Considering the Cloud

After the LastPass revelations and reading Jason Scott’s FUCK THE CLOUD essay today, I started considering what I should be looking at in terms of data security this year.

Not as “can this data be stolen”, but as “can this data be lost irretrievably — and how bad would it be if it was?”.

I have already lost access to my Twitter account, but I don’t think there’s much there that I’d care about if I never saw it again.

I still have the EMUSIC-L archives, even though the ibiblio site has been broken for years. They are incomplete; we lost some of the really good stuff, including Mike’s hot-off-the-experience posts about the first Team Metlay gathering. Still, okay.

My VFXsd sequences and patches are backed up on slowly-deteriorating diskettes, and it’s only a matter of time before those go. I think I have sysex dumps of all of them; I can replace the diskette drive with a USB one, but the SD-1 is getting long in the tooth, and I’m not sure I really mind if the various didn’t-quite-ever-amount-to-anything sequences are lost before I record them.

Photos. I have several dozen photo libraries in various states of cleaned-upness, and that is a project I should devote some time to actually catching up on, even if it’s simply to pull out the good ones and let whatever happens to the rest, happen.

Facebook does allow you to dump everything off, and it’s probably time to grab another archive.

Most of my music is up on the Internet Archive, which is likely to outlast me, and that’s OK. Should consider packaging more of the tracks on Soundcloud into albums.

I’ve lost all of my archived data from the mainframe era, and I’m a bit sad about that; there was some really elegant stuff in there — elegant for OS/360 and MVS, I guess…

I’ve shrunk my physical memorabilia footprint a lot; I have a few things I’d hate to lose, like my board from the 360/95 (did lose my mass store carts and my original FE manual somewhere along the way) and my pocket trumpet, but not as much as I thought before.

So I think my work for this year will start with finishing up the cleanup of both of our LastPass vaults — that’s mostly done at this point, but making sure we both have a clean copy is a chore — and then finding a way to compile and then deduplicate all those photo libraries (and separate my photos from Shymala’s — we did and still do tend to take shots with each other’s equipment and then forget to split them up).

I anticipate that job will take quite some time.

Once that’s done, I’ll come back to the various places my music is stored and get everything out on a release on Bandcamp and the Archive, which will make it available and as safe as I can make it.

I’m backing up my personal laptop with BackBlaze, which is probably safety enough for most of my data. Will need to review though and make sure it’s all getting backed up. Possibly spending a little to save the various backup disks in BackBlaze is a good idea as well…

I’ll revisit this over the year, but writing about it helps clarify my thinking some. Back to the passwords.