A lot of my OC edits are gone.
The PeerTube instance that I have been uploading to is no more. I think there are around 70 edits of mine that are no longer accessible. If there was a catbox link, they may still work. This represents hundreds of hours of work that I did that have simply vanished. If a link is broken, let me know and I can see if I still have the files for it. Thank you all for watching the things I've made/
I hope you learned an important life lesson from this about always backing up your stuff.
Right. Most people in that situation will learn the following, very important lesson:
Put your stuff on Google/Meta services.
All the tut-tutting in the world won't change more minds than a corporate service with 99.9999 uptime and a small country's power budget in data centers. If you're trying to OSS or crowdsource services on the Internet your one and only priority should be UX.
You can buy 2 TB hard disk for 50euro or less. Why people want to put their work on the cloud beats me.
Because the best way to ensure you always have a copy is to have multiple copies in multiple mediums.
A live copy you can access on your computer stored on a local drive.
A "cold storage" copy that lives on some kind of removable media, usually USB thumbsticks but can also be full but disconnected drives.
And finally a copy in "the cloud."
It's about distributing the failure points so if any one fails the others are all still available.
Like, for instance, if your house burns down you still have your cloud copy if the ither two got burned. (I personally would put cold storage copies in a fireproof safe.)
On the other hand, if your cloud copy gets deleted, and your local copies are fine... All you have go do is create a new cloud copy at a different cloud site and you're back in business.
Well, yeah, but that's a lot of work and Google is already doing it for you.
Which is why most people just set up a GDrive and move on with their day.
You want to compete with them, it needs to work the same way, just as reliably.
It's not even a lot of work, it's standard IT backup.
How do you think Google does it? With lots of redundancies and backups.
They've got millions of failover servers and millions of backups, but even they're not perfect and data gets lost. 99% uptime is great, but lots of people still lose data or get locked out of their accounts. That's not a new thing with Google. They absolutely do their best to retain customer data, but even they are not perfect.
You call it "a lot of work" but it's literally the bare minimum you can do to ensure you actually retain copies of your data. Just basic backup redundancy. Those kind of redundancies that allow Google to pull a 99% uptime, but that doesn't mean all their redundancies are enough when it comes to your data.
Lots of people who placed all their faith in Google have either lost complete access to their accounts or have had significant amounts of data lost. It's not a guarantee that your data is safe with Google forever and ever amen.
Yes, it's a lot of work because the alternative is no work. Of course Google does the same thing, they just do it in the back, where you're not looking, financed by all the data and money they syphon from you.
I'm not saying competing for free is easy, I'm saying that's where the bar is.
Hey, I do keep multiple copies in multiple locations. But I'm a nerd. Just one self-aware enough to understand how everybody else is doing it and what the usability bar is.
It doesn't matter why. What matters is if you build an alternative to a server-based alternative you need to match their functionality and UX.
For the record, proper storage at scale costs a whole lot more than 50 euros. I think self-hosting is set to become way more popular in the future, but it gets harder if data keeps evaporating.