Technology

"I wouldn't like to be caught without a second backup." -- Miles Edward O'Brian, Chief of Operations, Deep Space Nine. ("The O'Brian Principle").

"" -- Every free software advocate who has been on about this during the entire past 20 years and up to twice that, warning us about these kind of things.

Either the user controls the...

or, OP article story.

Friendly advice: never put your entire life in the hands of a corporation!

Also, the migration from local storage to the "cloud" was never a good thing for us, and the small gain in convenience wasn't worth it, but most people don't seem to realize that.

How many cases like this aren't making the news? There are probably thousands of people who depend on Apple or Google or Dropbox and are suddenly locked out with no options.

Imagine having all your important data in just one place.

Part of me is glad the liabilities of trusting these companies with the history of your life are validated. If you don't control access, you don't own it.

Their first party account is an interesting read and available on their blog here:
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

The post was updated yesterday with the following:

Update 14 December 2025: Someone from Executive Relations at Apple says they’re looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they’ll call me back tomorrow, on 15 December 2025. In the mean time, it’s been covered by Daring Fireball, Apple Insider, Michael Tsai, and others, thanks folks! I’ve received 100s of emails of support, and will reply to you all in time, thank you. Finger’s crossed Apple calls back.

If it's not in your hands in an open format it's not yours.

Not an "apple fan", an apple-focuse software dev deeply embedded in their dev community.

Which I suppose goes a long way to explain them being multiple terabytes in the hole inside Apple's ecosystem, and also why even having a separate backup would definitely not fix their problem in the first place.

I’ve been an Apple customer for 35 years. Had an Apple account as long as Apple has had such things. A few years ago (specifically, when Apple started retiring 32-bit apps from the App Store) I saw where Apple was going and created a dedicated account for my Apple ID that’s separate from the one I use for my contact for Apple services.

If Apple locked me out of my account today, I’d lose access to 14 years of app purchases on that account. That’s about it? And at some point I started using an alternative ID for some of my purchases, so I’d only lose access to some of them. And of course, I now keep copies of everything backed up, since they could vanish from Apple’s servers at any time.

I'm kind of confused why someone would try to pay for an ongoing cloud subscription by buying a $500 gift card.