{"id":38038,"date":"2023-01-02T16:32:16","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T21:32:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=38038"},"modified":"2023-01-02T20:17:29","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T01:17:29","slug":"your-memories-their-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/02\/your-memories-their-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Memories, Their Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kashmir Hill<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

If I were suddenly cut off from any of these services, the data loss would be professionally and personally devastating.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Some of my data landlords were more accommodating than others. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram offered Takeout-like tools, while Apple had a more complicated data transfer process that involved voluminous instructions and a USB cable.<\/p>\n

The amount of data I eventually pulled down was staggering, including more than 30,000 photos, 2,000 videos, 22,000 tweets, 57,000 emails, 15,000 pages of old Google chats and 16,000 pages of Google searches going back to 2011.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The granularity of what was in my digital archive accentuated the parts of my life that were missing entirely: emails from college in a university-provided account that I hadn’t thought to migrate; photos and videos I took on an Android phone that I backed up to an external hard drive that has since disappeared; and stories I’d written in journalism school for publications that no longer exist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Via Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Given enough time, I think all of us want to believe we could pare down our own digital stockpiles to just the files and photos that matter. But as I have thought about it more often, I have come to accept I will never be able to anticipate within my lifetime what is truly important in my data trove. Due to a botched iPhone backup from years ago, I am missing hundreds of photos I only later discovered were important and irreplaceable. As I tried to find those images on long-disused hard drives last year, I found images from family gatherings in decade-old Aperture libraries which took on an entirely new meaning when I rediscovered them.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

My long overdue project for 2023 is to ensure I have local versions of everything in iCloud. After all, I cannot know what may be relevant years from now, but I can have control over my ability to access it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I keep local copies of my photos, videos, e-mail, and of course documents in EagleFiler<\/a>. (The photos are managed by Lightroom, which is configured to store its master images and metadata within an EagleFiler folder.) The larger folders are stored on external hard drives, which are backed up using Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper. To protect against bit rot, I have a repeating OmniFocus reminder for asking EagleFiler to verify the checksums<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The main hole in my system is that it only includes my older iMessages, from before the Catalyst version of Messages. My newer text messages are locked up without a good way to access them. Yes, there are apps that can export them, but they only work with messages that are locally cached. Neither my phone nor my Mac has anywhere close to a complete set of my messages stored locally, despite having tens of GB of free space.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n