spoil sport. @beschizza had so much fun to imagine the content of his locked safe
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YEA! I think I was one of your advisors who suggested this route. I’m glad it appeared to help.
OT: Now if I can get my neighbor to contact our US Representative about her USPS constant mail hold f-ups. She doesn’t want to get her carrier in trouble, but I end up having to double-check her mailbox every flippin’ time she leaves town. (Sometimes he or his sub will deliver for two days, then hold for three days, and then deliver the rest of the time. Grrr.)
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I am currently trying to recover my own back ups from Apple’s Time Machine as, it seems and I was told at the Genius Bar when I presented my situation, that the newest version of Time Machine on the El Capitan OS does not recognize Time Machine back ups from any previous OS.
In one way, it’s very freeing. After all, I fully expect no one is going to be interested in my archive when I’m gone. In another, it’s very frustrating as I have pictures, music, art, correspondence, and reams of my own writing that I collected and kept for a purpose. I USE a lot of that old stuff to make new stuff.
Oddly enough, I mentioned my problem to Kevin Kelly when I happened to run into him by chance at a bookstore in Brookline, MA. Don’t think he believed me. Then I see that he is projecting an “own nothing, access everything” future. It may be an accurate prediction but you will be able to “access everything” only until you can’t and that accessibility or lack of it has nothing to do with your wants or needs.
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Well ‘the cloud’ is useful and nice… just I don’t trust it much and would not rely solely on free services. Put your not sensitive data there but just don’t be surprised if it goes poof all of a sudden just like a local drive can do.
I have my local laptop drive and an external drive I back things up to regularly cause I like to keep it simple.
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You don’t go to your photos.google.com and download things from there? I totally do, at least once a month. Those photos are mine mine mine and I’ll be damned if I trust any one place with them.
No, I back them up directly off the device to get the original resolution photographs. I haven’t paid for Google’s extra storage space that allows you to store the original resolutions. But Google doesn’t know that I’ve backed them up. They want me to delete my originals and just leave everything on the cloud - their cloud
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I use an external drive and flash drives for documents and cell phone photos back ups, and Google Drive for cell photos only. I had a younger teacher laugh at me when I questioned the wisdom of the department to completely rely on the cloud for backups, especially since the network would often go down.
Also, I’d never trust anything super personal to the cloud, and that would go double for a possible dissertation (@anon61221983 
I also had a super paranoid mentor professor who trained me to maintain numerous backups.)
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I have on more than once laughed out loud at the Microsoft guys when I went in for usability studies and got asked about would my employer use cloud services… I was working at place where they would get into all kinds of hot water hosting data outside of their own network. They will probably opt for their own internal setup for Office 365 eventually but no way in hell they are going to farm that out.
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Of course, the CIA has an AWS cloud. Only $600 Million.
Every day that I use the cloud or any service where the IT is out of my direct control (and even times when it is) I just assume this will happen at some point. It sure does suck but 1) you get exactly what you pay for and 2) even when you DO pay for it you should really expect the worst and take as many steps as possible to safe guard your livelihood. Hope for the best sure but seriously, the more valuable something is to you, the more care should be taken.
I wish this person all the best and hope they recover but I more so hope a lesson was learned and they won’t get caught flat footed next time.
I know a small law office that got hacked, utterly and completely, recently. Their computers were owned for no one knows how long. They used Gmail for their legal correspondence - totally owned. Facebook pages defaced. They did not have AV on any computer. They will likely never recover and can’t imagine the damage to all involved. I believe they had to call all of their clients and let them know that they basically had to assume that every email, every document on every detail on all the computers, every filing, every bit and byte in the firm is now our somewhere on the internet. I guess the point here is that no they did not intend for this to happen but that they had the duty to take all due precautions and they took none. The hacker did the actual damage but the firm is to blame.
In this case Google screwed this person but the individual did nothing to mitigate the possible future damage here. Sucks but hard to feel too sorry here.
EDIT: My comment is specific to the blog. The email I feel a bit more empathy for but it is part of the same thing. You should always have a plan for your business continuity. If your business or livelihood is just a blog and email then you sure should have a plan if those free services go bye-bye on you. Tough lesson for sure. Good luck blog owner!
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Eggs, basket.
As far as I’m concerned a (non-free) internet hosting service (Google or otherwise) is an excellent tertiary, backup-of-the-backup-just-in-case egg basket.
You know, for those modern infinitely reproducible, but easily corruptable and sometimes friggin’ magically disappearing eggs we have to constantly mind nowadays, like the paranoid digital hens we have become.
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Straight up, this is the first time I’ve gotten “you should be a hive mind to protect the integrity of your brand” this decade. I thought you guys were all dead or working for ■■■■■■■■■■ by now.
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Lets take this as an opportunity to learn to back everything up. The more places the better.
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Hive mind? I was more thinking of an Orwellia memory hole process by which all previous posts are constantly updated to agree with what ever the latest post says. But a hive mind sounds much less complicated. 
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Cautionary tale: http://www.news9.com/Global/story.asp?S=13833909
Back when I was running research, my data was always copied daily onto multiple computers, a USB stick and a cloud service. And then hand-copied onto paper as well.
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wish google would erase some of the crazy addys collecting dust on my massive list…
snapshots of his blog exist at archve.org. Just use the wayback machine…
I had an issue with google some two years about some ‘red meat’ and a certain celeb
only knew this as I managed to remember a possible cause for such robo management
but in another instant a semi professional airline journal writer on google+ was deleted
and I realised it at the time
I would not use the forums now since there are other security questions
but are thinking we need some bright ideas…
One reason I have multiple back ups of my books (that I wear will get published one day) and not on cloud. My books and photos are the only things I back up regularly.
Flagged for bogosity
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