Be a Gardener, not a Tenant

Last month I asked a family member about their digital photos and whether they had them backed up. They replied, “Of course. They’re in the cloud.” I followed up with another question. How would you feel if you lost access to that cloud account? Upset, they replied. That’s what I thought, I said. And commented I believed it’s not good to rely on cloud services alone. Cloud services are not forever. I suggested my family member look into backing up their photos locally. With multiple copies. And pointed them to relatively inexpensive (less than $100 US dollars) portable hard drives. This week, when I read Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web, it reminded me of my conversation with my family member. I nodded my head at Jeffrey Zeldman’s words: The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with…