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Prolly preaching to the choir, but…
Big tech does not have walled gardens. It has corrals, full of milk cows. If you’re in one of those corrals, big tech will milk you dry, and cull you once the risk associated with you outweighs the predicted benefit from keeping you.
As such, whenever possible/reasonable to do so:
- Avoid big tech companies. They will likely treat you like cattle. If you’re looking for options, open source is typically way better.
- If you can’t do the above, at least avoid the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). They will treat you like cattle, you can be certain of that.
- If you can’t avoid GAFAM, avoid at least their corrals. For example if you have lots of Apple junk, stop relying on further Apple hardware or software; Google is equally crap but at least in this situation it has less power over you, so it’s a less worse option. The opposite would apply if you have lots of Google crap.
- “teh cloud lol” is someone else’s computer dammit. Once they deny you access, it’s as good as gone. Under no moment or situation, rely solely on the cloud for keeping your files safe; keep a local copy. And if the file is so unimportant you’re OK losing it because “teh cloud” is denying you access, just delete it.
inb4 “but dat’s too hard lol lmao” — play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
6 years ago, I had a friend get his Apple ID compromised by an ex-… He was effectively locked out of his laptop which he’d used his Apple ID to set up and sign in to. No recourse, so it meant that I had to do a full wipe and reinstall, and thankfully his music and photo projects were always religiously backed up to a pocket drive, so he lost nothing. At the point when he went to set up the newly installed OS, I insisted he use a password and NOT his Apple ID to secure the machine.
From then on, I’ve made it a point to have family and friends NOT use their Apple ID for their computer login credentials. This guy’s story only enforces my belief of the foolishness and danger of relegating one’s data to a third party’s cloud.
If the guy in the linked blog had stored his shit locally - it’s not like pocket drives are expensive - he wouldn’t have gotten into such a nightmare.
I learned the HARD lesson myself back in 2004 when an iTunes update went sideways and lost my entire music library. poof! into the void it went and I spent the better part of a week re-importing my CD collection to an external drive. Never again.
Sucks for people that fall into these kinds of fiascos with cloud storage. Take my advice: Don’t rely on it w/o having local backups.
Do Apple computers not have a local account option?
You definitely need a local copy of all cloud storage.
It does, but the setup dialogue that it runs when a new user gets a computer steers them to use the cloud almost exclusively… which I hate.
Tie that to the fact that the newer systems have soldered-in storage that isn’t upgradeable without a soldering stations and a ton of horseshit with finding the right storage chips with the correct firmware and in the matched pairs and blah… blahh… blahh… ad it’s supposed to make the system “secure” but in reality it’s about selling the cloud to users… which I despise… as it’s made the machines all-but unrepairable and unupgradeable. We’re back to the Michael Spindler / Gil Amelio “Performa” era of the early to mid-90’s non repairable, ungradeable Apple computers, and it sucks.
Tim Cook can’t fuck off from the company - Steve Jobs personal blessing to be CEO or not - fast enough, IMO. (Apple computers have been hot garbage since 2012, which is why my newest Mac is a MacBook pro from 2010 running an unsupported OS install…)
The whole “cloud” option started with iTunes in that there was a push to have users merge their personal music collection with the Apple Music streaming option, and grew from that point.
It was so slick in it’s implementation that back in 2006 - 2008 era when a lot of people finaly got rid of their PowerPC (RISC) Apple computers and bought Intel Macs - I had clients migrating ther systems ask me why they had to use the cloud for their music collections.
To which I had to explain that no… they did not and honestly, they really should back up their libraries to an external drive and THEN load it into a non-default location on their new machine. (I always suggest a folder at root level that is for the music library, there’s something about the library NOT being in the default location that prevents iTunes from losing track of the files - which it could do… and did to me. Once.)
I could go on ad nauseam about this entire fiasco, so suffice it to say that the guy in the blog made a fatal mistake, but it’s not like this hasn’t been a long term drift of Apple’s services itself. It’s been 20+ years in the making. This guy isn’t the first and for sure won’t be the last, and it utterly sucks to see ANYONE in such a bind. I feel for the guy and absolutely loathe to see he got bitten like he did.
So unnecessary but for Apple wanting to squeeze more money out of the users.
It was always insane to keep everything in one ecosystem. The more they said it was for our convenience the less I believed.
As above now’s a great chance to enact some privacy practicing backups.
That’s the risk you run buying into the whole crapple ecosystem.
It’s not just Apple though, is it? I suspect the vast majority of Windows users are logged in with a Microsoft account, and every Android phone uses a Google account. Sure, there are those of us who use Linux for our computers, and Graphene/Lineage on our phones, but we’re a tiny minority.
