Holy carp! 
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“We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies,” they said, carefully closing the barn door as the last horse went swiftly toward the sunset.
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I thought Justin Timberpuddle owned that dinosaur…
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Guys, you had one (remaining) job!
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I have a couple disks from a late 80s Macintosh I wish I could open. At one point I had a g3 tower with a 3.5 inch drive and they wouldn’t work on there. Maybe one day I’ll meet someone with that model of functioning computer and be able to open them again… assuming the discs are still functional. I have a similar issue with a Syquest disc. I’ve seen the drives for sale on eBay but with a scsi port and I’m not sure if I can make that connect to a modern Mac with a 20+ year advanced OS. All my data from the zip drive era on I have preserved by continually moving it from one drive to another. My 25 year old photoshop files actually still work on modern photoshop which is nice.
I have a 4Tb backup drive of like every file I’ve created since the 90s and a backup of that backup. Right now they are all in the same house though… I should probably put one of those in a safe deposit box or something and switch it out every couple years… hm…
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I wish they had suggested that BEFORE losing the data. A little late now. Sheesh.
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This is true while they’re highly profitable or at least in their capital driven expansion stage; but once profit margins start to dwindle, many of those “multiple redundancy backups” will be switched off to save cash.
Facebook and Instagram might seem too big to fail at the moment; but the internet is a constantly evolving place and their mighty fall will come eventually.
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I’ve seen too many online platforms fail (Friendster, MySpace, geocities etc) and too many pages on the internet archive with broken links and images of even sites that still exist to ever full trust that my data is safe on any platform not controlled by me. I have been pleasantly surprised a couple times though. The web host (site5) for my personal site had a backup of the whole thing when some malicious code found a vulnerability and deleted my entire website. In a very short amount of time everything was back up and I was able to patch the vulnerability. Still, I learned then to make sure I had a hard copy of everything important I’ve put online.
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Geocities had a long decline and eventually was deleted on purpose:
And this incident. Keep in mind MySpace was the original Facebook. And it will eventually decline as well, until the data either goes poof or is purposefully deleted.
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If you are recovering plaintext, just get a program to dump the disk image. Sooner, rather than later. I have partially recovered docs using a hex editor this way (using some program that would substitute X for unreadable bytes).
I am deeply jealous. Wish I had my whole digital history intact.
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If you ask around, there’s always someone with an older Mac. I’ve got several, and quite a bit of recovery software.
Craigslist usually has a ready supply of older Macs, if you’re willing to shell out a few bucks.
Definitely mirror that drive and keep it offsite.
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- “Do you have a backup?” means “I can’t fix this.”
– The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
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Hoping one day to do that. It’s why I’m still holding onto the discs. 
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One glaring omission in my archive is emails from before 2006. A hard drive crash killed most of the ones I had downloaded at that point to outlook or Mac mail. And those very early 90s hotmail accounts had a very limited storage limit and old emails regularly got deleted. That eats me up. I’d love to go back and read the first emails I wrote and received in 1995.
And those lost emails kinda bring up another point: things like the internet archive are really only good for skimming data available to the general public. Private Social media, text messages, emails etc are extremely vulnerable to data loss… in some cases it’s probably very good that they aren’t publicly skimable but still.
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I agree that flash-based storage is probably not an archival medium, but I believe the panicked predictions in that article are based on some misinterpretations. Later, there were clarifications.
In particular, those data-retention times are intended as minimum requirements for worn-out drives, not projected/effective retention times for new drives.
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Do you think the last sound every recorded by a human will be listened back to or not?
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It’s not just copies of your data.
It’s about whether or not you can access that data.
A decade ago I began a transition to Linux, and not because of the usual list of OSS freedom concerns - but simply because I felt that it would force me to move my data into open formats, and therefore my data would be accessible for longer.
I have data going back to the late 90’s at least, and in theory could go and fetch data from floppy backups from the early 90’s.
My mid 90’s backups are on QIC tapes that use a floppy disk controller, and are encrypted. I’ve forgotten the password and don’t have a floppy controller on my PC anymore. That was when I learned my lesson about not relying upon the backup hardware format. I now keep many copies instead.
But it wasn’t until the mid 2000’s when my laptop died and I went back to my old desktop - a Windows 2000 machine - and had to reinstall about 10 bits of software just to get up and running that I realised how the data formats locked me in.
To make it clear in relationship to this article - creator’s or fan’s backups of the final MP3s for this music might be fine. But for the creator, do they really have confidence that any backups of the original project files that they created the music with will work?
For myself, as a hobby photographer, the question is whether or not the proprietary software I used can still be launched and I could recreate my photos. (Answer: Barely. I have install archives, and could use a VM to reinstall the old 32-bit software and the plugins I bought.)
I had similar concerns about writing and programming tools I used.
People often talk about backups. But only when you try to open the files and realise that you might need a version of Lightroom {n} years old, or access to plugins long since gone do you realise just how dependent you are on the format of your data.
It’s a pernicious problem, which is often overlooked. Don’t just sort out your backups - sort out your data formats. Moving to Linux may seem extreme, but it forced me to use open software that I have more confidence in having a stable, usable data format.
You don’t have to move to Linux. You just need to evaluate your data and then decide whether you need to switch software. If not, you need to look at keeping extensive software installation backups and perhaps a virtual machine or set of virtual machines that have the tools you need installed.
Don’t assume you can open your data in 10 years’ time. If you do, you’re probably in for a nasty surprise.
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MySpace? Hmmmm, MySpace… 
Nope, no idea, give me a clue.
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Someday, this will happen to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.
One can hope.
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