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nixCraft 🐧

What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs: In March, an aspiring author got a troubling message: All of her works in progress were no longer accessible. What happened next is every writer’s worst fear. Remember, the cloud is just someone else’s computer wired.com/story/what-happens-w

@nixCraft Make sure to never lose anything important, back up all your files onto a micro SD card and implant it directly into your left buttcheek to never ever lose it!

@nixCraft few words, Proton Mail, Proton Drive. I would rather pay 13 eur monthly than have anything on Google. I have gmail only as “spam” email, whenever someone asks for email for dodgy registration he receives gmail, and there is over 100k unread mails

@nixCraft I’m living in post communist country and remember what it was back then. And things like this sound very very worrying even though we’re not talking about strictly political phenomenon here. Those actions are identical with the political censorship and that is terrifying.

@nixCraft “Ðe cloud” is not *personal* computing. Do not rely on it existing tomorrow even if yesterday everything was fine :blobcatcoffee:

@nixCraft

Should have just installed MS-DOS and write books using WordStar.

Only upload them to the cloud when needed.

@nixCraft

I've been reading all of the discourses of the Buddha and putting my notes in Google Docs for a number of advantages.

Thankfully, I also do monthly backups of my computer which includes downloading a copy of my Google Docs and putting them on an external drive along with my computer data.

@nixCraft moral of the story - don't use any Google products

@nixCraft Once Upon A Time it was like "you trust the bank to look after your money, don't you? - so why wouldn't you trust the cloud to look after your bits?"

Point is that I *don't* trust the bank to look after my money. What I trust them to do is *replace* it if they cock up and lose it, with different, but identically useful, money of their own, sourced from somewhere else that isn't my concern.

It's the "identically useful" that's hard if a cloud provider loses your particular collection of bits.

@nixCraft
How high would her word count have to be to go beyond the capacity of a resonable usb pen drive? We are not talking about 8k video files here. Backing up important work has been drilled into me from IT class day dot. To trust so much to something completely beyond her control is just daft.

@nixCraft This is why I use LibreOffice, running on Linux, on my own hardware AND make regular backups.

When my work goes online, its through Draft2Digital, for publishing. Works in progress (WIP) do not get put online.

Reminds me of a critique exchange with another writer. I was super angry when I found out they put my work in Google Docs and then shared a link back with their notes as comments, because I don't post WIP online.

Google Docs has always been a problem in search of a solution.

@nixCraft sad storey. But it could happen today with Win11 and Word too.

@nixCraft Things that happen when people uses someone else computers