Just saw this article, and thought some of the folks here might find it interesting:

"Either way, Cooper’s ordeal is a chilling reminder that those of us who use the Internet to house our creative work do so at the mercy of the platforms who host us."

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/why-did-google-erase-dennis-coopers-beloved-literary-blog?mbid=social_twitter

Steve Z.

Thanks for the article, Steve. Yes it is interesting - but much more less dramatic than I thought at the beginning. ;-)

Blogger/Google surely made two mistakes:

- They did not inform Cooper that they would erase his blog (so that he would have a chance to save the material). Moreover perhaps the deletion only of the problematic parts of the blog would be a solution too.

- They obviously refused to communicate with him also after the deletion.

On the other hand Cooper made two serious mistakes too:

- It seems that he did not save the material he uploaded to his blog on another place. Data backup should be a standard procedure whenever the data is of importance to me.

- He posted material that obviously violated Blogger's terms of service. Not often (he says) but it happened: On the one hand something that had to do with escort ads (in some literary way edited by Cooper, as it seems). And on the other hand some crazy fantasies (again in the form of literature) about the wish to see children dying. - If I were the owner of a platform I would not accpet such material too.

With these two severe mistakes, I think that Cooper to a large extent is responsible himself for the disaster that now he seems to have lost all the material of 10 years blogging.

On the other hand it seems quite plausible what a former Google employee said to Cooper:

«She guessed that the whole thing was a clerical error of sorts—the result of a policy reviewer who “saw something on the blog they interpreted as out-of-bounds from Google policy and took it down.” The disastrous consequences probably stemmed from “just a stupid mistake,” she said.»

From this point of view: Yes, we should all be aware that a data loss could happen whenever we send something to the cloud.

Anything important to you in the cloud should be backed up to your own device. Especially if it is a free service.

From my own experiences with Google Adwords, it seems that Google employ lots of poorly trained, outsourced staff to enforce the subjective parts of their policies. So you could be found to be in violation of terms of service, even if you haven't done anything wrong. And there is generally no right of appeal. They are judge, jury and executioner. You might not even find out what you were supposed to have done wrong (cf Kafka's 'The trial').

Desktop applications still have many advantages...

One nice thing about cloud services that sync to a folder on local devices (e.g. Dropbox, Evernote, Tresorit) is that if the service suddenly disappears you always have the local copy. This is a reminder to me not to use Dropbox's "selective sync" on all my devices -- at least one device always needs to sync all of my dropbox folders. Selective sync is also a much-requested feature for Evernote but these stories remind me that the feature comes with a big drawback: at least as it is now, I always have a full copy of all my Evernote notes on all my Windows machines.

Good move. As a small business, we also use synchronisation services of various kinds (Dropbox, Evernote, but in particular Soonr), and have dedicated one of our microservers to backing up these services in a one-way sync operation (so even if something truly awful happens and all data held in a synchronised account is deleted in such a way that the deletion is propagated across multiple machines, we'll always have a completely independent backup - well, several, in fact).

It's worth bearing that two-way effect in mind, incidentally. Your data is vulnerable even if your service provider doesn't suddenly die a death, because synchronisation "giveth, but also taketh away". While I appreciate the versioning in Dropbox and Soonr, it's no match for a totally independent backup...

Cheers,
Bill

This reminds me of when my Gmail account was suspended due to suspicious activity (or something?!?)

I tried every normal channel of communication, but got no response. I finally started googling for Google employee names and emails, and called a Google employee. He was a bit miffed to take my random customer support call, but was sympathetic and took my info and promised to look into it.

A day later, my gmail was restored. Phew!!

Speaking of Dropbox, the one cloud service I really rely upon (besides Dropbox) is Workflowy, which fortunately has an auto-backup to Dropbox feature.

dan7000 wrote:

One nice thing about cloud services that sync to a folder on local
devices (e.g. Dropbox, Evernote, Tresorit) is that if the service
suddenly disappears you always have the local copy. This is a reminder
to me not to use Dropbox's "selective sync" on all my devices -- at
least one device always needs to sync all of my dropbox folders.
Selective sync is also a much-requested feature for Evernote but these
stories remind me that the feature comes with a big drawback: at least
as it is now, I always have a full copy of all my Evernote notes on all
my Windows machines.

Someone who's involved in front of and behind the scenes in software curation and whose views I tend to trust once wrote to me:

"Yes, synchronization is hard... The Internet isn't nearly as reliable as most people think, and synchronization is ideally suited to demonstrate that."

I try to back-up accordingly.

And here is a cautionary tale for those not using the cloud:

"Writer rushes into burning building to save two finished novels"

"An author in New Orleans has rushed into his burning home to save a laptop, which contained his two finished novels."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37395526/writer-rushes-into-burning-building-to-save-two-finished-novels

In a universe long ago and far away (think tape!), I taught a consulting course which covered, among other things, protecting critical computer data. Two of the bullet points were:
1 - There are only two kinds of data users, those who have lost data and those who will lose data.
2 – If data doesn’t exist In at least three separate places, it might not exist at all.
The cloud hasn’t changed a whole lot in that regard.

More cautionary news for those who choose to live in the cloud: Wunderlist’s servers have been down for over 24 hours now. Local apps work fine, but you can’t synch between devices.

Microsoft, which bought Wunderlist a little over a year ago, has confirmed the outage and apparently has no idea when (if?) they will be able to get their act together again.

xtabber wrote:

More cautionary news for those who choose to live in the cloud:
Wunderlist’s servers have been down for over 24 hours now. Local
apps work fine, but you can’t synch between devices.

Microsoft, which bought Wunderlist a little over a year ago, has
confirmed the outage and apparently has no idea when (if?) they will be
able to get their act together again.

Yikes. 24 hours would be enough for me to abandon the service for sure. Coincidentally (?) Evernote's servers were down for about 30 minutes (that I noticed) on Wednesday, and then I got some sync errors for the remainder of the day which finally resolved. Shows how fragile your infrastructure is if you rely on these services -- but it's hard to avoid relying on the cloud in some way.

One advantage of being an older guy: I remember when the network was often a not-work. Two generations before me, many people didn't trust banks (and with good reason—look at what they're still doing today). My generation, instead of stuffing their money under a mattress, uses the cloud primarily for backups.

Apropos to the original point of this thread: I have a Blogger blog, and I have a monthly reminder to back it up. Google has made some improvements here; blog backup used to not save comments, but it does now. Fortunately, I've never had to use it.