte. As they say, every safety regulation is written in blood.