Microsoft Account With Files, Photos, and Games Almost Lost

Hoping EU steps in and demands a clear, swift and fair way to appeal this kind of shit.

Don't trust any cloud storage provider. Unless you have an explicit contract that says otherwise (e.g., a corporate account), they have no obligations whatsoever. They can lose or delete your data at any time for any reason and you have no legal recourse.

Make local backups of it all. Even if you need to spend a few hundred dollars on large USB drives, you will appreciate having those backups when your cloud provider decides you no longer deserve to use their service.

In principle, you shouldn't use cloud storage at all. You're just asking to lose your data, and it's pretty trivial to put your stuff on your own computer and access it with something like Tailscale. Then you own your data and your backups.

But in this case, there's no way to have local backups of Xbox games. I have hundreds of games on Steam; if I lose that account, I lose those games, and there's nothing I can do. I'm buying on DRM-free platforms when possible, but lots of games are only available with DRM.

(Or with piracy.)

@Plume, how does Tailscale change the real weakness of cloud storage? All I got from the website was it's a VPN - which equates (for me) to cloud.

@David_C has it (for me) correct - do local backups. If you really feel the absolute need for (what used to be called) off-site storage of said backups for DR (disaster recovery) you probably have several choices... safety deposit box (at cost), some other (trusted) person's house (free, but more open than the first suggestion yet less open that the cloud), and of course, just keep it at home (but not in the cloud in any way) and figure that if you lose it in case of fire or whatever disaster you can imagine, you actually lost it because (if you live through said disaster) you made it alive and there were more important things to rescue.

Screw "convenience", do local backups routinely, accepting that in case of DR you may lose everything that's changed since the last one. And yes, your local and routine backups should need to "sync" your 10,000+ photos on any sort of routine basis.

@Dave Tailscale is just a way that you can provide your own secure cloud—if you provide the machine, location, network connection, etc.

> how does Tailscale change the real weakness of cloud storage?

Tailscale lets you connect to your own computer from anywhere. Let's say you have an old Mac mini. Turn on file sharing and install Tailscale. Now you have your own Dropbox, and your data is stored on your own computer.

> Tailscale lets you connect to your own computer from anywhere. Let's say you have an old Mac mini. Turn on file sharing and install Tailscale. Now you have your own Dropbox, and your data is stored on your own computer.

Indeed and, though the online SMB protocol can sometimes be brittle compared to simpler ones dedicated to syncing, this is very plausible in practice. If you want to go further, you can, e.g. SyncThing, NextCloud, even sftp can be made to work on iOS. And you can substitute other technologies for connecting—Nebula, if you have a VPS somewhere to host the lighthouse node on, Cloudflare (my preference presently), if you need to expose web applications directly to the Internet from behind an impenetrable NAT or with SSO protection for family & friends using a web browser, or just directly exposing services to the 'net if you're brave and no exactly what you're doing.

And don't forget that your "disaster recovery" plan can also include *encrypted* backups to a cloud provider, e.g. Arq etc to a storage provider of your choice. You can self-host and still keep good backups.