"The cloud" is other people's computers. The computers may be well managed today but what about next month, next year, three years from now?
If your data is important you gotta take responsibility for it.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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Can't Locate Our User Data. Cloud.
People never seem to understand that "the cloud" is no more substantial or permanent than the meteorological ones it's named after.
The cloud eventually pisses on you or rains your data down on someone else.
But the data transubstantiates into AI godhood not unlike like Heracles, Jesus or the Prophet when the cloud embraced then and took them to their respective heavens.
That's why you have local backups of important data.
That's what you get for relying on Microslop
We can give it to you for free... oops, now we need to cancel it. 😜
Oops, we have already cancelled it early. But we offer you even more freebies as compensation 😜
Oops, we have even deleted all your valuable data, and earlier than we promised. But we offer you a lukewarm declaration of our own incompetence as an excuse 😜
Am I dreaming, or....
Are they just begging for class-action lawsuits on as many levels as possible?
The company said it regretted the impact and was offering affected nonprofits a free "concierge service," a meeting with a Microsoft specialist to help set up a new Microsoft 365 environment and answer questions.
After that experience they're going to do business with Microsoft again?
Some high percentage of them will be that stupid, yes, because the people making the decisions are not terribly computer-literate and just want things to go back to "normal" without having to learn anything new or retrain anyone.
Yes. Yes, they are.
Taps forced arbitration email you probably never saw in your junk folder
The only thing more tonedeaf and Microslop-like would be to offer Copilot subscriptions to try and hallucinate the data back.
No sympathies; nonprofit ceo's choose to follow big tech rather than their opensource nonprofit brothers and sisters.
I have sympathy for non-profits. Did you ever use Gmail or Google Drive? Same concept.
If they're smart enough, they'll look for greener pastures, if they double down that's when my sympathy ends.
Non profits likely can't afford a team of tech workers to maintain opensource infrastructure. Avg tech worker salary in the states is $100k, you'd need two or three staff for coverage/to avoid key-person risks, so you're looking at $200-300k to retain internal teams to use opensource tech, in salaries alone. Opensource doesn't mean 'free' too, as many businesses will generally require some sort of support/enterprise agreement for risk management/audit reasons -- so they'll pay lic fees on top of the salaries.
The technology supports the business, but it isn't the business -- sorta like a pizza shop may need a brochure-website to advertise their services/take orders, but their actual business is pizza. Someone who's specialising in pizzas, shouldn't need to learn how to maintain an opensource server stack. If you get a 'golden goose' staff member, who's some university student genius that loves pizza and will happily maintain opensource infrastructure on the side, then your business is totally fucked if that person leaves because finding a replacement with similar skills is nearly impossible / very expensive.
They can outsource it to a third party, as most businesses do. And then that third party goes through the same general calcs, and settles on big box tech solutions for similar reasons.
I don't think its as clear cut as you seem to imply.
Hosted nextcloud services start at $5/month. It scales up for more users, but so does Microsoft.
Hosted -- so from a company perspective, still Cloud. Still subject to similar potential risks.
Yeah, but they aren't Microsoft and have competition, so they might care if they lose your business. Unless you're a big company or state actor, Microsoft probably wants your data more than what little money you have. Especially if they don't get any money from you because you're on some kind of charity plan.
A small local company is also more likely to help you with an individual backup solution if something off the shelve doesn't fit you.
Not all clouds are equal.
Non profits likely can’t afford a team of tech workers to maintain opensource infrastructure.
No, what they actually can’t afford to do is rely on Microsoft? That’s who lost their data in reality?
MICROSOFT: You'd be insane to trust us with your data, lol
^new ad campaign?
honey pots to destroy knowledge, cool.
They offered 300 business basic accounts for free. That’s only like $2000 worth of accounts or discounts on other premium accounts.
How about, you lend me someone to help me migrate to another service.
I have some data synced through OneDrive for my business. Last night, I found a corrupted pdf. I’m not sure if this occurred when it downloaded from Canva years ago or if it got corrupted on OneDrive somehow. Luckily, I was able to just redownload it from Canva.
Yes. We should trust some other company with all our data, what could go wrong? Think of how much money we can save by *checks notes* no longer being in business at all!