For those who’re delicate to tech disasters, you may wish 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 recordsdata from varied onerous drives, which needed to be discarded as a result of a transfer. The plan was to then transfer the recordsdata again from OneDrive to new onerous drives, however earlier than the consumer was ready to do that, their account was locked by Microsoft—with none purpose 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, but it surely’s a warning to the remainder of us—and a reminder to place just a few fundamental protections and precautions in place.
Hold A number of Backups
It was once a reality universally acknowledged that information wasn’t correctly backed up till it was backed up twice, in two separate areas. You’ll be able to copy your vital recordsdata to an exterior onerous drive, but when it is in the identical room as your laptop computer, then theft, fireplace, or flood can wipe out each copies on the identical time.
In the present day, having two backups of all the pieces—so three copies in whole—may appear extreme, as cloud storage providers so hardly ever go down. We have all change into used to the concept that the info we have logged with Microsoft, Google, Apple, or different suppliers is all the time going to be accessible, so we need not fear about it.