In the event you’re delicate to tech disasters, you would possibly need to look away now: A latest Reddit thread tells the story of an unlucky consumer who discovered 30 years of pictures and work locked away and inaccessible in Microsoft OneDrive.
The person made use of their cloud storage account to consolidate information from numerous arduous drives, which needed to be discarded attributable to a transfer. The plan was to then transfer the information again from OneDrive to new arduous drives, however earlier than the consumer was ready to do that, their account was locked by Microsoft—with none cause given.
It is nonetheless not clear why the account was locked or why Microsoft has up to now ignored the consumer’s appeals to revive entry, however it’s a warning to the remainder of us—and a reminder to place a number of fundamental protections and precautions in place.
Maintain A number of Backups
It was a reality universally acknowledged that knowledge wasn’t correctly backed up till it was backed up twice, in two separate areas. You possibly can copy your essential information to an exterior arduous drive, but when it is in the identical room as your laptop computer, then theft, hearth, or flood can wipe out each copies on the similar time.
At the moment, having two backups of every little thing—so three copies in complete—might sound extreme, as cloud storage providers so hardly ever go down. We have all turn into used to the concept that the information we have logged with Microsoft, Google, Apple, or different suppliers is all the time going to be accessible, so we needn’t fear about it.