I so enjoy when Seth Werkheiser’s “Social Media Escape Club” emails arrive in my inbox. His writing is straight-up gold. He tells it like it is. His emails often outline the addiction to social media that most are trying to break (or at least cut back on) and are ultimately getting nowhere. He provides curated quotes from around the internet as a way to help you feel like you are not alone. One that resonated with me today was from the newsletter Technically Good:
“Reminder that “The Cloud” is “someone else’s computer,” and if that computer happens to be under the purveyance of someone who isn’t completely rational, that could be a problem. File under: Digital sovereignty … especially since also, someone can, in fact, just turn off your cloud, leaving you without your data.”
We are so dependent on technology that it’s easy to overlook these simple truths because of convenience. Apple makes it so easy to just let their Cloud do the work behind the scenes. But I can report first hand, when it fails, and has failed for some time even though you thinking it’s working, it can be catastrophic.
It’s also why I spent the better part of my Sunday night backing up photos and videos to three separate places, two of them physical media that I can just connect to my device anytime I need it. No Cloud company can stop me from doing that.
If any of you out there need a friendly reminder, here it is: print your work, on physical paper, and store it away. Get a couple of solid state drives (expensive right now I know!) and copy your work to them. Setup redundancy by making a duplicate of that work. Make a zine (they’re trendy now). You know, do the stuff that will allow your creativity to thrive, no just on a phone or computer screen.
Don’t rely on someone else’s computer and computer software to save your creativity for you.
Now here are some photos from Tett House. Probably not worth printing, but definitely worth backing up for myself, Cloud or no Cloud.
