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Thinking abt the Tumblr purge, the new discord policy, & recent AO3 discourse... I wish more ppl realised that there's no such thing as stability on the internet. If a website hosting provider decides to delete data, they would axe billions of files with the press of a button. +
The ffnet & wattpad situations,,, even internet archive has been saying they're at risk. AO3 is a great service, & it's an important model on how to archive data. It might collapse eventually, as history repeats itself, but the ideology remains. A new service will come after it.
Thinking abt what happened to megaupl*ad. It can happen to any website, anytime. There is no "cloud", ur data is on someone else's computer. Servers in a basement somewhere. The safest & way to store data is in offline external hard drives, & even those are fragile & can break.
Ppl ask, why does A03 asks for donations, "it's just a website" - all the data u post & consume on it has to be stored SOMEWHERE. They need physical servers, these aren't for free & they cost a lot, & they talk about it on their blogs so it's no secret.
I'm rambling abt this topic cz it interests me, u can ignore me. This extends past A03 - there r academic online libraries at risk of getting axed cz of copyr!ght. It's sad. I'm of the belief that knowledge should be accessed by the masses. But hosting servers don't really care.
Point is; save everything u care about. I have a 4TB external hard drive I use to store what I want to keep forever, with dates & names, for archiving purposes. My irls say it's useless & I can just use g**gle drive - sure, but there is no "forever" on a cloud, or online.
