Google Deletes Artist's Blog and a Decade Of His Work Along With It (fusion.net)

Ethan Chiel, writing for Fusion: Artist Dennis Cooper has a big problem on his hands: Most of his artwork from the past 14 years just disappeared. It's gone because it was kept entirely on his blog, which the experimental author and artist has maintained on the Google-owned platform Blogger since 2002 (Google bought the service in 2003). At the end of June, Cooper says he discovered he could no longer access his Blogger account and that his blog had been taken offline. Along with his blog, Google disabled Cooper's email address, through which most of his correspondence was conducted, he told me via Facebook message. He got no communication from Google about why it decided to kill his email address and blog. Cooper used the blog to post his fiction, research, and visual art, and as Artforum explains, it was also "a platform through which he engaged almost daily with a community of followers and fellow artists." His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.WayBackMachine has some of the pages from his blog, but they are only screenshots. Google Cache is also of not much help. Slashdot readers, just out of curiosity, is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

Comments

Ahem.

[halivar]

His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.

And nothing of value was lost.

Re:Ahem.

[maxrate]

And nothing of value was lost.

Bless.

Re:Ahem.

[BarbaraHudson]

And fortunately he doesn't have a backup, sparing the rest of humanity from the risk of exposure to animated gifs. Now can we get to work on the kittens?

Re:Ahem.

[hey!]

Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.

Re:Ahem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been on the other side of this (in a previous job), and have had some insight into what's happening in these situations. Yes, accidents do happen and data occasionally gets lost. That's why you always should keep backups. And unlike other providers, Google does make that relatively easy with its "Takeout" service. Also, if you do contact Google as soon as the problem happens (preferably, within the first month), data will usually be restored. Admittedly, Google doesn't make it easy to contact them. So, that's unfortunately a bit of a challenge.

Now, for the ugly side of things. From my experience, a full 90% of the users who complain loudly and publicly, really only tell half the story. A provider such as Google won't publicly comment, as that's a battle that can't be won. The court of public opinion is merciless that way. But I swear, the vast majority of cases, the complainant is really at fault themselves. They just conveniently omit those details when they go public. "What? I should have mentioned that I ran a child-porn ring from my Google account before it was shut down? Why? Is that relevant? I still deserve all my data! And besides, I should sue for disruption of business. My child-porn business partners don't like their e-mails bouncing!".

Not saying that this is exactly what happened in OP's case. But I'd honestly be surprised, if he told us all there is to his story.

Re:Ahem.

[TheReaperD]

I wouldn't be surprised if a DMCA complaint made by a 3rd party (and likely one hired on behalf of him) is behind this.

Re:Ahem.

[EEPROMS]

Also this is a good lesson for those using cloud storage, have more than one and mirror all your personal files across both and "with different passwords" . If one cloud provider does lose all your data you have a fall back.

Re:Ahem.

[BarbaraHudson]

The blog was taken down for repeated violations of the TOS. The Guardian can offer you some insight: If you scroll down a bit, you'll see this:

He had a featured post, twice a month, where he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities. Cooper’s work often depicts sexuality and violence in graphic terms, and some of the writing and images dealt with similar themes.

He has no reason to whine.

Re:Ahem.

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

me.

If they're important to you then why wouldn't you make a copy?

Re: Ahem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no - alternative sexuality! Burn the witch, burn the witch, BURN THE WITCH!!

Re: Ahem.

[Anonymous Coward]

You appear to be correct. Web archive has copy. Appears to be a lot of gay porn not owned by blogger.

Re:Ahem.

[slashdot_commentator]

Doesn't matter. In the court of public opinion, you lose when you stay silent.

Re:Ahem.

[Askmum]

His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.

And nothing of value was lost.

GIF novel. I have several of them I think. All at 25 fps. Some call them movies.

Re: Ahem.

[red crab]

Last night, my Gmail account was temporarily disabled by Google. Upon login, a screen greeted me with the message that Google has temporarily locked down my account after detecting some unusual activity. Some reasons were provided, as to what they thought could be deemed as suspicious - I was either accessing my account from multiple geolocations/was sending bouncing emails/was downloading emails with large attachments/was continuously fetching my mail via Imap/POP or most inexplicably, my browser cache was the problem. All the reasons, save the last one weren't valid in my case. I keep several tabs open and have Adblock Plus in my browser , dunno if they had a problem with any of that. They did re-enable my account the next morning, but there was nothing I could have done had they chosen to shut off my account permanently. There was no support email or phone number mentioned anywhere, and anyway I wasn't entitled for any support whatsoever. The point being, Google can be worse then the Federal Government in terms of service. You can never be sure when you run afoul of their vaguely defined TOS. Users need to be careful while entrusting their data to free service provider, that's the entire point.

Re: Ahem.

[The-Ixian]

You are missing the point.

This isn't really about the content. This is about the fact that he violated (possibly knowingly) the TOS for the platform he was using.

Even if he didn't know he was violating the TOS he should have backed up his stuff.

14+ years on the Interwebs... he has no excuse for remaining ignorant about backups.

Re: Ahem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Picasso make copies? What about Michelangelo, Divinci?

Re:Ahem.

[cthulhu11]

In that case, really Google will not have lost them because they would not have been its to keep. Really *you* will have lost them by having not performed even a modicum of due diligence. Even if this dipshit hadn't been using teh intarwebs for 14 years, just plain common sense is that if you value something, you don't just hand the only copy to a stranger. WTF is an "Experimental author and artist" ? Methinks code for "barista".

Re: Ahem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm strange. I had the same kind of stuff once (I was really doing some unusual things) except I had the option to access my account with a captcha and a code sent by sms if I recall correctly. This is a security feature. Maybe someone was really messing with your account ?

Re: Ahem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumb. Gifs are just moving pictures.

Re: Ahem.

[HornWumpus]

At the end of his life, Picasso made lots of copies of the same sketch. He had no respect for his fans.

He was known to draw a sketch on a napkin and leave it as a tip. Those were worth thousands at the time and tens of thousands now.

More basically, digital art is different. There is no original.

Good excuse.

[Anonymous Coward]

The blog ate my homework.

Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[sycodon]

A rouge Right To Be Forgotten?

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[cyber-vandal]

Rouge? What shade?

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[aicrules]

Pedantic Purple

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're joking, but I actually only understood it when I saw the jokes.
I guess as a typo it's not so weird maybe, but the pronunciation is so totally different that I couldn't make the connection between these words easily.

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're joking, but I actually only understood it when I saw the jokes.
I guess as a typo it's not so weird maybe, but the pronunciation is so totally different that I couldn't make the connection between these words easily.

Besides surrendering to tyrants and generally sounding like faggots, the French just love strange spellings, up to and including wasting seven letters for a one-syllable name like Jacques, and rendering a name pronounced like "Fran-swa" as though it were "Fran-co-is". "Rouge" actually got off easy.

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like someone has a case of francosis!

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[rduke15]

Well, I think English doesn't need to worry about competition from French in "which has the greatest disconnect between spelling and pronunciation".

I guess everyone knows "ghoti", but I'm sure there are many other funny demonstrations.

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rouge elephant != pink elephant

Re:Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Google suspected he was D.B. Cooper, the airline extortionist?

Re:Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Anonymous Coward]

Legal Service perhaps.

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rouge meaning red not purple, pedant.

Re:Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Errol backfiring]

Probably. But if it is successfully done, would you remember?

Re:Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cart before the horse.... first get the Right To Be Remembered.

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[AK Marc]

English has many exceptions, many for adopted French words. French has a greater disconnect when you are following the basic standard rules.

Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten?

[Hognoxious]

I don't know what your definition of "basic standard rules" is, but you can always cherry-pick a subset of rules and claim that reality doesn't obey them. Fact is, French spelling has a fuckton of rules but generally follows them. English has quite a lot of rules but the complexity comes from frequently breaking most of them. Italian and German are a doddle by comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Cloud Is Wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

until the lightning bolt comes out of it....

Re:The Cloud Is Wonderful

[the_povinator]

I had the same problem as this guy at some point-- my homepage hosted on google pages was disabled because of some unspecified terms of service violation. I couldn't even fix the issue because they wouldn't tell me what the violation was about. And no luck contacting a real person.

After that I moved my homepage to a machine I control (danielpovey.com)

Re:The Cloud Is Wonderful

[gzuckier]

I had the same problem as this guy at some point-- my homepage hosted on google pages was disabled because of some unspecified terms of service violation. I couldn't even fix the issue because they wouldn't tell me what the violation was about. And no luck contacting a real person.

After that I moved my homepage to a machine I control (danielpovey.com)

mrs. clinton, the investigation has ended.

Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean...really? It's 2016. Your art is your passion, and you don't have it backed up ANYWHERE?

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the computer he used to create the GIFs in the first place? I mean, he had to have written and created most of his long fiction and GIFs offline, then uploaded them.

Something seems amiss with this narrative.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Alwin Henseler]

Backups are for pussies. Real men just upload their shit to some FTP server... ehm, never mind.

Re:Save often, make backups

[NatasRevol]

The FTP server on OneDrive. Which went from 15GB to 5GB and ate your data anyway.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean...really? It's 2016. Your art is your passion, and you don't have it backed up ANYWHERE?

He's an artist, he doesn't sweat technical details, 'nuf said.

Re:Save often, make backups

[pr0t0]

First, yes, local backups should absolutely be done. But also: doesn't Google have millisecond backups on every continent and two oceans? Just wondering if his lost data could be restored from one of those.

Re:Save often, make backups

[St.Creed]

Creating backups is soooooo last millenium... it's all in the cloud now and these "big data" NoSQL solutions are failsafe. Or failproof. Or whatever. The data is not lost, it's just missing in action - it may even show up one day all by itself.

Re:Save often, make backups

[BarbaraHudson]

You better hope not. His "art" went Darwin. Let nature take it's course.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.

Did you ever work in retail at any time in your life? One of the first things it teaches you is that there is an entire class of people who absolutely HATE lifting a finger to do anything at all for themselves, no matter how easy that thing may be, no matter how much sense it might make. They resent the notion of ever having to take care of their own affairs.

It's sort of like the people who wait on hold for 30-45 minutes for tech support, only to ask a question that's answered in the manual, in the FAQ, in the help file, on the web site, and often, what they need is right there in the menu if only they'd click on it just to see what it contains. Plus, the people who really do need a technician (say, because the problem is on the ISP's end) get to wait extra long because of the backlog of useless people.

I don't know what the percentage of them is, but a lot of people are just helpless. Entire industries play a role in helping them remain that way. The only thing left is for restaurants to offer them pre-chewed food.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Prien715]

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" ~ Linus Torvalds

Re:Save often, make backups

[hey!]

If anything I'd say this guy is ahead of his time. Those of us who started in this field in the 1980s are fully aware of value of backups, but m kids' generation trusts the cloud to always be there for them.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the cloud. It's all backed up magically by Google... Ha.. I have most of my files in OneDrive. Even so, I keep a copy on a second drive and I ship them off to BackBlaze. Fuck Google.

Re:Save often, make backups

[plopez]

they're using /dev/nul which is the secret sauce to being web scale.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Sowelu]

It's not lost, it's intentionally deleted for unknown reasons.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Sowelu]

How the heck do you even back up a site like that?

Re:Save often, make backups

[drnb]

If anything I'd say this guy is ahead of his time. Those of us who started in this field in the 1980s are fully aware of value of backups, but m kids' generation trusts the cloud to always be there for them.

That is a bit of revisionist history. The kids of the 80s had to learn that floppy diskettes and hard drives failed too and this developed an appreciation for backups, just as today's kids will learn that "bad things" happen in the cloud too, which is actually something the "kids" with the 1960s/70s learned on their centralized mainframe based storage. Every generation starts out "trusting" technology and is eventually relieved of that silly notion.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Artists never change, I guess. 20 years ago, a classmate of mine sent his portfolio of computer graphics to an art school on a floppy disk. They either never got it or lost it, so they needed him to send it again. Unfortunately, he had sent them his only copy. Somehow, he had never saved anything to a hard drive or made copies of his floppy disk. Instead of going to college the next year, he had to take the year off to rebuild his portfolio.

Re:Save often, make backups

[David_Hart]

How the heck do you even back up a site like that?

Hmmm, maybe using a web page scraper tool like HTTrack or perhaps the built-in export/backup function on the blog site...

Perhaps Google has a help page that describes how to do this... Nah, that would be too easy....

https://support.google.com/blo...

http://techproblems.org/how-to...

Re:Save often, make backups

[Reaperducer]

He was probably counting on Google, as the service provider, to backup his data for him. The way that (if you let it) Apple backs up all of your iPhone data constantly so that if you drop it in the toilet, you just get a new iPhone and everything in a few hours magically comes back the way you left it.

That's the promise of "the cloud" we keep hearing about from the marketing departments. This artist, being an artist not a tech guy, believed it.

But this is actually par for the course for Google. I moved all of my clients off of Blogger about five years ago after one of their Blogger blogs simply disappeared without a trace and no recourse. After a little digging, I turned up HUNDREDS of similar cases of people's Blogger accounts vanishing into thin air with zero help from Google. This has been going on for years, and Google is silent about it.

After all, you get what you pay for.

Re:Save often, make backups

[zrobotics]

He was writing a GIF novel, so the reasons for deletion aren't entirely unknown. In fact, I think Google is doing a public service here

Re:Save often, make backups

[bickerdyke]

I'm not sure about that. They are holding personal data that the owner may request to have deleted. They would have every regulator on their back if deleted information would be recoverable against the users directly expressed order.

I guess they have something more like extreme redundance that protect from hardware failure and probably one and a half continents erased from the map by a meteor strike, but not a classical backup that would allow restoring data as it was x days past.

Re:Save often, make backups

[bickerdyke]

Google Takeout. That's where the tools to im- and export data to and from Google services can be found.

Re:Save often, make backups

[bickerdyke]

...and he never thought of applying for more than one university?

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been telling people this since the term "cloud" was first coined. Storing your data (or backups) on someone else's server takes that data totally out of your control...your data is now theirs to do with as they wish. They can delete it, sell copies of it, give it to anyone they want to have it.

You need to keep anything important backed up locally to several devices of your choice.

Re:Save often, make backups

[mysidia]

It's not deleted.... it is made unavailable for view by mortals. The author can rest easy knowing that the advertisers will have access to the analysis of the data for decades to come.

Re:Save often, make backups

[KlomDark]

Yah no shit. Currently downloading all my stuff from onedrive. And it's slow as hell. Up to 9.82 gigs and crawling along. But once it's done, then delete and goodbye. Fuck onedrive.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard, and save multiple copies of everything locally".

one comma makes so much difference.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Darinbob]

You missed the part where he said "I don't want to sue but I will if I have to!"

Re:Save often, make backups

[Darinbob]

Sort of like living on in the clacks?

X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.

I wonder if google has a copy they could resurrect with enough effort. Not that I expect them to of course. Backups are important. For normal stuff I just use raid-6 with a small linux box and whenever I remember/think about/get bored enough copy that off onto normally unpowered hard disks that get stored off site. Of course, I'm probably about a year overdue there, although lately there is really not that much that even justifies that level of precaution.

Still, if anyone likes the idea. CentOS + software raid + possible encryption + at least 4 disks that are the same size but ideally different brands and possibly different ages + a basically reliable computer seems to just work, well except for the 15 seconds or so to spin the drives up when you access them after awhile. I'm almost convinced that you could do more or less the same level of thing by somehow keeping the same size drive in two normal computers and running some kind of mirroring service. Still having dedicated storage on a dedicated system that runs one thing probably adds a little security, though malicious software on the normal computers could still take it out before you had a chance to notice, hence partly why those external drive backups matter.

I wonder when we will have computers and file systems fast enough that the entire file system is fully encrypted, yet still version controlled, if you want it to be, so even if malicious software runs amuck, you can undo it, or go back and find the files you accidentally deleted three months ago. I'm not sure that level of protection would be warranted for normal PCs but it might be for dev computers. I know some automated backup software saves multiple versions of files...

Actually here is an idea that might be worth implementing. Have windows/linux/etc be able to specify folders/remote file systems/etc that mount read only, and then prompt you when you want to actually write to that resource for the write password. It should then remember that password for a reasonable time before forgetting and going back to read only access. Perhaps some kind of algorithm that identifies which files are normally written to and which are not and then basing the prompt on how normal modifying that file/folder/etc would be? It wouldn't stop everything, but might mitigate some damage.

Re:Save often, make backups

[zugmeister]

Yeah, you should demand your money back as well!
That'll teach them to change the terms of service on a free offering.
After giving you a chance to opt out of the reduction.
I'm all for bagging on MS when they deserve it, but you're butthurt the gift horse has developed a cavity.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Blogger site that's frozen in time and inaccessible to edit or remove. They say they sent warning messages about needing to "convert" or "migrate" but either 1) they went to an email account I could no longer access at the time or 2) they never actually sent anything. It's fine if the stuff sits out there (it is name-identifiable and if someone Google-searches me and goes enough pages down they'll find it" but it's just crappy. No more hosting my content on platforms I don't control.

Re:Save often, make backups

[zugmeister]

doesn't Google have millisecond backups... wondering if his lost data could be restored from one of those.

Almost certainly it could, but just try getting the support number to the engineer who could do it. For being such a high-tech company, their contact page is remarkably bereft of any way to, you know, actually contact someone who works there.

Re: Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no help that companies are pushing "the cloud" as a backup service.
Sorry but backup needs to be available in a reasonable time. And with most ISPs not willing to offer steady and reliable high speeds it isn't. It works for pics and mp3s but 5+ GB is gonna take some hours for most users.
Then there's the fact that 1 year of cloud service costs more than a 2 TB external drive that would be instantly available when you need it.

Re:Save often, make backups

[scdeimos]

And yet cloud providers like Amazon expect us to store all their data with them. Sure, backup your data as much as you like in S3 and Glacier... but if it crosses their border routers they're going to charge you by the gigabyte.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't.

First of all you keep your data safely somewhere on hardware /you control/ and then you use a blog to /present/ the work. Not for storing it.

Re:Save often, make backups

[ultranova]

For being such a high-tech company, their contact page is remarkably bereft of any way to, you know, actually contact someone who works there.

Nothing remarkable about it. After all, Google's entire business is knowing what you want even before you do. You don't need to contact Google, for Google already knows you heart's desires.

Re:Save often, make backups

[LQ]

Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.

Clearly he should have copies of the artwork but you can't back up social media and the relationships you build there.

Re:Save often, make backups

[AmiMoJo]

I have about 1TB on OneDrive and it just shrank. All the data is still there, I just can't add any more to it. It's all encrypted binary blobs and I don't think I even have the keys any more.

Re:Save often, make backups

[ray-auch]

No that would be silly, since he only had one copy of his portfolio how would he do multiple applications ? :-)

Re:Save often, make backups

[vtcodger]

I don't remember the details completely, but shortly after Google bought Blogger.com, they disabled ftp upload to blogger. That seemed to me at the time to be a clear attempt to encourage you to store your website on their servers ... and only on their servers ... without backup on your machine(s).

IIRC, if your website has only a few files and if you don't use Google's website creation tools, you can upload all your files one at a time via some clunky manual interface and keep a local backup. But for most people, with a website of any size, you pretty much have to just trust Google. I didn't trust Google to always act in my best interests then (and don't trust them now). I moved my website to someplace where I could simply upload from my master copy using a simple script. But I'm a techie. This unfortunate gentleman is an artist. How is he supposed to figure out he's dealing with typical system administration (i.e. whackjobs)?

I suppose you could probably update your site the Google way and periodically download copies with wget/curl to keep a backup. But I wouldn't be at all surprised that in the clusterf**k that is today's internet, that is difficult, impossible, or doesn't get all your files.

Re:Save often, make backups

[greenfruitsalad]

i have never worked in retail, but i have children, so i understand.

Re:Save often, make backups

[houghi]

After all, you get what you pay for.

If you get it for free, you are the product.

Re:Save often, make backups

[houghi]

Yes, I work in the service industry and I knwo that some people will just not have a clue about what I think is trivial, just as I have no idea about things that they find trivial.

Extreme examples: person is too "stupid" to do a backup. Perhaps he does not even know what a backup is, let alone an incremential one.

Then on the other side is the person who knows all these things. Knows 27 computer languages and dreams of electronic sheep, yet he is "to stupid" to tak to some person of another gender. He has NO idea how to do that.

So ALL people are helpless at some point and will need the help of others. To look down on them means you are to stupid to have some form of empathy.

The issue is that the person was informed by the company that his data would be safe. It wasn't. He was lied to and that is apparently ok. THAT is the problem. Not that he did not know he should take a backup, but that he was never told he should take a backup.

When you see somebody from Google, just ask what you must do to keep your data safe. Do not argue with his anser. He will moste likely say 'upload it to us'. So where is the problem? Not with the person.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

OneDrive won't eat your data, it will only keep you from putting new stuff there.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

mechanically pre-chewed food exists, it's selled as 'smoothies'

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

The 80s: floppies going bad ate my homework.
The 90s: the same, but now you could also blame HDDs
The 2000s: the pendrive fried and ate my homework, you can *really* blame HDDs, and the CDRs/DVDRs are all returning bad sectors.
The 2010s: the pendrive fried, the SSD ate my homework, the Seagate HDD ate my dog, and the Cloud deleted the backups!!!

So, Id say you need to be a moron since the 80s to not know you need several backups, preferably in different types of media.

Re:Save often, make backups

[The-Ixian]

We could forgive him if it was his first day... but this is at least his 5,110th day...

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah...with spelling like yours, I'm guessing the real "anser" is that your idea of being in the "service industry" is operating the cash register at your local McDonalds.

I don't think some uneducated swine with the spelling of a brain-damaged third grader should be accusing others of being "to stupid to tak," whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Just Some Guy]

Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

Or even invert that: save copies locally and then upload them when they're ready. Know how long it'd take me to get my blog back online if a provider nuked it? As long as it takes rsync to finish copying the files.

First, I'd never trust a hosting provider not to delete everything I've written for some unknown reason. Second, the writing/editing apps on my laptop are way better than any browser editor I've ever used. I'd loathe creating anything substantial directly on a remote server.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Takeout. That's where the tools to im- and export data to and from Google services can be found.

Exactly. Google made Takeout so that it would be super easy to have your own copy of the stuff you store on Google. If you don't value it enough to make a local backup, or a cloud backup on AWS, or something - then - well you can lose all your stuff.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Just Some Guy]

it's all in the cloud now and these "big data" NoSQL solutions are failsafe

My company uses lots of big data tools, because we have business processes like "run a few thousand separate machine learning jobs on a database with a few dozen TB of data". I promise you we have backups.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Has he tried contacting NSA? Pretty sure they have copies of all of his stuff.

Re:Save often, make backups

[SivDotnet]

In my experience they are usually Mac users!

Re:Save often, make backups

[david_thornley]

I pay AWS to do some hosting for me. I don't particularly trust their backups, but I'm paying them a small amount of money for some minor services, and I count as a customer.

Re:Save often, make backups

[wyHunter]

I also think that computationally many people are functionally illiterate. They can make some use of computer technology but don't necessarily understand the implications of said technology. It's a bigger problem than just in computing - it's pretty much everywhere now - but that may be the case here.

Re:Save often, make backups

[kaatochacha]

I'm guessing he speaks more languages than you, and it's a language issue.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

IT is cretinic, try backing up your emails when all you have is a web page. Or try recovering them from an outlook compressed files when all you have is an outlook compressed file. You are passerbies, people in computing ARE ATTACKING users and I ve been ten years saying why: THEY HEAR VOICES, and many of those voices are Muslim or reply to Muslims and Africans. Expect more hostilities from computing from now on.

Re:Save often, make backups

[HornWumpus]

It would be great if you could backup relationships.

'Wanna fuck?' changes things. Doing a restore if you get a no could get you another chance, plus information to improve your odds. ('Pardon me miss, would you think I was too forward if I asked you to sit on my face?')

Might also work for getting raises etc.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, as Aym Rand suggested (paraphrasing), "food shot directly into the rectum." She be crazy, but that line was funny as hell.

Re:Save often, make backups

[Anonymous Coward]

What a ignorant whiner. Why do people like you have to put a false context on things like the could? is it becasue you are ignorant? is it because it's the only way you can convince yourself your life as some sort of meaning, even though it doesn't?

Free

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost like he used a free service with no expectation of availability or warranty, to do all of his work.

He sounds Millenial.

Re:Free

[immortalcrab]

Where does all this hate for millenials comes from?

Re:Free

[apoc.famine]

Millenials, I think.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fuck off.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably got laid off and replaced with one.

Re:Free

[EmeraldBot]

It's almost like he used a free service with no expectation of availability or warranty, to do all of his work.

He sounds Millenial.

Oooh, daaaaaang, he looks so young! I guess aging creams are all the rage these days. Kids, eh, always being hip, stylin', funkaaaay freshhhh!

Re:Free

[__aaclcg7560]

Where does all this hate for millenials comes from?

Gen Xer's who are stuck between the Baby Boomers who got everything and the millennials who whine about everything.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

baby boomers love to hate on millennial, because they know they are the cause for every woe a millennial could have but just laugh it off/create more woe for millennials, they seems to feed on it.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fuck off.

You sound Millennial too.

Re:Free

[NatasRevol]

Their level of insouciance, arrogance, narcissism and stupidity?

Re:Free

[ganjadude]

as one, it comes from the vast majority of us and our "im a special snowflake" attitude

Re:Free

[bev_tech_rob]

Where does all this hate for millenials comes from?

Gen Xer's who are stuck between the Baby Boomers who got everything and the millennials who whine about everything.

Fucking straight....I'm one of those pissed off Gen-Xers....

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

From stuff like relying on a free service with no expectation of availability or warranty, to do all of his work.

Re: Free

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what happens to a snowflake when it's thrown into a fire? Pretty much the same thing that happens to everything else.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlikely, because that would involve a millenial being willing to do actual work. Millenials are the laziest, dumbest generation possibly in the history of mankind. Everything's been handed to them, and they just whine about it.

Re:Free

[Opportunist]

From experiencing millenials.

I mean, yes, the Yuppies of the 80s had the same "gimme that, it's MINE!" attitude, but at least they were willing to work for it.

Re:Free

[neoritter]

Pavlov has taught you well.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me get this straight, we just whine about those 2 things???

Re:Free

[Grishnakh]

Yep, just as I suspected: he's an older Gen-Xer or even a young Boomer: too technically clueless to keep backups.

Say what you want about the work ethic of Millennials, but at least they're more likely to be technologically clueful enough to keep backups.

Re:Free

[Opportunist]

Don't blame yourself, blame your parents who kept telling you you are. Blame society that insisted you had to get a reward and award for just showing up to the competition without accomplishing jack shit. Blame those that kept telling you "everyone's a winner" and "everyone's special" and of course "everyone's important".

I don't blame them for having that attitude. That doesn't mean, though, that I accept dealing with that attitude.

Re:Free

[Immerman]

Whereas millennials know that no matter how hard they work, they're unlikely to get "that", since the 1% are hoarding all new wealth almost as fast as it's produced.

Re: Free

[Anonymous Coward]

So much for those participation trophies for everyone on the last place soccer team.

Re:Free

[AmiMoJo]

Well, boomers are well known for being irresponsible.

Re:Free

[chefmonkey]

Free? No, the implicit agreement you have with Google is your privacy for its services. Google didn't uphold its end of the deal, so he should ask for his privacy back.

Re:Free

[__aaclcg7560]

[...] we still work our asses off for the "American Dream" we were promised knowing full well we're just as fucked [...]

I gave up on the American Dream and settled for a modest lifestyle. Since I only make $50K in government IT support, I can't afford the American Dream in Silicon Valley. Big houses, big cars, big women and big kids get expensive in a hurry.

Re:Free

[martinX]

Pavlov's dead, baby. Pavlov's dead.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know anything about millenials nor did I have any idea that they're hated, and yet, I think I can answer your question. They're hated because they don't back up but then whine about the inevitable consequences.

Re:Free

[AmiMoJo]

I'm a gen Xer and I sympathise with the millennials. The boomers screwed everything up, broke the economy, dragged me it if the EU, and have a massive sense of entitlement. If I hear "I've worked hard all my life" one more time...

I thought it was bad when I had to pay for the education that the boomers got for free. But then I look at the deal the millennials have, and realise they are even worse off.

Re:Free

[hey!]

Like Sartre said, hell is other people.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working since age 10 (paperboy). No one gave me anything, but a job, where I worked as hard as I could. Don't expect free, people. There's always a price.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the bell toll for Pavlov?

Re:Free

[HornWumpus]

So you're saying: The Xers are pissed because the millennials are stealing their schtick?

You want whiners? Look back at the boomers when they were college aged. But there were enough of them that they felt self righteous about their whine. Just as they felt self righteous about disco, then BMWs etc etc.

Re: Free

[Anonymous Coward]

On point

Re: Free

[Type44Q]

Pretty much from observing you.

Re:Free

[timepilot]

Wow, I'd love to see the statistics that back that up. My personal experience says that GenX, Boomers, Millennials and everyone else only get clueful about backups after they've lost data. And sometimes not even then.

Re:Free

[__aaclcg7560]

Don't expect free, people. There's always a price.

Unless it's Social Security. You paid into the system. Even though you get more back in benefits than you actually deserve. Never mind that seniors will outnumber workers (taxpayers), Social Security/Medicare will consume two-thirds of federal budgets, and taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else in 2030.

Re:Free

[fyngyrz]

No. Pavlov fell in the forest.

Re:Free

[EmeraldBot]

Wow, I'd love to see the statistics that back that up. My personal experience says that GenX, Boomers, Millennials and everyone else only get clueful about backups after they've lost data. And sometimes not even then.

This guy gets it. I have absolutely no idea why the funk the first post is ranked so highly. If I said black people were terrible at backups, or that all them' thar' illegal Mexicans can't never do no right proper server maintenence, of course it'd be unacceptable. If I said lesbians are too stupid to do backups, of course it'd be stupid. If I said Veterans are too insane to do a real citizen's work, it would rightfully be ignored as a moronic statement. So why the f**k is his age an appropriate measure?

I'm starting to worry humanity will forever be doomed to jumping to conclusions on the most stupid and absolutely asinine of things. We sit on our Twitter feeds all day and publicize and celebrate how diverse, smart, and accepting we are, and yet we're just as quick to label people as the earliest and most uncivilized brutes who lived in caves. At least the butt probing aliens want everybody's behind, no matter religious, age, or racial makeup.

Re:Free

[desdinova 216]

the older generation(s) have have always hated the younger generation

Re:Free

[Opportunist]

Ya know, your grandfathers used to demonstrate against that instead of silly things that don't change jack shit.

Re: Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, THAT'S insightful.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

With all due respect you think that sound baby boomers make about how everyone younger than them is a disappointment isn't whining?

And who can blame the millenials who are aware enough to know they've been lied to constantly?

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever the world is, and however the millennials are it is the boomers fault.

The boomers have run the world for decades, and raised the millennials. If we are going to blame a generation, get to the root of the problem.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Helicopter moms in action is what it did it for me. For instance, a bright but immature kid found some admin credentials that a sloppy vendor left behind on a network share. He basically used them to vandalize various internal services of a K-12. He got a two week enforced vacation from school for that. During his sabbatical, he called in bomb threats to another school to get a buddy of his out of class.

Helicopter mommy went into to overdrive and basically got the kid off with no almost no consequences. Well, he did lose some summer vacation to the juvie hall. Boo freaking hoo. I've seen what happens when chuckleheads like that hit adulthood. They do things like Occupy their Uni because the cafeteria isn't a free range farm to table exemplar. Though I DID love it when OSU threatened them with paddy wagons. Thoreau would have heaved his guts out seeing those little brats.

Re:Free

[Grishnakh]

Your comment is stupid. The simple fact is that Boomers did not grow up with digital technology, so of course they're less likely to think about things like backups: they never had to do backups when they were in their 20s because they didn't have personal computers back then. It's only the Millenials that grew up with this stuff, so if any generation is more likely to be computer-savvy, it's them.

Honestly, you think it's ageist to say that older people are less likely to be computer-savvy? You're a fucking idiot if you think people of all generations are equally likely to be.

The comment quality of this site gets worse every single day. I guess all the smart people really have left for greener pastures, leaving idiots like you behind, trying to claim that Grandma is just as statistically likely to be talented programmer as a 25-year-old.

Re: Free

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked hard all my life!!!

Re:Free

[ChrisMaple]

The parents of the baby boomers - the so-called greatest generation - were the ones who failed to educate their children

The attitude was, and continues to be
___Send the kids to church for a couple of years to learn to be moral
___Send the kids to public school to educate them.

It doesn't work, and it cannot work. It has to be done at home, and there are few parents left with the ability to do it properly. We're screwed.

Re:Free

[Darinbob]

Pavlov's more famous than Lennon!

Re:Free

[Oligonicella]

"The comment quality of this site gets worse every single day."
And you've shown that to be true.

Re:Free

[Grishnakh]

Are you another moron who thinks elderly people are just as likely to be competent with modern technology as young people? Holy shit, this site is full of retards.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of something has nothing to do with responsibility. Many of the grand things in life is free, like air, that doesnt mean theres no expectation or duty of care.

Re: Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Young people who download malware on their smartphones to watch cat videos? Hah! Some of the greatest programmers ever are well into their retirement age. The internet wasn't developed by zitfaced teens and fedora-wearing neckbeards you know.

Re:Free

[ultranova]

It doesn't work, and it cannot work. It has to be done at home, and there are few parents left with the ability to do it properly. We're screwed.

If by "we" you meant whatever political or religious cult you wished to have those children indoctrinated to support, then yes you are. The children, on the other hand, will be better off for seeing there's a wider world out there with far more futures to choose from than just ones consistent with your ideology. So will the country and humanity, for that matter.

Re:Free

[qeveren]

The older generation always shits on the one that follows.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking straight....I'm one of those pissed off Gen-Xers....

Oh... you have it good. Trust me, it's better to be pissed off than pissed on.

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

The simple fact is that Boomers did not grow up with digital technology, so of course they're less likely to think about things like backups: they never had to do backups when they were in their 20s because they didn't have personal computers back then.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

I'm a boomer (according to the wikipedia definition). I had a TRS-80 model I when I was a teenager, this used cassette tapes for storage, and I knew about the importance of backups then (keep three copies of anything important due to the unreliability of cassette storage).

Re: Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Observation.

Re: Free

[Grishnakh]

The older people who developed the internet are not representative of the older population in general. They're exceptions. A huge number of people who are the age of Tim Berners-Lee don't even use computers or smartphones; the same cannot be said of teenagers and Millenials.

Re:Free

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, and how many of your classmates in school as a teenager also had a TRS-80, or any home computer at all?

I was exactly like you back then (though I had something other than a TRS-80). I was absolutely not a normal teenager. My little nerd clique was not normal at the time; we were seen as weirdos because we liked computers.

Every teenager these days has a smartphone and uses computers. There's plenty of people my age who don't. There's lots more in the Boomer generation (I'm an Xer; Boomers are too old to have had personal computers as teenagers).

You're making the classic logical fallacy of assuming that everyone in your group (in this case, people your age) is exactly like you. They're not.

Re:Free

[inerlogic]

Truthier words were never typed...

Re:Free

[Immerman]

Agreed, but they also didn't have cheap junk food and 100 channels of TV broadcasting 24/7 to keep them placated. As in Rome of old, bread and circuses go a long way to quelling economic uprisings before they start. And it helps further when what demonstrations there are, such as Occupy Wall Street, are systematically infiltrated and disrupted by the police from day one. Still, the demonstrations did at least get the ball rolling - economic inequality and "The 1%" have become topics people think and talk about, instead of being dismissed out of hand as jealousy and class warfare. The first step towards changing things is acknowledging there's a problem, and for a long time the elites had successfully de-legitimized that viewpoint.

Re:Free

[Just Some Guy]

He sounds Millenial.

I'm a Gen-X dad to several Millenial kids. I've taught mine what "the cloud" is. Have you explained that to anyone? If not, you get to shoulder part of the blame for them not knowing.

Re:Free

[cwsumner]

A great many of the older people, that we know, have discovered that email and chat is a lot easier than paper and stamps. Particularly for international correspondence. They have recently been using computers for many things and learning a lot. And for them, "recently" is longer than the millenials have been alive!

A lot of people still don't use the poplular tech, but a lot of them do. And not just the tech folks.

I have see "little old ladies" teaching kids how to use their cellphones, and about things like backing up data!

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

If his data is truly gone, then he did get his privacy back - problem solved!

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, that's not it. I'm a Boomer and I pretty much hate all y'all.

Get off my lawn.

Re:Free

[TechnoJoe]

and the millennials who will have to pay for everything.

Fixed that for you

I was born owing about $4,400 in debt (US National Debt). I was not consulted about this. I did not consent to this. It was just forced upon me. Before being able to vote, my share of the debt grew to $21,000. It did not cost the government $4,000 for my mother to give birth to me, and it did not cost the government $21,000 to raise me. So who got the money? The Baby Boomers and Generation X-ers.

Today, 15 years later, my share of the debt is $60,000, despite voting for people who promised to lower that number. Yet, I am paying for (via taxes) debt that I neither benefited from nor authorized. Maybe I have a legitimate reason to whine?

Re:Free

[HornWumpus]

All the kids have computers, but those computers are overcomplicated and the kids are (as a group) just not interested in the internals.

One thing about a trash80, crapple, C64 or Amiga: With a little time invested, you could know everything there was to know about them. Kid geeks like to master things, 'getting a handle' on Android will never feel as good.

Complete fool

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what he gets for not keeping an offline backup.

Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

If you dont have a backup, then it must not have been important to you...

Re:Backups

[Nkwe]

If you dont have a backup, then it must not have been important to you...

Actually, if you haven't successfully tested a restore of your backup, you don't have a backup (and it must not be that important to you.)

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you test your parachute before you go skydiving?

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely.

Re:Backups

[jlv]

And you test your backup parachute, too.

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, most people forget about the integrity part of data loss protection. Multiple copies are great, right up until files get corrupted and you overwrite good data with bad or run out of working backups of your backups. Parity files (or equivalent) are a must for anything you don't want to lose.

Re:Backups

[fyngyrz]

...and then you find some genius who wants to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft for "fun" and see if the parachute works under real-world conditions.

Re:Backups

[imidan]

I was doing IT support many years ago as an undergrad. I was called to someone's office because their hard drive had failed. When I arrived, she had already purchased a new hard drive, and was quite pleased with herself for having made backups. She had a tape backup drive and multiple tapes that she swapped on a schedule so they'd wear evenly, stored the tapes in different locations, and so on. So all she needed me to do was install the new hardware and restore the backup onto it.

I put the new HDD in, booted off the recovery floppy disk, and went to restore the backup off the tape. In her backup software, she had checked the box next to 'C:\'. Turns out, the software defaulted to not backup subdirectories. So all she had on all of her backup tapes was the contents of her root directory: autoexec.bat, config.sys, and that sort of junk. That was a depressing trip.

Re: Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Had that recently with duplicity. Restores work fine on the original machine but they use the encrypt key on the machine. Machine fails, where's the encrypt key? Safely backed up but can't be restored without the encrypt key.

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I was doing IT support many years ago as an undergrad. I was called to someone's office because their hard drive had failed. When I arrived, she had already purchased a new hard drive, and was quite pleased with herself for having made backups. She had a tape backup drive and multiple tapes that she swapped on a schedule so they'd wear evenly, stored the tapes in different locations, and so on. So all she needed me to do was install the new hardware and restore the backup onto it.

I put the new HDD in, booted off the recovery floppy disk, and went to restore the backup off the tape. In her backup software, she had checked the box next to 'C:\'. Turns out, the software defaulted to not backup subdirectories. So all she had on all of her backup tapes was the contents of her root directory: autoexec.bat, config.sys, and that sort of junk. That was a depressing trip.

That sounds like a hilarious trip! Guess she learned a valuable lesson about paying attention. Hope it was important. Keeping a straight face and acting professional would be the hard part.

By the way, if women want to be respected in tech, they need to stop causing most of these scenarios. Or we can all just accept the status quo, that's fine by me. Just, if they're going to complain about it, they should work to change it.

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

fire alarms, too, if you don't test pulling fire alarms, you don't have fire alarms protecting your backups

Re: Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm ashamed to admit this... I backed up my GF's PC back in 2005 or so, by dragging the contents of C: to a folder on the network. The copy failed silently, and everything _looked_ OK as the directory structure had copied perfectly... but most of this folders were empty. Yep, learned a good lesson there.

But, damn, fuck windows for its silent fail. If I see a progress bar and then it goes away, it's logical to assume that the job is done.

Re:Backups

[HiThere]

And since so many people didn't seem to get this, after you test the parachute, you can't use it until you've repacked it, at which point it needs to be tested again.

This is why traditionally parachutists packed their own parachute. And carried a backup. (I'm not sure whether they actually packed the backup themselves.)

The problem here is if you're incompetent to pack a parachute, you might be better off letting someone else do it for you. He was probably expecting Google to manage his backup chute.

It's all very well to say he should have done his own backup, but lots and lots and lots of people are incompetent at that, and many of them know it. So they expect their provider to do it for them. This isn't really unreasonable...but the point is legitimately arguable. But expecting him to manage his own backups may be quite unreasonable, and I don't see *any* valid argument against that.

Re:Backups

[Nkwe]

And since so many people didn't seem to get this, after you test the parachute, you can't use it until you've repacked it, at which point it needs to be tested again.

The parachute description is all true, you can't truly test a packed parachute without using it, repacking it, and then not knowing for sure that the last pack job was good. However you can test the process. If you pack it yourself or pay a professional to do it for you, and it passes a test, you can have reasonable assurance that if you follow the exact same *process* again (pack it again yourself, or have the same professional do it for you again), you will have a usable parachute.

In the backup case, while arguably in this example is not as life critical, the guy should have validated the *process*. He should have either had the skills to make and restore a backup, or he should have tested the process by having the vendor demonstrate that they could restore a backup on his behalf. If he had done this at least once, he has a legitimate complaint that his data is gone. If he had never attempted a restore (on his own, or by asking Google to do it for him), I wouldn't consider his complaint legitimate.

Re: Backups

[The-Ixian]

robocopy, my friend, robocopy...

Re:Backups

[Keybounce]

Testing restores is tremendously important. Worse, you have to seriously test it -- live off it.

In other words, the only *Safe* way to test a backup is to put your old drive/partition aside, restore to a new drive/partition, and then work from that.

* I AM NOT JOKING *

Recently, I was having serious trouble with my Mac. The trouble had just started a few days ago. So, I restored a time machine backup. That's what time machine is for, right?

I have a script that I check occasionally, for things that somehow get flagged as "do not backup". That script is:

#!/bin/bash
mdfind "com_apple_backup_excludeItem = *backup*"

Now, you might be asking, why would I need a test like that for things that are not backed up? Because, back in 10.7, I discovered that some things that I wanted backed up would get that exclusion. Once you find something you want to backup, you can clear that flag

keybounceMBP:DigBuildLive michael$ notTM
-- edit: Slashdot, means *DO NOT REFORMAT THIS*. There should be a newline here. --
-- Worse, angle-bracket space code space close-angle-bracket should not be removed, especially inside a 'do not reformat' code block. Sheesh. What's next, complaining about too many leading '>' symbols in a diff? -- /Users/michael/Library/Calendars/Calendar Cache
keybounceMBP:DigBuildLive michael$ tmutil removeexclusion '/Users/michael/Library/Calendars/Calendar Cache'
keybounceMBP:DigBuildLive michael$ notTM
keybounceMBP:DigBuildLive michael$ ls -le@d ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State
0 drwx------@ 41 michael staff 1394 Jul 14 20:28 /Users/michael/Library/Saved Application State/
                com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem 61
keybounceMBP:DigBuildLive michael$ xattr -l ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State
com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem:
00000000 62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 5F 10 11 63 6F 6D 2E 61 |bplist00_..com.a|
00000010 70 70 6C 65 2E 62 61 63 6B 75 70 64 08 00 00 00 |pple.backupd....|
-- edit: Slashdot complained about "too many junk characters", so the last two lines of mostly zeros had to be removed, sorry. --
keybounceMBP:DigBuildLive michael$

So what happened in 10.9.5? Turns out, mdfind will not look inside of /Library. Saved Application State was not backed up.

Which meant that on restore, all the "currently open windows" and their desktop assignments were gone. So, using 5 different desktops to track the current state of 5 different projects? Gone. The "Currently being editing" files? No longer open -- I have to figure out which files are in the process of being edited. Combine that with Apple's new "We edit in place, with live auto-saves", and my "in progress edits" are now in the file system somewhere, not in an AutoSave directory.

It was a serious disaster for me. I relied on saved application state / the "transparent application lifespan" restoring.

My solution, moving forward?

#!/bin/sh

PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH
cd ~michael/Library/ && rsync -av --delete "Saved Application State/" "Saved Application State.old"

That gets run once an hour from cron.

And that's with Apple's Time Machine -- which is supposed to be a "Just set it and forget it, it works out of the box" "best of category" backup system.

Re: Backups

[imidan]

Yeah, robocopy is how I do backups for my own computer these days. Combined with svn. I store all my data in a version controlled directory, commit to my off-site repo when I'm done for the day, and then in the middle of the night I robocopy the contents of my working directory to a backup hard disk that I occasionally swap off-site. Weekly, I copy the SVN repos off-site. Sounds a little paranoid, but I saw too many sad grad students walk in to the help desk with the only copy of their entire thesis on a 3.5" floppy disk that had gone bad...

Contact Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they still have it. And find out why it was taken down, may have been a violation of their terms or a copyright complaint.

Re:Contact Google?

[ShaunC]

"Contact Google," that's hilarious.

Re:Contact Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.google.com/contact... That was really hard, took 0.67 seconds.

Re:Contact Google?

[rudy_wayne]

Contact Google? If you think it's actually possible to contact someone at Google who gives a shit, you must have just started using the Internet yesterday.

Re:Contact Google?

[BarbaraHudson]

Sure you can. I contacted them because some dispshit was operating an online pharmacy targeting transsexuals in Canada. Aside from the stupidity of paying more than they would cost with a prescription, and the fact that doctors would do the necessary blood tests every 4 months to check for risks, it's illegal to operate an online pharmacy with a .ca domain.

The site was gone within hours, and all the spam posts they had done all over the place were dead.

"Experimental artwork" can be a euphemism for anything. Even images of violence against women will get your blog nuked.

Re: Contact Google?

[StikyPad]

Yes, it's trivial. When I had my GMail account pwned, I emailed them, and a human helpfully verified my identity, the suspicious activity, and restored my access. Don't just assume it's impossible without trying. And if it doesn't work, just be more persistent. The squeaky wheel, and all that.

Re:Contact Google?

[ShaunC]

Perhaps I should rephrase. Yes, it's easy to contact Google. You can talk into a black hole all day long; getting a meaningful response, if any response at all, is an entirely different matter.

Re:Contact Google?

[martinX]

Did you google that?

Re:Contact Google?

[hey!]

Perhaps I should rephrase. Yes, it's easy to contact Google. You can talk into a black hole all day long; getting a meaningful response, if any response at all, is an entirely different matter.

In an alternate universe, a different version of you gets his data back.

Re:Contact Google?

[Fwipp]

Not all trans people can get hormones through their doctor. They might live in an area with only shitty doctors who refuse to treat them, be unable to afford the doctor's visits, or be frustrated by the long lines for cheaper care.

Also, I know you say they were targeting Canadians, but it's also pretty popular to target USA citizens with pharmaceuticals "from Canada" (not from some scary overseas place).

I do recommend going through the "official" pipeline if it works for you, but a lot of people don't have that luxury.

Re:Contact Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is how you do it... http://lmgtfy.com/?q=contact+g...

Re:Contact Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Vint Cerf supports the creation of interplanetary Internet. You need one to contact Google customer service.

Re:Contact Google?

[BarbaraHudson]

If they can't get them through their doctor, find another doctor. One who specializes in trans care.

If they can't find one in their area, it's not worth risking a stroke to use hormones without a doctor's supervision and regular blood tests. Either move or do without until you find one. What good is it if you're paralyzed and need help taking a shit?

As for the "frustrated by the long lines for cheaper care" - that's absolutely NOT an excuse. That's like all the trans who went to butcher Brown for their surgeries in a hotel room because they couldn't wait. Bad results, like one who, when she shits, it comes out the front because of a fistula.

The cost argument is valid. However, the solution too many resort to (sex work) is way too risky. M2F transsexuals have a 26% HIV infection rate. That's not a typo - it's more than one in four. That number makes sense, since an informal survey shows half either are or have made a living selling sex, both pre-op and post-op.

Going through the official pipeline is hardly a "luxury".

Re:Contact Google?

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

Hire a lawyer to write a (polite but firm) letter requesting that someone at Google contact his client regarding the loss of some of his intellectual property stored by Google. Have the lawyer's office (with its return address) mail it (postal mail) to Google HQ, attention: legal department. If you want, send a carbon copy to your local TV station's "human interest" department -- "years of a local artist's work destroyed by cold, corporate monolith Google" is exactly the kind of story they eat up, and a news crew calling Google's PR department for a comment may get the right attention even if Google Legal doesn't respond.

Re: Contact Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an account recovery system, like most websites have, but Google's is very complicated because it tries to make correct but difficult decisions about whether to hand over an account or not. You should try to find and use it before you try to reach a human.

  https://www.google.com/accounts/recovery/

Re: Contact Google?

[kc7rad]

Something similar happened to me about a decade ago. Someone got my GMail account so Google locked my e-mail and shutdown my blog. It took more than a few e-mails and phone calls, but a week later everything was available again. Then again, a decade later, things at Google may have changed.

That said, since Mr. Cooper is in France, perhaps the TOS there is different from here. I don't know him or his technological prowess, but as others have hinted at here; perhaps he just doesn't know too much about the "cloud" or TOSs or backups or the internet in general. Chiding him about his lack of knowledge gains nothing. Help him, and others learn about these things rather than poking fun or throwing insults.

Seriously, even cloud services I pay for are backed up. My backups at home are backed up. Anything on any blog or e-mail account I have for free could be deleted, and while I might be pissed, would loose nothing but a few days performing restores. Backups just aren't that difficult any more.

Re:Contact Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so unapproachable DAs and non answering attorneys/lawyers will never believe you cannot go to the cops and tell them: my woman is in this picture in the internet and I have no idea what happened to her... so no one will believe you ever. You could not repost a few pictures...

Re: Contact Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Emailed them? Excellent. Can you please give me the email address?
I have been trying for literally 5 years to contact a human at google regarding an account I'm locked out of.

Re:Contact Google?

[Fwipp]

Not everyone can find another doctor. Some states don't have a single doctor willing to prescribe hormones without a letter from a psych - which is often >$1000 in sessions and 6+ months of "Oh yes doctor, I've only ever liked pink girly things tehehe" before they'll say "okay, you're trans enough." A lot of doctors won't even prescribe hormones for trans people with that magical letter, and finding one who takes your insurance might be very difficult or impossible.

The risks of a stroke from HRT are way overblown. The majority of people without pre-existing issues can take a normal dose without any real risk. I think I've heard that about 1% of trans women get blood clots, and most of those had pre-existing risk factors. That's quite a lot lower than our ~50% suicide attempt rate.

Agreed, I'm not gonna tell anyone to go to a value-bin surgeon. A fistula is like, nightmare-scenario outcome. But SRS isn't HRT. SRS requires a lot of care and skill, HRT requires "take 2 of these and 2 of these daily. If you start feeling weird, lemme know."

And yeah, a lot of trans women are forced into sex work because they can't find gainful employment as an out trans woman, especially one that pays well enough to save up for SRS (if they want that) in addition to their normal costs of living. Having the option to order pills online isn't going to make them more likely to resort to sex work.

Re:Contact Google?

[ShaunC]

it's illegal to operate an online pharmacy with a .ca domain

So you reported illegal activity to Google, and they took action. That's great, they have a duty to respond to such claims. But that experience has no bearing on the scenario where someone whose blog was deleted might ask to have it restored. Try asking Google for something that doesn't involve criminal activity or the threat of lawyers. Position yourself as an end user with some trouble with a Google service, contact them and come tell us how that works out. Try reporting spam that originates from Gmail, not just the From: header, but received by your own MTA from e.g. mail-pa0-f70.google.com, and the same sender continues on unabated after multiple reports. This is hardly a new problem.

Yes, if you're a paying customer of Google or if you're reporting something that might involve some legal exposure to Google, you might get a response. Otherwise in my experience you're out of luck.

"Experimental artwork" can be a euphemism for anything. Even images of violence against women will get your blog nuked.

I would expect images of violence against women to get a blog nuked from any free service, Google or not. Someone who wants to publish such imagery would surely need to pay for their own server. I'm not sure where that plays into Google's reputation for customer service.

Re:Contact Google?

[BarbaraHudson]

Get serious. The guy was posting ads from prostitutes looking for clients. Oh wait - ACs aren't to be taken seriously. My bad. :-)

Re:Contact Google?

[BarbaraHudson]

Planned parenthood can provide hormones under the harm reduction model, and it's cheaper than ordering online - same as any doctor who's willing to can. No need for a letter from a psych.

As for "the majority of people without pre-existing conditions" - how many DON'T have other risk factors? 26% have HIV, and unlike the majority of the population, most of them smoke, many of them are in the sex trade and/or the drug trade (way more than the general population), etc., and these are all risk factors - and many of them do this before even starting to transition or go on hormones.

There is no excuse to not go through a doctor any more.

Re:Contact Google?

[BarbaraHudson]

The guy was posting ads from prostitutes. All it took was one complaint and it's gone. And if you think for a moment, the story is not over. Gmail is a separate service that they didn't have to shut down, but they did. Call it "preserving evidence."

While it won't help him recover his art

[naughtynaughty]

This should serve as a reminder that backups are important.

Re:While it won't help him recover his art

[Anonymous Coward]

This should serve as a reminder that backups are important.

All that happened here is: he just learned a valuable lesson.

If he wants to be like too many people then he can hate on Google for the performance of their free service. If he wants to be an adult he can consider what was within his power to do in order to prevent this ever happening again.

"Person does something negligent, gets bad result" is not really news. Why is this on slashdot?

Re:While it won't help him recover his art

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the lesson is don't rely on others to save your data, especially cloud providers. If this is how cloud providers serve their customers, we're better off without it.

If you don't pay for it ...

[Alain Williams]

you can't rely on it to do anything in particular; you are entirely dependent on the whims of whoever provides you with a free service.

Everyone on slashdot should know that, I tell my friends to backup things from ''the cloud'' to some physical media that they can hold in their hand (preferably 2 copies), but I know that most ignore me ... 'Oh, that is just Alain sounding off again, I will be all right ...'

Sign-up wall

[Anonymous Coward]

Or whatever that nag thing is.

On another note, this is the future of "cloud": You no longer own what you do; if your provider deletes it all, poof, it's gone. And the only way to maybe get it back is to go big, go public, shout a lot, raise a ruckus. Not everybody can or wants to do that.

Better keep your own work under your own control and keep backups of that. Then publish from there.

Re:Sign-up wall

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, people still don't understand that "the cloud" is just another name for "someone else's computer".

And so you have the problem of (a) a small, new company run by fucktards that goes out of business and takes your files with them or (b) a big company, like Google, that is really nothing more than the Internet version of a spoiled rich kid -- starting new businesses or buying existing companies and then discarding them after a while when they get bored with them.

Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[mrchaotica]

You must be new here. To paraphrase Qui-Gon Jinn, "there's always a bigger asshole."

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[SirSlud]

Predictably, "experimental art" are trigger words for most of the crowd here. Wannabe programmers have a perfect target in artists against whom to direct their own insecurities regarding social acceptance and worth.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[serviscope_minor]

Quite. People are actually gloating over this guy's loss. His only crime is not to not be as computer savvy, or to put it another way, his only crime is not to be a basement dwelling neckbeard.

Re: Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moreover artists are usually highly regarded if not well rewarded in society. Unlike nerds their faces are not used as toilets.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[war4peace]

Somebody who creates series of animated GIFs and computer-aided artwork, and who also operated a blog for the last 14 years can be called anything BUT not tech-savvy.
I am not "gloating" over his loss, however I think that:
1. It might not be a loss after all (the data is most likely still there somewhere)
2. It's too early to yell "google ate my homework" until Google definitely rules that the data is lost
3. Having one instance of your data only and not thinking about the possible consequences for 14 years is inexcusable.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[BarbaraHudson]

His mistakes were many. J'acusse!

The Top 10:

• Ignoring the TOS;
• "Experimental artwork" - come on ... this is part of the "90% of everything is crap" aka Sturgeon's Revelation; On the Internet, 99%; (see Facebook);
• Spare copies of anything important;
• The crime of using a computer while stupid;
• Too arrogant to ask for advice from someone who would know "what happens if" and how to avoid it;
• Seeing all those ads for "external BACKUP drives" and not asking "Why would I need one?"
• Ditto portable usb sticks that "let you carry your DATA around with you";
• Ignoring all the stories of people who lose all their DATA and ACCESS to their account because of sucky passwords;
• Not keeping his mouth shut - better people think you are a fool than prove them right;
• The biggest one: Thinking that "bad publicity" will get Google to "do something about it." HAHAHAHAHA!

What a maroon.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[sgage]

Have we heard anything from Google about this yet?

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite. People are actually gloating over this guy's loss. His only crime is not to not be as computer savvy, or to put it another way, his only crime is not to be a basement dwelling neckbeard.

Actually his error was to fail to recognize: 1) his own lack of knowledge, 2) the value [to himself] of his own work, 3) that other people know more than he does and that this would be a very simple question to ask that they would likely answer for free.

He was careless and got a bad result. There's no injustice in that. I'm not an automechanics expert, so guess what I do about my car? That's right, I find someone who is. I don't just neglect it. That's what he should have done. Why all the misplaced sympathy for people who make bad choices? Concerning things they later claim are important to them?

If I wanted to be an asshole like you, I would have said "I'm not a dirty greasemonkey", that way I can look down on those who have knowledge I don't have ... for some reason. Hate to break it to you, but there are well-groomed people who understand the virtue of not placing all your eggs into a single basket. In fact a great many of them don't have beards, as some of them shave and some of them are women.

But hey at least you got some smug satisfaction from using a stereotype against sensible people, to punish them for the "crime" of making sound decisions. Seriously you sound jealous. Yours is a loser's resentment, not a legitimate outrage.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, his crime was to trust the cloud. Any long time user of a computer knows that at some point in time the shit will hit the fan and you have to be prepared. He wasn't and now pays for it.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[serviscope_minor]

His mistakes were many. J'acusse!

Congratulations on owning an honorary neckbeard.

Ignoring the TOS;

Like about 99.99% of the population.

"Experimental artwork" - come on ... this is part of the "90% of everything is crap" aka Sturgeon's Revelation; On the Internet, 99%; (see Facebook);

Translation: I think your work which I've never seen is crap so fuck you.

The crime of using a computer while stupid;

Translation: the crime of using a computer while not being an arrogant condescending neckbeard.

Too arrogant to ask for advice from someone who would know "what happens if" and how to avoid it;

Accusing someone of not knowing the right questions as arrogance = neckbeardery.

* Seeing all those ads for "external BACKUP drives" and not asking "Why would I need one?"

Or you know not realising that non local storage from a reputable company isn't trustworthy.

Ignoring all the stories of people who lose all their DATA and ACCESS to their account because of sucky passwords;

Translation: not being a neckbeard spending all his time on slashdot.

* Not keeping his mouth shut - better people think you are a fool than prove them right;

Yeah the fucker should just have kept quiet and definitely lost his work rather than having a chance of getting it back. Fuck him, I'mn a neckbeard so he can fuck right off. We're superior us techies because computers.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[Ol Olsoc]

Yeah the fucker should just have kept quiet and definitely lost his work rather than having a chance of getting it back. Fuck him, I'mn a neckbeard so he can fuck right off. We're superior us techies because computers.

Dood! something going on in your life at the moment? I've not seen so many angry, sarcastic posts by one person for a long time

It doesn't take a neckbeard (whatever the hell that is) to figure out that "the cloud" is not a safe place to store your stuff. It just takes a bit of prudence. An artist's images are similar to business data's files in that they are their lifework and IP. So unless they are in the business of creating ephemeral art - think the sidwalk art that disappears after the next rain - You have to preserve it.

In my own field - Photography - we have to jump through a lot of hoops for permanence, specific ways to work with and treat the paper the photos are printed on storage of negatives - CD storage when that was common.

I spent and spend a lot of time making certain that what I do is recoverable. And now that I am on digital photography, there are the issues with preserving the photos and data there as well.

So now I have all of my negatives and slides scanned and backed up, and they are now sealed in an evacuated container. The resultant digital files are archived in multiple locations, on devices that I own.

If a person is making art and has an interest in preserving it, it is incumbent upon them to make certain that their method of preservation is adequate. And any casual perusal shows that the cloud is not adequate. Unfortunately, this fellow got an indelible example of just why that is the case. It's sad, but it is his fault for not doing his homework. If permanence is important, it must be important before the art or data is lost.

Now have a beer or adult beverage of your choice, and chillaxe.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[Ol Olsoc]

His mistakes were many. J'acusse!

"Experimental artwork" - come on ... this is part of the "90% of everything is crap" aka Sturgeon's Revelation; On the Internet, 99%; (see Facebook);

Ugh! I know a few people who have used Facebook as a place to store their photos, not checking to see what Facebook does to them.

But hey, quite a few years ago, someone at my employment had a project, and one of his photos was chosen to be the front page of a prestigious magazine. So he brought down the 3.5 by 5 linen finish photo, and told me they needed an artwork ready print. So I told him I needed the negative:

"What's that?"

"The negative. You know, the strips of plastic like material that come back from the place with the paper prints?"

"Oh - you mean those Orange things? I just toss those"

"Ohhh boy"

Needless to say, the resulting cover was lacking a bit. You can only do much making a copy neg from a small linen surface print.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[david_thornley]

I was at an experimental art performance once, and I figured that it isn't experimental if it can't fail. The soprano was a very good friend of mine, and she was very good. She'd have been better with better material, but at least she got paid for it.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[BarbaraHudson]

Here's the kicker - the way that they totally disabled everything (email etc) instead of just the blog, he's probably being investigated for distributing online pornography or for the prostitute ads he posted regularly. Now for the rest ...

People losing data is on the major media all the time. Stop being a neckbeard yourself - go watch some TV news. People having their accounts hacked and losing access to all their files, Apple being a good example.

Why not then go outside, breathe some fresh air, take a walk, etc. He was in clear violation of the TOS for a LOOONG time, intentionally - as you can see from the article, he likes to push things beyond the edge. And this time it blew up in his face. So fuck him.

If he had this shit on his laptop while traveling and customs found it, they would have seized it. Ditto if he had been looking at it in a public place and someone reported it. So he got off lightly by getting away with it for 14 years.

And he probably doesn't have his passwords backed up either, so if someone had stolen his porntop, he would have lost access to everything - including his online crap when whoever ended up with it logs in and replaces his stuff with pictures of cats for the lulz.

Re:Jesus, could you all be bigger assholes?

[BarbaraHudson]

He's overlooking the fact that the guy admits that an integral part of his blog was ads for prostitutes. "Artistic and literary merit" ... yeah, sure, whatever you say Frank.

They did more than disable his blog - they shut down everything. They didn't have to shut down his email, which was a different service from blogger. That's what you do when you're a service provider told to preserve evidence. We may not have heard the end of this story ... :-)

Experiment over

[OrangeTide]

Now the experimental author knows the outcome of the experiment. That artistic work will disappear if you don't take efforts to preserve it.

If we repeat the experiment we would be doing science. (would that make you a scientific author instead of an experimental one?)

Re:Experiment over

[Minupla]

Sadly, 25 years in IT tells me that the experiment has been repeated a number of times, and that its results have been reproduced frequently.

"Hey, I stuck this floppy to my filing cabinet with a big ol magnet and now it doesn't work, can you fix it? It has my only copy of my thesis on it"

Min

Re:Experiment over

[OrangeTide]

Most of my stuff from 25-30 years ago is gone, except the few things I happened to have print out. Seems hardcopy was more reliable than digital medal, at least for careless people.

Re:Experiment over

[stephanruby]

Either that, or that the artistic work will disappear if it's not mixed in with a decent amount of porn.

Re:Experiment over

[Minupla]

Yes, I still have some fan feed 132 column printouts from my MUSH days... since I met my wife on one, they have significance to me, but not much else from those days survived.

Min

Re:Experiment over

[Anonymous Coward]

If we repeat the experiment we would be doing science. (would that make you a scientific author instead of an experimental one?)

While technically true, repetition studies almost never get published. I'll have to assume the experiment is correct, and continue to back up my data.

I called up the NSA

[CajunArson]

The NSA couldn't help.
They were like: GIF "novels"?

MY EYES! THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING!

After that the NSA respected his privacy by nuking the stored surveillance from orbit.

Re:I called up the NSA

[sexconker]

MY EYES! THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING!

The quote is "My eyes! The googles do nothing!".

Further reading: http://www.urbandictionary.com...

Re:I called up the NSA

[msauve]

That's many levels of meta-ironic. The correct quote is "My eyes! The goggles do nothing!" So your source is wrong. But their presumably unintentional misspelling of "goggles" as "googles" makes it fit very well with this story.

Re:I called up the NSA

[sexconker]

The page I linked isn't my source. My source is watching the show (every single episode thus far) and hating when clowns get it wrong. I've posted about this matter before.

I found it humorous that the page I found said "googles" so I copied it, hoping someone would notice.

Re:I called up the NSA

[msauve]

"The page I linked isn't my source. My source is watching the show..."

Oh, you just don't know how to spell goggles. Got it.

Re:I called up the NSA

[sexconker]

You don't know how to read past one line.

Re:I called up the NSA

[msauve]

LOL. You're demonstrably wrong, and now trying to backtrack. Your claim was that the OP was wrong and the proper saying was "...googles...", and pointed to a link for more detail. When I pointed out that was wrong due to the misspelling at that source, you said that wasn't your source, which was your own experience. So, the misspelling must have been yours, or you lied about your source. Whatever, it's clear you're simply wrong and are now simply digging a deeper hole.

Only on a blog?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did he seriously delete all of the originals after uploading them to his blog? If so, this should serve as a valuable lesson.

Don't delete your fucking originals!

Give NSA A Call

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA has every bit of it. Ring up Michael Rogers, and I'm sure he'll be happy to get that restored for you.

"... consider suing ..."

[Splat]

"Cooper, who lives in France, told Artforum he’s consulted a French lawyer specializing in intellectual property. He told me he’s considering suing Google"

Blogger TOS:

"OTHER THAN AS EXPRESSLY SET OUT IN THESE TERMS OR ADDITIONAL TERMS, NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE SERVICES. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DON’T MAKE ANY COMMITMENTS ABOUT THE CONTENT WITHIN THE SERVICES, THE SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS OF THE SERVICES, OR THEIR RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS. WE PROVIDE THE SERVICES “AS IS”."

Oh would you look at that ...

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you certain as to how much weight that carries under French law?

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[freeze128]

That won't stop him from suing... That would just make the subsequent court case VERY brief.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[dunkelfalke]

TOS are not above the law, you know.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you can't terms of service your way out of everything in Europe right? Unreasonable behaviour won't fly in court over here, even if it's covered by some contract.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[barc0001]

Usually those TOSs are on something that was paid for. I have a hard time believing that any court would force a company to compensate someone for something lost because they put it on a free service. Because if they did, the day after that ruling a lot of free services would send out a "You have 30 days to back your shit up because we're closing our doors" notice.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

You are assuming that those were the TOS when this blogger first started - before Google took it over.

These companies change their TOS'es like I change underwear. You may get a notice and then you got to read dozens of pages of legalese to see where the changes are. Some are decent enough to give you the changes - but the prudent thing to do is read the whole thing over again because who knows if ALL the changes are there. And some are so obnoxious that there are links in the TOS that link to other TOS for different parts of the service(s).

Never the less, this guy was a bit foolish to rely on that one service and not back up to at least other services. And this should also be a warning to the dangers of having one's content stored on these big mega corps that can change their services at anytime.

They are not to be trusted.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[sgage]

I wonder if all the stuff he claims to have lost ever really existed...

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[swalve]

What's unreasonable about it? I'm pretty sure I have an entire folder full of emails telling me blogger is getting shut down.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

So your claim is that the law is written that Google must provide him with backup services for free?

LOL

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Put more simply: if you didn't back it up yourself it isn't backed up. It can disappear at any time without warning.

Heck, even companies that do provide some kind of guarantee of a service have managed to go bankrupt and disappear overnight. Trust none of them.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Threni]

They are, assuming you're talking about civil law. Any case he might have had for them deleting his "work" goes out of the window. If it was really that important he'd have backups. He hasn't, so it wasn't. Just like you and I. Being "an artist" doesn't put you above the law either.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[BarbaraHudson]

You know you can't terms of service your way out of everything in Europe right? Unreasonable behaviour won't fly in court over here, even if it's covered by some contract.

The guy's original behaviour was negligent. His attempt to sue someone else for his negligence is unreasonable. See the difference?

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[AmiMoJo]

That might not stand up in French courts though. For example, in the UK selling stuff "as is" is meaningless, it still has to work and be fit for purpose.

Then again, it could just be a lawyer trying to make a few Euros.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[hey!]

On the other hand, disclaimers in a TOS can sometimes be found unenforceable depending on the laws governing the country you're in. In the US for example if Google deleted the content because the artist was a minority, Google could be sued even though it didn't promise not to delete anyone's data. Yes, Google wouldn't have broken contract law, but it'd have violated civil rights law.

It's significant that this action is being brought in France, which takes the preservation of cultural objects and artists' rights more seriously than the US does. You'd need a French lawyer to say whether this guy has a case, but you can't rule it out based on what Google claims they can do in the TOS.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[sgage]

Except no one was 'selling' anything - it was a free service, offered as-is.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[ljw1004]

OTHER THAN AS EXPRESSLY SET OUT IN THESE TERMS OR ADDITIONAL TERMS, NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE SERVICES. .... WE PROVIDE THE SERVICES "AS IS"

Maybe he'll sue on grounds other than "broken promise".

And there are lots of grounds for suing even when something is "as is". For instance, attractive nuisance (doesn't apply here); negligence (would have to establish duty, breach, causation, damages); defective product; that the terms in the TOS aren't enforceable; intentional infliction of emotional distress (would have to establish that Google's behavior was extreme, outrageous and caused harm).

I'm not evaluating the strength of any of these grounds. Just saying that the TOS isn't a blanket "off-the-hook" as your post suggests.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Stormy Dragon]

he’s consulted a French lawyer specializing in intellectual property

Since the complaint is that Google HASN'T copied his work, this seems like the exact opposite of intellectual property law.

Is there an such a thing a intellectual commons law?

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

That TOS is void the moment the service no longer "IS" specified in the "AS IS" part, so the moment his account was closed the Terms Of Service (Service no longer provided) go down with it, if the service was still provided even with all the artist work gone the TOS would be valid.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[AmiMoJo]

Even so, it was a commercial service that relied on users like this guy for content to drive ad revenue. They entice people to use it and take that deal.

I'm not a French lawyer but even free services where there is some consumer element are usually protected in the EU.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

You could drive a truck through his case. ... too soon?

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Ecuador]

You are right. I am sure he is entitled to a full refund.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[stephanruby]

"OTHER THAN AS EXPRESSLY SET OUT IN THESE TERMS OR ADDITIONAL TERMS, NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE SERVICES. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DON’T MAKE ANY COMMITMENTS ABOUT THE CONTENT WITHIN THE SERVICES, THE SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS OF THE SERVICES, OR THEIR RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS. WE PROVIDE THE SERVICES “AS IS”."

Oh would you look at that ...

Also, how much money did the guy lose? $5

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

And what is there in that TOS that is above the law ?

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is talking about compensation. He can get his art back.

Re: "... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you certain how much weight French law carries against US corporate might?

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[ihtoit]

As much as it requires a click-through, which means at some point it cross his screen giving him the opportunity to READ IT and either ACCEPT the terms of the CONTRACT or REJECT THE TERMS OF THE CONTRACT and either RENEGOTIATE THE TERMS or LOOK ELSEWHERE.

"Did you click the "I Accept" button?"
"Yes."
"Did you read the Terms of Service before clicking the "I Accept" button?"
"No..."
"Are you aware that having clicked the "I Accept" button you accepted the terms of the contract as is, with no prejudice as to any or all of the terms?"
"..."

I look forward to my new HumanCentiPad.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[ultranova]

I'm not a French lawyer but even free services where there is some consumer element are usually protected in the EU.

I'm not a lawyer either, but I have a hard time believing somebody offering a free service can't simply discontinue it at will. Consider: if you publish a program under GPL on your homepage, and have ads there, are you obligated to keep maintaining it? How about all those ad-supported mobile apps?

If a shop has a community billboard to entice customers, as many do, do you have grounds to sue when they take it down?

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus compensation, plus full reinstatement of his IP.

Re:"... consider suing ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

That TOS has needed to be seriously challenged for a long time.

Another Reminder

[painandgreed]

Remember that "on the cloud" just means "on somebody else's server". They may say you'll never lose it, but they have been known to lie, or go under, or change their service. Remember the Sidekick which advertised all your phone data would be in the cloud and backed up so you'd never risk losing it?

Probably the FBI

[TroII]

D. Cooper you say? Maybe the FBI commandeered his Google account years ago and shut it down when they closed their investigation into the famed hijacker.

Den Cooper

[Anonymous Coward]

Now where have I heard of that?

The "Cloud" is a Trap!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been warning folks for years, "The Cloud" is a Trap!

Apparently everyone thinks I'm over reacting, until it happens to them.

Tough luck, "The Cloud" is a Trap!

Wayback machine?

[plopez]

He'd need the URL of a publicly accessible page(s). And then only maybe.

Re:Wayback machine?

[war4peace]

Not reading TFA or even TFS makes you look stupid.

Re:Wayback machine?

[plopez]

At least I made an effort

NSA

[Supp0rtLinux]

There was a time when the NSA was monitoring and recording everything. Maybe he could call them and ask for a restore?

Re:NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA found nothing worth keeping. Even the NSA has standards.

archive.is

[Anonymous Coward]

http://archive.is/3tNs

Re: archive.is

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me nothing of value was lost.

Re: archive.is

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean he isn't suing any more?

Re: archive.is

[boarder8925]

Honest to God had never heard of this service before. Thanks for the link. After suffering on this website for 13 years, I've finally learned something!

Backup.

[ledow]

"is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?"

Yes. Restore from backup in his backup software.

Whoops. You didn't do the thing that EVERYONE talks about every time they lose something, that schoolkids are taught to do, that everyone needs to use at some time in their digital lives?

Shame.

Call it "temporal art", forget it existed and move on. The rest of the world already has. The only people who thought it important didn't think it important enough to save BEFORE it was lost.

Re:Backup.

[freeze128]

I was never taught to backup in school. It took a large data loss for me to understand that I should backup my data.

It's a shame that this guy didn't learn sooner....

Re:Backup.

[KiloByte]

I'd say it takes an average intelligent person just around 30 data loss events to learn the basics about importance of backups.

Re:Backup.

[PatientZero]

It took a large data loss for me to understand that I should backup my data.

Yes, but did you then actually start backing up your data? :)

Re:Backup.

[BarbaraHudson]

I was never taught to backup in school. It took a large data loss for me to understand that I should backup my data. It's a shame that this guy didn't learn sooner....

It's "experimental art." How big a loss can it be to the average person?

Re:Backup.

[CanadianMacFan]

And then it'll take another big loss of data to learn to verify that backups are actually working before needing them.

Re:Backup.

[safetyinnumbers]

Aside from backups, did he systematically delete everything from his own machine?

Single copy

[Cro Magnon]

A single copy is an accident waiting to happen, whether that copy is on Google, OneDrive, or your 10 y/o laptop.

Re:Single copy

[david_thornley]

That's one thing I like about DropBox. The data is automatically on two separate drives at home plus in the cloud. It's still possible to lose it, but it would take something like a house fire at the same time DropBox goes out of business, and I'm willing to accept those odds.

Right to be forgotten?

[Supp0rtLinux]

Maybe someone in the UK filed a right to be forgotten request and Google just got the wrong person. I'd call the NSA and ask them for a restore (since they snoop on everything anyway).

Re:Right to be forgotten?

[CanadianMacFan]

Or someone didn't like his art and filed a right to be forgotten request on his behalf.

Re: Right to be forgotten?

[Type44Q]

I'd call the NSA and ask them for a restore (since they snoop on everything anyway).

Why bother calling? Just ask 'em out loud right now; they're probably listening somehow... ;)

Re: Right to be forgotten?

[andy.ruddock]

Somehow? You mean, idk, like maybe surfing Slashdot?

Re: Right to be forgotten?

[Type44Q]

I was - partly in jest - referring to possible hidden microphones, compromised electronics, etc...

backups are for wimps

[Anonymous Coward]

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)

Seems weird that Google would delete his email

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we sure the dude didn't just forget his password? Why would a provider nuke a guy's email address?

Cloud != Guaranteed Service

[ErichTheRed]

This should not be a surprise to anyone here, but it's a very good example that, unless you have a specific document signed by both parties promising some level of service, you don't have that service.

I'm in the middle of a "cloud conversion" for one of our core applications. I get incredulous looks and blank stares when I ask application developers how they've planned for redundancy and potential data loss. The other day, I actually had a senior application architect tell me "the cloud takes care of that." Sigh...yes, you can be reasonably sure that your data will survive a physical disk failure. But will it survive an accidental deletion? The cloud alone sure doesn't guarantee that. They also don't guarantee that your application will run if one of their data centers blows up...unless you pay for that.

In short, smart infrastructure guys have nothing to worry about in terms of the cloud -- you don't have to worry about hardware failure, but you do need to be smart building out the pieces. The developers are being told that all they need to do is push the button to deploy their applications now, so we still need to protect the system as a whole from stuff like that.

Re:Cloud != Guaranteed Service

[BarbaraHudson]

And you expect them to change their expectations after you've explained it to them? "Developers" who didn't think of it on their own are not "developers" - just cheap warm bodies.

waah waah waah

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm being harsh, but I am so fucking tired of people just putting faith in the "cloud."

He deserved it. This is what he gets for using proprietary software and software as a service.

The only cloud I trust is my own. If it had anything important on it, I'd have VMs at more than one hosting provider.

This is also a story about backups, but fuck the "cloud." When you use somebody else's cloud, you have no control over it. Don't whine and bitch when that becomes a problem for you.

My other frustration with the cloud are clients who sign up for SalesForce and then are fucking shocked that they need to pay for me to be able to hook into their API.

Re:waah waah waah

[NormalVisual]

The only cloud I trust is my own. If it had anything important on it, I'd have VMs at more than one hosting provider.

Preferably on different networks separated by some distance.

One Flash drive

[BenJeremy]

Probably one flash drive could have held the contents of his art and blog. Who doesn't keep the original sources, though? I create games, and the assets I create always have source in the form of Illustrator, Photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint or Corel Draw files - all religiously uploaded to several destinations as backups. House fire? I have cloud backups and off-site discs at another location. Cloud goes offline? I have several backup drives locally.

It's dumb and tempting fate to put all your eggs, as they say, in one basket.

real reason for this story?

[Stan92057]

https://support.google.com/blo...

"Quote"Check your email to see if you got a message from support@blogger.com. If your blog was deleted by Google, the email will explain what happened."End Quote"

didn't the author/blog owner of this do any kinda research? why is this story on slashdot really....

Re:real reason for this story?

[clonehappy]

It says they deleted his email account, too.

Re:real reason for this story?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! They eliminated his email address at the same time! So that email they sent is also gone!

Re:real reason for this story?

[cstdenis]

According to the summery Google deleted his email account too.

Re:real reason for this story?

[BarbaraHudson]

Ever see "America's Funniest Videos"? We like to laugh when people do stupid things. The laughter this guy is generating may be his most significant good to the public well-being. Because sure as hell nobody who doesn't already keep backups is going to learn anything from it.

Re:real reason for this story?

[Stan92057]

He had to use an email address to sign up.for a gmail account. so even if they didn't give him notice"unlikely" they can still use the email address he used to sign up for gmail.address.to reply to him from the support link i posted.

Re:real reason for this story?

[Stan92057]

Ya, no argument their. I remember the bubble bust back then the big thing were photo storage sites. Millions of personal images were lost with no way to get them back. most never learn. I have so many backups it funny.

Re:real reason for this story?

[Anonymous Coward]

He had to use an email address to sign up.for a gmail account. so even if they didn't give him notice"unlikely" they can still use the email address he used to sign up for gmail.address.to reply to him from the support link i posted.

If I need to already have an email address just to sign up for gmail, then what fucking good would it do to sign up for gmail? I can get any feature I want using a regular e-mail account and one of the wide range of pop3/imap clients. What's the appeal of gmail? Is it for people who can't run their own spam filter? My ISP offers me something like a dozen e-mail addresses (granted, all at the same domain) and my VPN offers me another. Anytime I want another option, what really works is to use something like Mailinator and be done with it. What would gmail possibly offer?

I really want to know. I didn't know this about the gmail signup process because I avoid using Google services. But now that you've brought that up, well that would really seem to hurt the utility of getting a gmail account. That you'll be subjected to automated spying is already a lot to have to put up with.

Re:real reason for this story?

[andy.ruddock]

You don't need an email account to sign up. they ask if you have one so you can use it for account recovery later on. The same goes for a mobile number.

Re:real reason for this story?

[david_thornley]

I've had several email addresses that don't work anymore. The one I was using when I signed up for Gmail is one of them, although the address I gave them was only directed to that account. Lots of my friends don't have their own domains, so that's not really an option for them.

Re:real reason for this story?

[Stan92057]

Your making excuses. I stand by my comment and btw go look at the archived page, its no wonder his lol blog was deleted along with the blogs email address..i could only get 1 page to load it was plenty enough

Re:real reason for this story?

[david_thornley]

What I am saying is that Google does not necessarily have any account other than his gmail.com account that will get a message to him. If I didn't have my own domain, which I use for email, Google would know only my gmail address. I'm not saying that the blog and account should or should not have been deleted, but that Google's only halfway reliable method of sending someone an email is their own email system.

We recently set my mother-in-law up on gmail, and she didn't have a pre-existing email address. It was apparently not required.

Re:real reason for this story?

[Stan92057]

I stand by my opinion and comment. we agree to disagree.

Au Contraire

[kackle]

It sounds like he had high expectations of availability and warranty.

Try Resurrect Pages plugin

[Solandri]

I'll join the chorus of voices saying it was incredibly stupid to use an online service as your only copy of your materials, with no local backup. But what's done is done. If the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy, try installing the Resurrect Pages add-on to Firefox. It links to a lot more caching and archiving services than just the Wayback Machine.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/

Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[Thud457]

Wait, WHERE is cloud?!!

shit.

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[kelemvor4]

Wait, WHERE is cloud?!! shit.

Don't be dense now... it's in the sky! How can they take the sky away? The sky belongs to everyone!

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[Fire_Wraith]

Wait, WHERE is cloud?!! shit.

Don't be dense now... it's in the sky! How can they take the sky away? The sky belongs to everyone!

You can't take the sky from me.

But you can delete my blog, it seems.

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[MrLint]

You cant take the sky from me.

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[MillionthMonkey]

I never trust "the cloud" with anything anymore. Whoever came up with that name was probably trying to send a message- clouds have a habit of blowing away.

You can't even trust gmail anymore. Recently I did searches for some important email conversations I had and they had just vanished without a trace. I thought I was deleting them myself by mistake. Eventually I realized that for the past year, whenever I reply to an email, and ONLY if I reply to it, Google throws the whole conversation into the Trash folder.

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[KlomDark]

Take my love, take my land
  Take me where I cannot stand
  I don't care, I'm still free
  You can't take the sky from me.

  Take me out to the black
  Tell them I ain't comin' back
  Burn the land and boil the sea
  You can't take the sky from me.

  Leave the men where they lay
  They'll never see another day
  Lost my soul, lost my dream
  You can't take the sky from me.

  I feel the black reaching out
  I hear its song without a doubt
  I still hear and I still see
  That you can't take the sky from me.

  Lost my love, lost my land
  Lost the last place I could stand
  There's no place I can be
  Since I've found Serenity

  And you can't take the sky from me.

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Actually clouds don't actually 'blow away' nor do they 'blow to you'. It is the changes in the atmosphere that makes clouds appear and disappear.

Re: Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I have migrated all my storage to The Fog. Being more pervasive and present, content is harder to abruptly delete.

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[gzuckier]

Wait, WHERE is cloud?!! shit.

Don't be dense now... it's in the sky! How can they take the sky away? The sky belongs to everyone!

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?!

[hcs_$reboot]

I don't think Google would trash a valid conversation without your consent. Google trend is to keep rather more than less. First of all, even if you reply to the last mail of a conversation, its date-stamp is still the one of the last mail your received in that particular conversation, and not the date stamp of the reply you just sent, i.e. the conversation does not appear at the top of the inbox as you (I at least) would expect. It took me ages to find a conversation (that didn't have a specific keyword to search) that was supposed to be around March 2016, when I replied to it. However the mail received before that was in 2015... Oh and btw, have also a look at the "archives" (in "All mail").

NSA backup service

[Steve1952]

Personally, I am seeing a big business opportunity for the NSA here. As I envision it, anytime, anywhere, just say "NSA, back me up please". A link to the backed up files will then appear on your computer screen, and your credit card or bank account will automatically be deducted.

Google (Alphabet) is not your friend!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am constantly amazed by the belief of friends and family who have no technical background that Google (Alphabet) and all things related to Google are the outcome of an altruistic and open minded company intent on making the internet of things a better place. For crying out loud! Google is a company owned by another company and listed on a stock exchange. The purpose of the company and it's activities is to produce a profit and if that purpose achieved with a friendly smiling face that leaves you with a warm fuzzy that's awesome. However, as with any experience, when using the services of a company the experience may vary. I agree with the comments made here. "e caveat emptor" Buy the product but not the sales pitch and CYA!

Re:Google (Alphabet) is not your friend!

[NormalVisual]

I am constantly amazed by the belief of friends and family who have no technical background that Google (Alphabet) and all things related to Google are the outcome of an altruistic and open minded company intent on making the internet of things a better place.

Especially given Google's propensity to just drop entire products/services at will.

It's not like paying for it is much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Software all comes with a license disclaiming any warranty of fitness for any purpose, hardware come with warranty terms limiting damage to the cost of the hardware, and services have a contract that forces you into arbitration on their terms.

Corporation have used their vast resources to figure out how to get away with selling nothing, and have gotten pretty good at mathematically determining exactly how crappy they can act before they get in trouble with regulators. Their PR departments are good at smoothing everything else over, and when they get called out over it the just world fallacy means that 50 smug /. posters will leap to their defense, as a way of explaining that they are so smart they would never get shafted by a company that way.

Re:It's not like paying for it is much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Their PR departments are good at smoothing everything else over, and when they get called out over it the just world fallacy means that 50 smug /. posters will leap to their defense, as a way of explaining that they are so smart they would never get shafted by a company that way.

Maybe that happens but this isn't such a case. Not only would this event have been trivial to prevent, the steps necessary to prevent it are considered basic due diligence by anyone with even a small bit of expertise. Had he put any thought into it, or even bothered to ask someone a question along the lines of "this is my work and it's extremely important to me, how can I make its total loss much less likely?" then he'd have only the minor inconvenience of finding someone else to host his work.

It really wouldn't take a lot of smarts to never have this problem. The smallest bit of caution would have made it a non-issue. It would take so little caution and so few smarts that it's reasonable to blame Mr. Cooper for his own loss.

The moral of the story is not that bad

[topologicalanomaly47]

The conclusion from all this is that even if you don't backup anything for 14 years trusting it all to a free service with a big fat disclaimer in their TOS you still get some bits and pieces back via the good work done by the archive.org and other similar services.

Ask Slashdot

[aicrules]

I'm sure the submitter is surprised that the answer to the impromptu ask slashdot tail on the story got such a wonderful response. But regardless, how did this story warrant posting on Slashdot? Dennis Cooper can go figure out with Google why they removed it. If he finds out it is for some newsworthy reason, go right ahead and have some random article written about it. There is literally nothing of value in this story. It doesn't expose some major concern with Google's services. It doesn't highlight an abuse of government power. It's one guy with some content that he didn't backup and has MAYBE lost for good.

Poor Dennis

[Anonymous Coward]

Dennis is a total dumb ass.

A Delorean

[twmcneil]

Only way this guy is gonna see his shit again is with a time machine. Sorry bro.

Uncle Al says "Save early, save often".

Re:A Delorean

[jm007]

Reminds me of my own painful process to learn to save early, save often.

Some of us have to learn the hard way.

O RLY?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of his artwork from the past 14 years just disappeared

Eric Schmidt works for the Pentagon. Seen him lately?

And this is why...

[Archtech]

... it's unwise to entrust anything of value to "the cloud". Put your work and your intellectual property on Google - and it may vanish, leaving you with nothing except the dusty prospect of sueing one of the world's biggest and most powerful corporations. Buy books from Amazon in Kindle format, and one day they may simply vanish too - as, with supreme irony, copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" vanished in 2009. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Keep what is important to you under your own eye and your own control, and of course back it up judiciously and perhaps store copies in a few other places. But blithely assuming that your intellectual property is safe on computers owned and controlled by people whom you do not know, and who have fundamentally no obligation to you, is risky.

If you enjoy thrillers and would appreciate a dramatic fictional presentation of these ideas, try Michael Connelly's novel "The Scarecrow". https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scare... You will probably never feel the same about "the cloud" again.

Same problem with an ultra-niche blog

[cliffjumper222]

I had been using a blog to record my pond over a period of a year. I specifically wanted to have a timeline record of pictures and notes. I knew no one would be reading it for a while until I completed the year and used it essentially as a notebook that I could easily upload to using my phone. I got about 10 months in and Wordpress deleted it all. Greeeeat. I still have the photos on my phone, but not the notes I took.

"The cloud"

[Bomarc]

And this is why I have about 100TB of hard drives lying around. “accidents” happen. Companies change policy. Three hard drives rotated; and this problem wouldn’t exist. I still want to know: How to backup (retain) my email from Yahoo.
I wish him the best. I would also be interested in knowing why his accounts were deleted.

Re:"The cloud"

[mrbester]

So would he. Apparently there was a "violation" but Google aren't saying what it was, which is part of his lawyering up; to find out. I'm betting some easily offended idiot stumbled on his stuff and reported it, at which point Google weilded the SmiteHammer. No, they won't give a chance to rectify the issue, the content is purged, no they won't tell you why, apart from fuck you.

No surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

The lession here is don't use googles piece of shit products.

Get off my lawn!

[mattyj]

This is just a case of someone that doesn't know how the Internet works, and maybe can't read. It's documented elsewhere that his account was disabled because of a violation of Google's terms, and when that happens, after you try to log into google there's a prominent message saying as much with instructions on how to get more info, etc.

Nothing has been deleted. Nothing is gone. He just needs to take care of whatever violation he triggered with Google.

And, as stated elsewhere by everybody and their mothers, back your stuff up someplace else in the physical world. Hard to believe it took this guy 63 years to learn that lesson.

Re:Get off my lawn!

[HiThere]

That's a reasonable interpretation, and I don't know the case or the reasons, but how certain are you that your description is what happened? That's not what the summary sounded like to me.

He should ask for his money back

[Anonymous Coward]

He should definitely ask for his money back.... oh, wait...

But seriously, Someone commented in this thread, "must be a millennial". Perhaps that's the problem. I mean, all of these services are pretty reliable, and everything is always just "there", it gives one the illusion of permanency. Those of us who have been around awhile know better. We keep copies of things. I feel a little bit sorry for this artist, but not too much; not more than I am for that woman who was caught on the mall security camera a few years ago, so engrossed in her texting that she walked right into a pool of water.

Here are a few computer-related Haikus for this guy. These are not mine. They've been floating around for years. Perhaps they will be of some solace:

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

The Website you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.

With searching comes loss
And the presence of absence:
"My Novel" not found.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.

Serious error.
All your links have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank

He should be happy

[Pahroza]

That was the trade-off he didn't know about. In exchange for winning the Euro 2016 Final, he lost his data.

What TOS?

[zenwarrior]

He obviously never read the current TOS which have been in effect for at least two years. He wants to sue after Google's TOS clearly state they assume no responsibility? His own lack of responsibility is the only culprit here. And if by some slim chance he finds he can can sue, the TOS say damages are limited to what he paid for the service (i.e., zero). Please, Slashdot! We aren't this desperate for news! But he does have one thing on his side. Maybe as with the death of an artist and the value of their works going up, so will the value or quality of his works with their disappearance. The fish that got away is always much larger than the one pulled into the boat. He'll forever be able to say how great his work was without any evidence to disprove his statement.

Don't use Google for anything

[John Jorsett]

After the numerous services that Google has created and subsequently terminated, I don't use anything of theirs unless it's for the most noncritical, temporary, ephemeral, or throwaway purpose. They've screwed me too many times for me to get sucked in again.

Re:Don't use Google for anything

[thegarbz]

Google hasn't terminated their service. In all of history they've also provided advanced notice and a period where you can extract all your data from their services. If you got screwed then you mustn't have been paying much attention.

Anyway all of this is completely irrelevant. Expect your service to end abruptly if you breach the terms of service, which this "artist" apparently did.

Account locked for abuse?

[swillden]

If both his blog and his e-mail have stopped working, it sounds to me like his entire account has been shut down. AFAIK, that's only done in cases of pretty egregious abuse... kiddie porn and the like. It's possible he didn't do the abuse, though, so he should contact Google to go through the account recovery process. This seems like a good place to start, then click "Another error or problem".

Re:Account locked for abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've a friend with a popular blog that had the same happy. Keep contacting Google, there's a team that does these reviews and restorations. It is probably all still there, just tucked away behind a human review. Wouldn't be surprised if it was back by next week.

Re:Account locked for abuse?

[thegarbz]

As mentioned above in a link to the guardian his blog featured "he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities. Cooper’s work often depicts sexuality and violence in graphic terms, and some of the writing and images dealt with similar themes"

So yes. Stock standard breach of terms of service, which include no advertising of such services, and the general knowledge that by doing anything depicted above you're skating on thin ice of having breached the terms of service but having the company ignore it until now.

Re:Account locked for abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could understand a warning first, then suspension of the blogshit, but deleting an entire google account and taking away email, calendar? As well as all purchased movies, tv shows, music, games and applications from the Play store, as they will all be tied to the gmail account.

Strange that no one sees that as the issue. It's all sanctimonious crap about taking backups.

Once Again: Cloud == Someone Else's Computer

[theshowmecanuck]

Do you GOT THAT? FFS.

He probably bragged that he didn't need to do anything to protect it, it was "in the cloud, on Google's servers."I have heard that from to many idiots. This makes me wonder even more about how stupid some small startups are to host their companies email on GMail.

There is more on WayBackMachine

[wahaa]

WayBackMachine has some of the pages from his blog

If you try the Blogspot's localized domains, there is more content saved there
.com
.co.uk
.ca
.com.es
.com.br
...and so on

Re:There is more on WayBackMachine

[Anonymous Coward]

there's a lot at http://archive.is/denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com

Hopefully someone out there who liked his work has downloaded copies of it.

It's a sign of the times..

[evolutionary]

I have told people in my circles for years that relying on "cloud" backups is an invitation for disaster for a few reasons: 1. It's not your server, even with legal agreements (how enforcible they are can vary from country to country), someone could hit the "rm" script and bye-bye data. Suing (even if it is an option) can't get the data back. 2. If you lose your connectivity to the Internet or the site, or the service provider is out of business, your data is effectively gone temporarily or permanently). 3. Any staff member can view that data. encryption (which can be intentionally weak or have a back door) can be used against you without you even knowing it...(until it's too late to do anything) We are a culture taught to "set and forget" and this artist, like most of us, got caught up on the idea that is data would be kept safe, which is exactly the mindset on that groups like Google, Iron Mountain, DropBox, Microsoft, Apple and many other "cloud providers" intentionally provide.The only way to be sure your data is secure (assuming you don't care who views it as much as making sure it's preserved) is to have your OWN local backup in addition to a cloud drive. You can create your own cloud drives to reduce the number of people likely to have access to the data (remember encryption is NOT a guarantee of security). There are many programs (free and commercial) that can help with your backups. Areca (open source/free/user friendly), Acronis (commercial, user friendly) and other products like Bacula (less user friendly), Bareos (Bacula fork). there are others, list here: http://www.enterprisestoragefo... Most people will be happy with Areca: http://www.areca-backup.org/in... We all have to remember we have to protect our own data and not get "headlight" frozen by everybody repeating "cloud storage" in our ears to the point it overrides our common sense. We have so many tools available to the public to protect ourselves and our data now. All we need to do is turn on our common sense/brains. I feel for this artist, but he should at least be a reminder to all of us of the truth we all know but somehow keep ignoring. Oh, at $150 CAD for 2 TB, we don't really have price as an excuse. Oh, also remember hard drives often die between 3-5 years (enterprise, Western Digital Black, Hitachi Ultrastar) or 1-3 years (Western Digital Black, i.e, green blue, red, purple, Hitachi Deskstar series). I don't mention Seagate because I've had too many bad experiences with them. I assume 1-2 years for their drives based on experience and test of Meantimes between failure, but Seagate drives are the cheapest, so for datacenters they are popular with their RAID 6 and RAID 10 setups.

Re:It's a sign of the times..

[RPI Geek]

You probably made some good points, but without paragraphs I just didn't bother reading past the first sentence.

And to make the story even stupider

[hackwrench]

Heh, good thing I actually went back and read more of the article before posting the below. Still, waste not, want not, and I still doubt a thorough examination of what archive.org actually preserved had been done. Then there's the matter of whether or not Google merely hid or deleted his work.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/... seems to say that archive.org has in fact been scanning the site, which is the first thing I check every time I discover content gone missing and should have been one of the things that someone at fusion should have done before running the piece. Besides, everyone knows you should back up the things that are important to you. I didn't care to click on any of the links

Re: And to make the story even stupider

[Anonymous Coward]

I checked it out. Most of blog appears to be gay porn not owned by blogger

So guy creates artwork

[future assassin]

uploads it to a free service and then deletes local original files? Maybe we need a Digital Darwin Award site....

No backup, artist must consider it unimportant too

[drnb]

Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.

Important enough to back up?

The artist's "experiment" has made a "discovery". Its important to back up your data regardless of who your online storage "partner" is.

Local backups?

[DiSKiLLeR]

Surely he has local backups?

Nobody would be so fucking totally stupid to have their only copy of all their work on a blog on the interwebs? LOL.

Publishing platform != backup service

[Anonymous Coward]

A publishing platform is not a backup or storage service nor should it be. Blog platforms are for _publishing_.

Can you imaging a photographer or magazine publisher deleting their originals after distributing copies? Of course not, because that would be stupid.

Internet clouds are like real clouds

[DidgetMaster]

They change shape all the time (e.g. 15 GB free storage becomes 5 GB overnight). They drift around depending upon which way the wind is blowing (company gets bought out by other company that has an entirely different mission). They disappear in the hot sun sometimes (bankruptcy, business focus changes, boredom). And in the case of this story...they can rain on your parade (all your data belong to us).

Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no such thing as "the cloud." There are just other people's computers.

Backups...other issues

[DCFusor]

I'd bet just about zero percent on this thread have "backed up" their money - which is bits in some bank's computer - at most. Their "TOS" were recently changed to "bail-in" by lawmakers. Yet you all seem to be perfectly happy with money that's basically fake and which only exists as bits on a computer you don't own. Which can be taken from you -legally- if the bank makes bad bets (yes, they are allowed to co-mingle funds now too). Don't take my word for it, but don't be surprised if more than GIF's go missing at some point.

Re:Backups...other issues

[david_thornley]

In the US, as long as you don't have too much money in any regular bank, savings & loan, or credit union, you're getting your money back in case of business failure. Of course, most of my assets are not in money form, which means that they're not protected by the government.

Re:Backups...other issues

[DCFusor]

Curious, I'm in about the same situation. Though I point out that even the attny general (Holder) pointed out that the big banks, who bought laws that allow legal co-mingling of their derivative bets and depositors money are "too big to jail". And yeah - "Free Jon Corzine!"
I note that the FDIC is ridiculously underfunded. Can't get blood from a turnip. You could print more, but we know where that goes.
I note that while we have a defense department that seems at least to support a lot of large defense contractors, and theoretically my stuff, we also have civil asset forfeiture so bad that last year it exceeded all losses by theft and burglary - 4.7 vs 4.2 billion bucks. (!)
So yes, it's good to have non money assets and especially ones that are NOT liquid enough to be desireable for thieves in uniforms to steal.
This is probably not the right thread to discuss this, but I was reacting to the "OMG, no backup - what an idiot" for something a lot less meaningful to most than "my next meal/rent or my kid's next doctor appointment".
Seemed kinda silly in terms of getting priorities straight.

Re:Backups...other issues

[david_thornley]

Good thinking.

There's a lot of stuff on my computers that isn't backed up, which does not include anything I created myself. That's recoverable after a disaster.

So...

[argStyopa]

...not just an "artiste" but stupid as well?

"the experimental author and artist has maintained on the Google-owned platform Blogger since 2002"

No backups anywhere?

Well, can we conclude finally that "the cloud" isn't as flawless a solution as all those cloud-storage salespeople INSIST it is?

IF he ever gets his account and data back...

[williamyf]

He should try this service called "Backup your blog" Offered by blogger

more info here:

https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/41387?hl=en

There is a similar offering for his email. Is called Thunderbird...

Obvious solution

[tomhath]

He should cut his ear off. That'll show Google he's serious.

must be digital art....

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is a genuine PhotoShack product.
A little ability is magnified digitally...
Copying and such are tolerated...
Not like watercolor, oils, pastels, sculptures and Martha Stewart crap. You know - traditional art.
Images may be deleted, but the paper, canvas, stone and glued buttons will still exist.

Is it possible to have a negative IQ?

[JustNiz]

Anybody that keeps their life's work on a single free cloud service and also doesn't keep any backups, is in my opinion so stupid that its almost inevitable eventual loss should be considered self-inflicted.

Gen Y is the laziest, dumbest generation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gen X is the laziest, dumbest generation...
Nintendo Generation is the laziest, dumbest generation...
Baby boomers are the laziest, dumbest generation...

post millenials are the laziest, dumbest generation (millenials)

Guess what, your folks said the same about you, your kids will say the same about their kids, It'll continue forever, and has for centuries "Kids these days"...

BTW, I'm old, I was told my generation was lazy and unmotiviated... and now my generation is saying the next generation is lazy and unmotiviated... It bugs me. since all these lazy, dumb people are calling the next generation lazy and dumb... so does this mean we're getting lazier and dumber with each successive generation? I don't know, that's for sociology students to determine... but wait they're lazy and dumb...

Re:Gen Y is the laziest, dumbest generation...

[ChrisMaple]

My 9th grade algebra teacher gave an example of this: a Greek philosopher (Aristotle?) complaining about the corruption of youth in his day, her point being that this has always gone on and is no big deal. What she missed was the collapse of the Greek empire a generation later.

Laziness and corruption do matter, and empires do fall due to the failings of their citizens.

Re:Gen Y is the laziest, dumbest generation...

[Gilgaron]

That was Socrates, Greece as a whole never had an empire as such, and their influence certainly didn't collapse a generation after Socrates.

Re:Gen Y is the laziest, dumbest generation...

[kaatochacha]

it's possible that all are true, and it's just a general downhill spiral...

common crawl has it all

[slazzy]

Common crawl seems to have it.

Need to blame 'greatest generation' too.

[drnb]

I'm a gen Xer and I sympathise with the millennials. The boomers screwed everything up, broke the economy, dragged me it if the EU, and have a massive sense of entitlement. If I hear "I've worked hard all my life" one more time I thought it was bad when I had to pay for the education that the boomers got for free. But then I look at the deal the millennials have, and realise they are even worse off.

Hate to break it to you but blame the 'greatest generation' as well. They developed many of the stupid business practices that led to the downfall of U.S. industry. They only seemed to know what they were doing in the 50s/60s because they effectively had no competition, literally blew it all up in the 40s, so many a foolish idea was allowed to persist and become entrenched. They started to push the costs onto future generations, for example the countering a demand for higher wages with increased retirement benefits. That bill won't come due for decades, but it eventually did, and such overhead made U.S. manufacturing less competitive. Combined with the trade policies they passed in Congress they share in the blame for exporting U.S. industrial production.

bull

[Anonymous Coward]

this story has bull shit rit all over it.

No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[thesupraman]

Let me tell you a story..

An experimental artist did some work, pinned it up to the public noticeboard at the load library.
He notice some people looking at it, so made more, kept pinning it up. Never kept any copies, just pinned the originals up.
The noticeboard had plenty of empty space, and he was enjoying this.
Some people even pinned up notes making comments on his work
After a few years, the noticeboard was taken down, because the library had been been reorganising, and there were now bookshelves there.

The artist stood in front of the library, complaining to everyone who walked past 'they took down my artwork!!! its not fair!!'

Perhaps he should have gone to librarian and asked very nicely if they still had the old noticeboard content, because he had been foolish enough to
not keep any copies, and would really like to actually have kept some of it.

But no, he just kept complaining to random passers by, hoping that would somehow help.

Re:No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[Nethemas the Great]

Analog

Re: No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

A better Analogie Would be: He tried to contact the librarians but found they were replaced by robots who are only build to put books back in the shelves.

Ever tried to contact Google? Good luck trying to get an answer.

Re: No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Opens up huge legal can of worms. Consider that same noticeboard board asked you for your personal information and contact information. Tracked and then used the content of said noticeboard to profit. Say the same noticeboard was used by other businesses for operational purposes such as passing information to customers or business partners and the closure of this noticeboard disrupted their business?

I get what you say and I agree with what you say wholeheartly and said artist is a dope because he didn't keep records of his own stuff. Fact remains the internet has turned into a leftist fiasco of nonsense. This whole argument is the self righteous against self righteous.

P.S Google still have a good reputation of trampling over the little guy that's just how they roll.

Re:No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

In this story, the artist wasn't given a generic notice from the library informing him that he was no longer welcome and revoking his library card at the same time as the new bookshelves went in. Therefore it's probably not quite as analogous as you might think.

Next time be less harsh on people who jump to conclusions. Everyone's fallible, especially you.

Re: No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[Killall -9 Bash]

If you're lucky, you talk to someone in Ireland. If you're not, you talk to someone in Mexico.

Re: No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever tried to contact Google? Good luck trying to get an answer.

Yes, I've tried contacting Google before on behalf of a customer when they changed ISP and got a new static IP address, which had been gotten blacklisted by whoever had it before them. Absolutely no way of getting past "helpful" webpages telling you it is your own fault, wait about 8 weeks and it will be automatically de-listed. Customer could not send any email to domains hosted by google in the meantime.

Re:No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[Keybounce]

You left out the part where he had permission from the librarian to post there. And, the librarian told them of how wonderful their message board was for posting stuff.

Re: No, this has nothing to do with Google.

[Coren22]

Yes, I have contacted Google, and they were extremely helpful. There is even a help link (posted just above you) that talks about what to do if your Blogger page is missing.

Perhaps it would do to actually try and contact Google first before bitching anyways, as it is so easy for a DMCA to take out all your stuff, and Google is legally obligated to disable access on receipt of a DCMA notice.

Re: No backup, artist must consider it unimportant

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, Google was under no SLA to ensure the datas integrity. It was the artists personal responsibility to backup all of his data. Now it's curious why the person's account was removed and no answer was offered by Google.

20-20 Hindsight

[Jimbob The Mighty]

Slashdot readers, just out of curiosity, is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

A time machine and some common sense?

The Article's title is wrong..

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be:

Idiot forgets to back up data, pays penalty.

Here's an idea

[viperidaenz]

Ask Google what happened.

If I had to guess, someone found his email password and deleted the blog for shits and giggles.

Or he could scream and throw a tantrum before Google have a chance to respond (and probably before he even attempted to contact them)

Terminological Stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Lesson #1 of computers:

If you do not own and control the machines that hold your data, then you do not own and control your data.

It's really just that simple, no matter what Amazon or Google or Facebook tell you. It's the lesson people learned in the 1960s and 1970s and that helped drive the 1980s "personal computer" revolution. Businesses were sick of leasing hardware and paying monthly fees for software, support, and storage and then having access to their own data controlled by the providers who kept collecting monthly fees...

"The Cloud" is a MARKETING breakthrough. In technological terms it's totally retrograde. In privacy, security, and personal property terms it's insanely bad and foolish.

And that's why

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Artist Dennis Cooper has a big problem on his hands: Most of his artwork from the past 14 years just disappeared. It's gone because it was kept entirely on his blog, which the experimental author and artist has maintained on the Google-owned platform Blogger since 2002 "

And that's why YOU SHOULDN'T DO THAT.

At the very least make some fucking backups once in a while, but depending on online services is just a bad idea in the long run.

Forrest Gump

[shubus]

"Stupid is as stupid does!" Blessed are those who make backups. ---and preferably off-line backups.

Stop relying on others

[Anonymous Coward]

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, cloud services, online storage space, services like github. Yes, I'm including fucking Github in that list because everyone seems to be fucking married to it for no fucking reason.

When all hope is lost ...

[Qbertino]

... maybe listening to Jesus might help.

Because: Not only does Jesus save, he also does nightly off-site backups.

*Tadum* *Crash* "Thud*
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.
Tip your waitors and try the fish.

The guy was an lDIOT

[p51d007]

For not BACKING UP his work. Plus, THIS is a prime example why you don't want to have everything on "the cloud". One keystroke by the owner of the server, POOF! It's gone.

Re:Trust in Google in the first place

[MrLint]

You're thinking of PayPal.

Foolish man

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we have all lost data from backups and cursed ourselves for not being more careful.

Though this from TFA is telling: “[If Google doesn’t] respond and rectify the situation, I won’t have any choice but to sue them,” Cooper wrote. “I don’t want to do that for obvious reasons, but I will if I have to.”

He claims he went public in the hope people would rally to his support, but threatening to sue someone hardly wins public sympathy. Under US contract law unless he was paying Google for that service he doesn't have a leg to stand on. TFA says he lives in France and has consulted a French lawyer. French law is a bit more tolerant on 'free' contracts but not much. Add to that Google's clam he violated their terms of service, that he has posted erotic material, and that he sounds like a bit of a jerk, and I wonder if we have the full story here?

And having threatened to sue Google, little wonder they've now clammed up.

Lesson for everyone here: Google is not your friend. Anything you store there can be gone tomorrow. If you accept those terms, don't complain if one day your digital life disappears.

Well smedley time to fire up the

[Anonymous Coward]

.... Wayback machine. Not sure it would catch a blog page, but if it is there,,,,, you ol' cooper should drop a nominal donation as a way of thanks.

Just ask your FBI/NSA records

[Anonymous Coward]

then all your beloved data will be there in it's original quality.

Re: Just ask your FBI/NSA records

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea but it won't be your "real" records.

Re:No backup, artist must consider it unimportant

[hey!]

Of course. But I'm just pointing out that you can't expect people to be OK with their stuff disappearing because it's not important to YOU, which should go without saying but apparently does not for some people.

Waybackmachine

[flyingfsck]

He should try the Waybackmachine. Maybe they have a copy of some things.

Slashdot. News For Nerds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you might as well call it "Home of dickheads".

Some real cold hearted assholes hang out here. Damn.

Backdown

[istartedi]

When working on your PC you need to back up. Everybody knows that. When working in the Cloud you need to back down. A lot fewer people realize that. It's bad enough that I got stuck with an ugly interface on Flickr after less than 1000 shots. There were some real pros on there with 100k+ shots and I feel sorry for them. There are recovery programs out there. I don't know how well they work, and I don't know how good a job they do at preserving things like tags, comments, EXIF, etc. I've been meaning to get around to putting my pix in a better format; but it's one of those things I keep putting off.

Anyway, people need to consider their backdown plans just as much as they need to consider their backup plans.

Best bit of graffiti I ever saw...

[Anonymous Coward]

...was on a church billboard that proclaimed "Jesus Saved", underneath it some technology scallywag had spray-painted "Maybe, but does he back-up?"

Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh thats an easy answer. All he needs to do is restore from his backups.

He had backups, didnt he?

Oh, he didnt. Silly, silly man.

Rule 1 of computing. Backup backup backup.

Google

[ekim68]

Google has been busy converting all of the Old Things on Blogspot to https and that has screwed up a few Blogs for some reason. It must have a physical/numerical address so try that..

Re:No backup, artist must consider it unimportant

[Darinbob]

And now he must suffer for his art...

Let's say, all your art was in a studio then the studio burned down so that you lost it all, isn't that the same thing?

Just treat the art as ephemeral. The majority of art is not permanent and no way to make it permanent, and modern art is full of intentionally ephemeral creations (performance art for instance). If the artist was any good then it'll go down in artist mythology/lore like the first draft of Mona Lisa frowning.

But maybe there's a lesson here. If you put all your vital irreplaceable art on Google or any other provider, then tell them that it's irreplaceable art!! Even putting art in a proper gallery usually involves some sort of agreement on insurance. Of course one could say "I'm an artist, I'm not expected to understand the real world!"

Putting it up on Google and them complaining when it disappears is like drawing with chalk on the sidewalk and then complaining when it doesn't last through the rainy season - in other words you have to use the right tools. The reason we can see some classic art today is because they used proper materials that lasted a long time.

Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Proof that you can't trust something like Google with important emails and work, because they can cut your access and delete everything; at any time and without reason.

And you sound

[rsilvergun]

Like an ass. If you're not a computer person fixing busted PCs all day then you get used to shit working. It's got nothing to do with being millennial. I wish people would stop blaming every mistake on people being lazy ass millennials. The worst thing you're probably soaking up that nonsense from right wing media. Christ, a hundred years ago you'd be going on about the Irish

Re: No backup, artist must consider it unimportant

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not. It is in the terms that he agreed to that were retroactively changed. Google has no commitments. Backups are essential. My 12 year old son knows this.

Some lessons can only be learned the hard way...

[Anonymous Coward]

My current job is technical support for a moderately sized hosting company. Everyday we run across situations where, for one reason or another, a backup is required.

For some people, the only way to learn the life lesson of keeping proper backups is to lose something valuable. That's the sad truth of it.

Regarding getting back his content, I would examine his browser's cached data. I'm sure there are still a few images stored in there... potentially entire HTML pages. I once found a need to pull a page out of my cache to prove a point (I can't recall what exactly). It was possible, but I had to jump through hoops to do it.

Pull From the Browser Cache

[nichogenius]

This is probably beyond the grasp of someone that doesn't think to take backups, but scavenging some of the images or even html pages from your browsers cache (assuming it hasn't been recently cleared) is possible. I don't think you will get everything, but something is certainly better than nothing.

Re:Pull From the Browser Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no need to use browser cache. Disable it. Read/writes to the drive for no gain is frivelous.

Re: No backup, artist must consider it unimportan

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's the thing with cloud services. They are so secure and your data is so safe. That is, until the day it's not. If you need to add an SLA, backups, encryption, etc yourself, cloud storage becomes utterly worthless. You risk exposing your data to others, you still need to monitor availability, you still need to pay for redundancy. So, what was the point of this centralization of storage again?

Where is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA probably has a copy.

Re: No backup, artist must consider it unimportan

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, since they had no legal obligation they're not in the wrong. Much like how Hillary Clinton is now innocent that she's not being charged. You guys will surely agree with your own logic over this, right?

Nope. Hillary was, in the eyes of the law, always innocent. Everyone is, until found otherwise by a court of law.

Re: No backup, artist must consider it unimportan

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction she is presumed innocent. Even though she's guilty as sin of mishandling Classified information, a crime others would be at least indicted for in a heartbeat, but she would be presumed innocent until convicted. That means she doesn't lose any rights until she's a convict. It doesn't mean she is innocent until convicted, just presumed innocent. There is a difference.

Click Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a link to a teacher, and her class of student bloggers, from the UK posting to Google productforum about the same thing in 2014: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/blogger/BWoWyGWozMw

There's an abuse button -- use it on Google. It's Abuse!!

Cloud's dissipate get over it

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't anyone know any thing about weather. Cloud's dissipate and go away, the same thing happens with cloud data. Sometimes it does a Hillary and nobody knows where it goes. The foolish are the one's who trust the cloud, or trust auto pilot technology, or trust someone else to keep your information, your life's work, yourself safe.

This is why you DO NOT TRUST THE CLOUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Another salutory lesson in why the only reliable backups are local (plus copies offsite) that you produce and control yourself.

If you're putting your life's work "in the cloud" and expecting it to be a) safe or b) secure you are an idiot. Putting your data in the cloud means it's no longer private and is no longer under your control.

Sorry I've got no sympathy at all for this "artist".

Re:No backup, artist must consider it unimportant

[ceoyoyo]

Better! The artist's experiment with a new medium has revealed that it is ephemeral, as are all things in life. While you might think you are working digital marble, like the sculptors of the ancients, the cyber medium is more akin to shifting sand.

I threw up in my mouth a little writing that.

Man loses work. Has no backup. News at 11.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man loses work. Has no backup. News at 11.
How is this a story?

The best place to get his stuff back

[Anonymous Coward]

Is hands down..

YOUR FREAKING BACKUPS. You did have backups, RIGHT?

The proper response

[Anonymous Coward]

Is for the artist to hire a lawyer to resolve his issues for him. Crying to the Internet is a waste of time and just makes him look stupid for not having backups of his work.

So?

[Ol Olsoc]

Not to sound unsympathetic, but if you are foolish enough to trust the cloud, this is what happens to you. And once it does - tough, you lost your stuff. It's like jumping off a cliff, happy about the awesom view and the weightlessness, and being pissed off that there is a hard place at the bottom of it.

Internet archive

[Anonymous Coward]

http://web.archive.org

All you own in IT is your SECOND best copy.

[mr_java66]

If I have said it once, I've said it a thousand times. All you own in IT is your SECOND best copy. You need to always backup everything. You will eventually lose the main/stubb/whatever. I feel so sorry for this guy. He must be heartbroken. Don't be hearbroken. Backup your stuff. :)

Jerry

Reminder: backups

[Anonymous Coward]

"cloud" == "other people's computers" and "free" == "you are the product" == "service may be withdrawn at anytime we stop making money out of it"

No worries.

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA has your data in triplicate.

NEVER EVER Trust Google

[kenwd0elq]

Google's motto was once "Don't be evil." It now seems to be "Don't! Be evil!" If you don't have YOUR OWN backups, on servers that YOU control, then everything you do is subject to random, capricious, even malicious, deletion and unavailability. We'll never know if somebody at Google objected to his work, or if some rogue admin accidentally deleted it, or if it was corrupted in some file system problem. But anything that's in Blogger especially is ephemeral and subject to loss.

Amazon has an "unlimited" cloud storage plan that's not particularly expensive; and USB flash drives these days are remarkably affordable.

Backups are good. Multiple backups are better.

Re:NEVER EVER Trust Google

[ebvwfbw]

Amazon has lost entire businesses using their cloud, more than once in 2014. I think more than once in 2015.

I don't think it's a matter of trusting Google. I have a feeling in this case, they sent him many messages. Maybe even to an e-mail address he's long since forgotten about. This is obviously a clueless person after all. I've found googles communications with the products I was using to be excellent when they decided to terminate them. I didn't lose a bit. I also have everything backed up in multiple places.

Control...

[cwsumner]

If you give someone else control of your stuff, so that they can "take care of you", then you are effectivly a slave to that person.
And with "the cloud", you don't even know who that person -is-.

Re:No backup, artist must consider it unimportant

[RockDoctor]

if Google lost m kids' baby pictures

Important enough to back up?

Of course not. Backing something up is a mark of wimpishness.

You can't trust anyone else.

[Anonymous Coward]

The "Cloud" is just someone else's computer.

Back up your files. No excuses.

Just because it's Google doesn't mean they're looking out for you.
YOU have to look out for YOU.

Sympathy for stupidity? Don't think so.

[BrianMahoney1357]

For around $100.00/year, you can run a dozen blogs on your own hosting site. Sell space to a few people and it's free. For around $0/year, you can back up your work/art/pics/videos to your own cloud space in said hosting account or, gosh I never thought of it, to your own damn computer.

Re: No backup, artist must consider it unimporta

[Anonymous Coward]

^^^^^^^^^^^^

We warned everyone about this. They didn't listen.

A sad tragedy for an innocent (fool).

[lucien86]

First law of computers - only a fool doesn't keep at least one backup - and ideally as many as possible.. No matter how difficult it is, no matter how awkward. It is a simple absolute given that sooner or later any single point of failure will eventually fail, always. Usually at the worst time. This is especially true when you rely on online services like Google - failure modes not only include technical failure, but also hacking, design changes, legal restrictions, or account control failure like in this case. his only real hope is to contact Google and beg and complain until they do something.. I'm sorry for him.

Blah

[TeddyR]

One of my fears was that either Yahoo or Gmail would simply pack up or discontinue their email with no notice. That is why one of my (at least once a month) is to make sure I download all emails/content from Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook (if you are not familiar with Facebooks way to download an archive of your facebook account you may want to look into it).

It was child porn

[Anonymous Coward]

You can call it art, but possessing CP is a crime in many places. That is why it has been deleted with no notice and why it is not avail in archives.

There are reddit threads about it.

Backup your contacts; Facebook does similar shit

[knorthern knight]

See http://thenextweb.com/facebook... Facebook is the ultimate "cloud service", and it too can delete your account and data... just because.

tldr; backup all your Facebook friends' (OK, maybe just the real friends) contact info offline. Ditto for calendars. Beware of syncing any device with facebook.

> Editorâ(TM)s note: This is a guest post by Chris Leydon, a freelance videographer
> and former startup founder. He organises the Tomorrow's Web series of
> meetups and documents London's tech community with his video production
> company Keyone Productions.

The "reason" he got for his Facebook account being disabled was...

> Upon investigation, we have determined that you are ineligible to use Facebook.
> Unfortunately, for safety and security reasons, we cannot provide additional
> information as to why your account was disabled. This decision is final.

He got onto Twiiter and actually managed to get the attention of a live person at Facebook UK, not some script-reader in Mumbai...

> I got a reply within an hour, saying that my query was being looked into,
> but no guarantees on finding out why my account has been disabled or
> reinstating it. The following day I received a further reply saying that
> unfortunately, due to a shared personal connection, he was unable to
> help or assist me in my situation because of a "user protection policy".

The consequences...

> Earlier on that day there had been an update to the Facebook page for the event
> I was attending, a change of location. Instinctively I logged into Facebook and
> saw that "Your account has been disabled message" again. I didn't know
> where I was supposed to go and I couldn't check Facebook to find out either.

> No worries, I have the event stored in a calendar on my Windows Phone.
> I flicked open to my calendar and looked for the appointment and it wasn't
> there. The calendar was syncing with Facebook and when my account
> became disabled, for security reasons, all of my Facebook events were
> removed from my calendar. Shit.

> Not a problem, I'll phone Russell, he was organising the event so could tell
> me where to go. I searched for Russell's number in my contacts andâ¦
> no results, he'd vanished. James? He was there as an email address and a
> Twitter handle but no phone number. Sean? Same again. My phone's contacts
> had been syncing with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but not actually
> saving any data to the phone or Exchange. All of the numbers were being
> pulled in from Facebook and without a Facebook account, I didn't have
> any Facebook friends and no numbers to pull in. Fuck.

> Luckily my text messages were still safe, I wasn't completely lost. I found
> an old text thread with Russell, phoned him and added the number as a
> new contact to my phone. I was saved for the evening and it turned out
> not to be quite the disaster I feared, but it started to dawn on me just how
> much Iâ(TM)d grown to rely on one platform.

I got mine back when it happened to me

[kattisch]

This happened to me and my blog and I was able to contact Google with the information regarding my blog and they were able to restore my email address and my blog. It took about a week to go through the process but I did get it all back.

your rights

[lott11]

so why is it that you think that any thing on the web is save or even safe. For more the 20 years people have been saying the same thing, the only place data is is safe is in your head. And most of all always back up in 3 different medias if you value your work. More so now day’s property theft from everyone, no backup with date stamp means you lost your rights. How can you prove it, it is your work or even that it is yours. Because of lawyers we have to always proof that we did the work, in some other place other than work. Or that we did any of the work at all. So if you are going to back up any thing here is the rules. It is your data so the only one that is responsible is you. No one will ever take care of your things, like you will. It dose not matter what company and how much you may pay for the service you are just a number. And last but not least it your data is out of your possession you no longer have control or the same rights to it. This means that data is no longer yours, it is now in the public domain. What this means the company that is bucking up or holding your data is beholding only to 2 persons. One it self and the government of where it’s belongs to, that means today any can view it at any time. And now here is the kicker you no longer have any rights to privacy, and in some cases you lost most right to it. But you do have one right if anything of that data can be used to incriminate you of any crime, that will be used to do so. And if you think you have the right of a person well read the law, and it describes how you may have lost those rights as of past 37 years. And if you country is still let you have dose rights make sure that the banking and corporate entities do not take those rights. Because then you will be like most America and the UK, Canadian, Australian and Most of Europa. The people are consider property or as they claimer to correct national product for the gross product. That is why they so much controversy for encryption of any device or data. So would you spend $50.00 on a hard drive or a web service, now that you know your rights. And there is the other point $50.00 how much and for how long on the web. Now a USB flash or cost how much and will last what 5 to 10 year just doing backup of data. Today you can get 2 USB flash drives of 32Gb or 64 GB or a 500 GB up to 1 Tb external hard drive. Yes $50.00 more or less the point it is your data, If you think that just because you paid for some software that will that will give the rights to that work. Think again read those agreements and see how much of it is really yours. So what can you do to recover the work, this just gave you and idea of how much you are SOL. Some claimed something and now you have to prove that it is your, you can put a XXX on the cover. Now you are going down for improper for those sensitive eyes or ideals. You my friend are do for long road, best of luck to you.

External Harddrives

[Anonymous Coward]

(Developers... Developers... Developers...) BACK-UPS. BACK-UPS. BACK-UPS. BACK-UPS. BACK-UPS. BACK-UPS. etc.

This is why I have an external hard drive. I keep an offline copy of all my files and I back-up to it every so often.

Are you telling me this artist kept absolutely no offline back-up copies over the last 14 years?

In Reality .....

[MercTech]

Cloud storage is only a convenient way to keep revisions of a file concurrent between several terminals. Anything that only exists only in a cloud is as ephemeral as a daydream.

Web based email is for when you want a quick check from another's terminal. Get a real email client and learn out to archive. Oh, wow, even some of the free email clients will back up correspondence automatically! Leave web based email for grandmothers discussing the latest cat video. (Yes, you can even pop serve gmail and hotmail to keep a record copy on your hard drive.)

    Face it, leaving the only copy of digital art out on a hard drive hosted by someone with no fiscal interest in the work is like leaving a large format oil painting in the hands of volunteers for a sidewalk art expo and not asking about the work until a month after the show.

Re:No backup, artist must consider it unimportant

[drnb]

Better! The artist's experiment with a new medium has revealed that it is ephemeral, as are all things in life. While you might think you are working digital marble, like the sculptors of the ancients, the cyber medium is more akin to shifting sand.

I threw up in my mouth a little writing that.

I think you should put that into a federal grant application. :-)