I’ve used iPhones since the first 2G in 2007. But my current photo library dates back to June 23, 2010. Everything before that seems to have been lost. What’s special about that particular date?
Anyway, the answer is that on June 23, 2010 I got an iPhone 4. About a year later Apple released automated cloud backup. I haven’t lost a single photo since, but photos of the first three years of my son’s life are probably lost to aging/lost hardware.
This is my heavy-handed way of saying that reliable cloud backup is really important to ordinary people’s lives. We shouldn’t ask them to give up cloud backup to retain control of their own data.
@matthew_d_green Who is asking people to give up cloud backup in order to retain control of data? Agreed with you but this could apply to a few different things and I wasn’t sure which ones this is reacting to.
@mpanhans The FBI, for one.
@matthew_d_green Yep. It also reminds me of Signal Messenger not implementing any backup feature for iOS in part because they don't trust iCloud. But it means lots of users lose valuable chat history with no recourse. There is an ongoing forum thread since 2017: https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-message-history-when-switching-phones/1736/807
