#i lost everything

[vvatchword]

I don't think any streamer I've ever seen could beat Vargskelethor in terms of his pure joy. He's so fuckin happy all the time. I love him

[uchiha-itachi-amaterasu]

I lost everything by rainbuni on deviantart

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia.

I want to ask— do you backup your wips? How do you do it?

I know there are things like Cloud and Dropbox but those are practically at the mercy of big corporations and with ai scraping now being the norm it feels risky saving work with online backup.

Do you use a USB instead?

Unfortunately nothing is risk-free these days.

I once saved a story to three different USBs, all different brands, and they all corrupted. Not all at the same time, but they all eventually lost the data. This was over a period of ten years, but of course some people have been relying on USBs etc. for this long now. Same with CDs burnt with data (something we used to do before USBs were cheap).

In fact a new study shows that over half of all external hard drives and USBs over a certain age (I think around 5 years) are already corrupted and often not being checked enough to check if they're still containing/keeping the data necessary. (To say nothing of entire batches of like Seagate and other brands being notorious for literally just...losing data and corrupting at any point in time - which is an issue for actual hard drives within the computer as well).

USBs and external HDs aren't necessarily safer.

In general it's a good idea to back up in three places, though this still isn't enough to guarantee safety. Those three places should be: a) hard copy (i.e. USB or external hard-drive), b) cloud copy (i.e. Dropbox etc.), c) on the machine itself (if it's a desktop). You can sometimes do like, a + a + c or b + b + a etc.

It still doesn't guarantee preservation of data! I think that's the hardest thing about preserving data and back-ups overall.

I have an extra bonus 'back up' in that 99.5% of all my writing is already public. And that a lot of that writing has additionally been snapshotted into the Wayback Machine. If all my methods somehow corrupted or failed, I could literally copy/paste my stories from AO3 back into Word documents (in fact I've actually done this before because I frequently go back in and edit AO3 chapters for typos etc. but don't mirror those changes in the original documents, so sometimes if I want to update a story, I'll copy/paste the AO3 chapter and override the original document).

Anyway, I use Dropbox Business (cloud), hard external copy (though not as often as I should), desktop version, and then also the AO3 version. Dropbox Business has additional data recovery protections that general Dropbox accounts don't.

We are always at the mercy of big corporations, anon. Big corporations make USBs. They make faulty external hard-drives that we sometimes mistakenly trust. Like no, they're not scraping for AI the same way, but I no longer believe - unfortunately - that this is truly preventable. Short of going a grassroots Linux direction, which...I can't, lol.

(This is a reminder to all writers: Back-up your writing! The beginning of the year is a good time to remember to do it, if you're not doing it every 3 months).

(And also, check all your USB/external hard drives! And make sure they're not your only source for that content, because you would not believe how much they degrade over time.)

If I ever needed a 5th option, I host my own domain and have done so through the same company for over 10 years with very high fidelity, and I would just dump it all into a database there so I could pull it back if necessary. That's not ideal (it's probably the easiest way I could be hacked because I check into the cpanel the least often), but it's doable.

But yeah I've been Dropbox Business for a long time. I don't like everything about them, but I trust them a lot more than Microsoft OneDrive (which I refuse to use) and many other cloud networks.

As for AI scraping, since 99.5% of my stuff is on AO3, it's already been scraped, and it's delusional of me to think it hasn't been. I have already had the majority of my art scraped into Midjourney, so sadly I've reached a level of disgusted acceptance that the gormless unethical billionaires of the world will just do what they want. If it has an internet connection to it, it's probably been scraped or will be scraped and putting something on a USB isn't going to stop that, because it needs to come off a USB if I want to work on an ongoing story.

[body-to-flame]

i accidentally deleted my account and im so fucking frustrated you dont have idea

[arkiwii]

NEW TWITTER ACCOUNT

dropping this here before I go to bed goodnight

[sprontisdabest]

i jumped to the void thinking my elytra was on

turns out it was not

[mathelaw]

.

[kamthesheep]

[ENG]: Based on true events

[ESP]: Basado en hechos reales

(Old version of the cccc album cover re-draw here👇/Versión vieja del re-draw de la portada del album cccc aca👇)

[ENG]: Yeah, the hand is horrible

[ESP]: Si, la mano es horrible

[youonlyzingonce]

Can you imagine if it didn’t happen? The first hello goes unsaid. The first phone call never dialed. The first note never written. And the first kiss never tried. Hands that were never held. The late nights never had. And I think after all these years that I’d know, I’d know there was something missing. Some great void in my cosmos. And even if I’d never met you, I think I’d be so very sad. No matter the hurt, no matter the pain we’ve caused, I love you so very much. And to have never known such joy, it would be as if a ghost haunted me. And I’d know. I’d know.

[miffysrambles]

i’m having a mental breakdown bc i didn’t save my pokémon save for a week and my switch crashed

[littlemoondarling]

I genuinely hate my family and am just tired of them....

[ghoulbats]

i’m simply not built for minecraft i just nearly cried at my last death

[m1shapanda]

So uh i wastrying to clean up some space on my phone but i accidentally deleted all my data on ibis paint :')

[wolfluna091]

Man, I just realized my ibisPaint was removed and when I installed again and synchronized the data, I lost most of my drawings… and the ones I got back, it's back to Sept 1… I'M SO FUCKING MAD!!😭😭😭

And now I can't even login on Twitter!!! I'm not feeling lucky today😭😥

[tache-noire]

A PILL TO MAKE YOU NUMB A PILL TO MAKE YOU DUMB A PILL TO MAKE YOU ANYBODY ELSE ALL THE DRUGS IN THIS WORLD WON'T SAVE HER FROM HERSELF

[llittletingoddess]

My salary got cut in half. This day couldn't be any worser 🤭