This is true, as long as they’re making money. Once Facebook and Instagram fall out of public favor- and this may happen to Facebook sooner than you think- those backup plans will be hard to justify during cost-cutting times.
Acid free paper and iron gall ink. Vellum if you can afford it.
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“Two is one, and one is none.”
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We are sorry the plane crashed and recommend that you not have boarded it.
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It was my repository for “Throwback Thursday” pictures.
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This is why I really hate the Google notifications on my Android offering to free up space on my phone by deleting the original photos on my phone because there are copies backed up to Google Photos. If you don’t have it in at least two places it isn’t backed up (three is better…) :-/
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“Loss of data” can happen for many reasons other than “accidental”. As @anon62577920 mentions, it often happens on purpose. Look at what just happened at Tumblr. Policy or decisionmaking will likely delete data first.
If Boing Boing disappears, I wager it won’t be because I messed up backups. It will be because someone decided to not care about the data anymore.
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Has it been long enough to be retro popular?
Do you think FB will be around in 10 years? How about 100 or 100,000. The OP says “someday”. That is pretty wide open. I would add that the Internet Archive will also most likely go away someday.
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Don’t give Boeing ideas.
As a tech support guy, I feel a little sorry for the guys who screwed up. I have felt the stress and anguish of a migration gone wrong.
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I think Friendster is first in line.
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You skipped Compuserve. 
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Yeah. Computers are basically garbage.
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I was surprised to realize I had been on Facebook for over 10 years… that’s nuts seeing as Friendster and MySpace both kicked the bucket pretty quick. Well MySpace didn’t totally go away but people abandoned it and they eventually got rid of the features that made it at all comparable to Facebook. Google+ is another one that recently kicked the bucket. I recall when that came out and people switching to that in protest of Facebook being “over”… I guess that didn’t totally happen…
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The first real loss of online content that I took seriously was MMORPGs going offline permanently. Most things I posted to more typical social sites I had the original content that I cared about and the rest was just jibber jabber. But MMO’s had the accumulation of a fuck ton of effort and great times with friends. And then it was like it never happened. Data centers do just not run for free forever without a lot of effort to maintain them. Eventually your data will be worth less than the maintenance costs.
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Your story is very similar to mine and why I did the same thing you did.
Truth be told I have been aware of ssds losing data despite even brand new ones supposedly not doing that I have not gotten a definitive answer that they ever truly stopped.
Also truth be told I have a lot of my life on just a couple external hard drives, kept in external Venus enclosures with fans. Pictures and videos going back to 2002, and some very important stuff there between 2005 and 2009 when I was in Japan on and off.
Even as far back as 2002 I knew that digital files would become perhaps irretrievable but I never actually found a solution other than what I came up with. Throughout the years I have asked and searched and never really got a better answer then my two 7200 rpm WD external hard drives. Optical media was not a good choice because it can get scratched and has organic dyes even in the DVDs, which can break down in 10 years or less in some cases. Apparently Rytek made the best ones for long term storage.
There is a format called LightScribe discs that apparently got rid of the organic dye and used a stone composite medium coupled with a special burner to write them but they supposedly will last for 1000 years without data rot. They read like normal discs in anything though you just need the special burner to create them.
I have already found the stuff I have backed up to those two drives much of my life some of it has become inaccessible but I have been afraid of copying over the years because of data loss, and if I copy I have to keep the originals because I’m not sure if the copies actually work, and so I would just keep accumulating more drives and more things to fail.
I never did come up with an actual usable way to backup my digital data in a way for long-term retrieval (say, 500 years)
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Long long time ago, and I don’t recall exactly when, I had a MySpace account. Then I realised - or was told, or something - that MySpace had a special place for musicians. “Great!” I thought, and set up an account. Then I discovered that I could not link, connect, or even see either account from the other. At that point I decided that MySpace was not worth bothering about. …and I never went near it again.
