A Cutting Egress

About a week ago, many bloggers were writing about the nightmare scenario of getting locked out of your iCloud account. Indeed, what could terrify a geek more? There was sense of panic at the realization this could occur.

Nick Heer writes at Pixel Envy:

What I am stunned by is the breadth of impact this lockout has, and what a similar problem would mean for me, personally. I do not blame Buttfield-Addison or anyone else for having so much of their digital life ensconced in an Apple Account. Apple has effectively made it a requirement for using the features of its devices and, thanks to Apple’s policy of only trusting itself, creates limitations to using third-party services.

This kind of issue can be devastating. Most of what was written about the impact focused on family photos being erased or rendered inaccessible.

I lost early baby photos of my first son to what I believe was an iCloud issue. I’m still trying to locate CD backups that I did of iPhoto years ago to see if I can retrieve them. I also lost music and while this isn’t a type of data that comes up in most of the discussions about the issues with iCloud, it can be very problematic.

The music I lost by using iTunes match and then Apple Music included a ton of music I had purchased on Emusic. It also included hypnosis sessions that I had done with a therapist when I was going through a long period with IBS. Those are recordings I can’t get back.¹ All that vanished when I canceled my Apple Music account (which was experiencing frequent problems).

Getting a NAS has been on my radar for some time. My godfather is offering me a godson discount on some drives to populate such a device. I’ll be adding purchasing something like this UGREEN NASync DH2300 to my new year’s resolutions. I've already busted out SuperDuper to help with those carbon copy clones.

Source: hey.paris

1. Fortunately, I no longer have IBS and don’t need the benefit that hypnosis provides for that condition. ↩︎