Anyone who knows me knows that I’m completely addicted to music. Chances are, I’ll be completely deaf by 40, but I pay little attention to that thought when I’m working on some code, headphones blaring all the way. My iTunes library is nearing 10,000 songs, and close to half of those are rated and sorted into playlists.
Not only am I addicted to music, but I’m addicted to the psychology behind music. I love deciphering music patterns, seeing what I listen to compared with my friends and those in different social circles around me. So it should be no surprise that I have a last.fm account that I actively use.
The other night, I went to check my account page on the site, and nearly had a heart attack. For some reason, most of my data was gone. It just wasn’t showing up, and for about a day I was certain that my data was gone for good.
It was not a good feeling. Never before had I thought about how much trust I’ve put in the last.fm service, and how vulnerable I am to anything that happens to them. What if the company tanks? What if, one day, they decide, “screw this”, and close their doors? What then, with my years of stored data, my musical history?
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I used to be a member of the Textamerica service, which was one of the first ‘moblogging’ services out on the net. From the moment I got a cameraphone, I was addicted. I used the service for a few years, publishing my mobile phone pictures to it, using their feeds to place these on my personal sites.. and then, one day, it was gone. I had lost two+ years of personal images, of trips to California and England, all because they decided to become a ‘pay’ service and close all free accounts after a short ‘notice’ period.
To be fair, they announced the changeover on their site, but to be honest, I only logged in to the account a few times a year. I had no reason to, and thus, I was burned.
So all this got me thinking about just how much of our digital lives are out of our hands. What if one day, something happens to Facebook, or Google? Far fetched, I know, but imagine the implications that would arise if one day our data, which we have spent years building and compiling, would cease to exist?
We better start backing our stuff up!
This blog belongs to Jade Rauenzahn, a 25 year-old web developer who lives in Santa Clara, CA.
After several similar incidents and a few totally unexpected HDD crashes I have come to be more or less paranoid about backing up daily, making duplicate or triplicate CD and hard copy backups of all the really indispensable data and pics in my files. Trust no one. Even if you think the service is secure the stuff can disappear, be stolen or corrupted. It’s one of the caveats of the computer era for sure. One more thing-be sure what you save is vital stuff. Pack-ratting data and files is a bad habit. I recently decided to sort everything I have saved on my server and on my backup HDD drive and found that about 45% of the backed up stuff was crap out of date or useless and not worth the space.
I do my best to limit the amount of closed networks to which I belong. If it doesn’t have a public feed (like Pownce or Twitter), chances are I’m not interested.
I do however, have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. It would certainly suck if they decided to just dump the free services and go toward a pay-only model like textamerica did.
What I think is even more concerning is if a service like GMail were to suddenly go away. When you think about it, they’ve been in beta for the past couple of years now and I question if it will ever get out.
You make a good point with GMail, Mike. It’s been four years now that they’ve been beta, and you have to wonder the psychology behind it. Could Google one day just go “whoops! Well… it was only a beta…”
I think sometimes in this ‘web 2′ world we overlook the term beta and fail to fully realize what that actually means about the software we’re using.