An Apple fan who has spent “nearly 30 years as a loyal customer” says they’ve been “permanently” locked out of their Apple Account due to what might be the overzealous actions of Apple’s automated anti-fraud system. It’s left them locked out of “20 years of digital life,” and it all started with the seemingly straightforward purchase of an Apple gift card.

I’m not blaming the guy, but he seems smart enough that he should have known better. Data isn’t secure if it’s in a single location, he gave up control and the inevitable happened. I do not trust anyone with my data, the more important, the more sure I am that I have copies in several locations, including ones that are entirely in my control. My photos exist on multiple devices, cloud, my selfhosted immich server and my offline backup. Same with documents and other important data. My ripped movie collection is not backed up since I have the physical media. Do not give up control, the systems are all setup to give you the illusion of security, but then this kind of thing happens. Maybe I’m extra paranoid since I’ve been the victim of identity theft but I’m comfortable with my level of paranoia.

Same here. I self host photo storage, which leaves originals untouched. It’s got a parity drive. There’s a hot spare. Every night it gets backed to up two different cloud providers that both host their own hardware, on two different continents (OVH, Germany and Backblaze, US East). The entire thing gets written to two offline disks every six months, for worm protection. I run recovery exercises a couple of times a year. It would take a dinosaur killer asteroid for me to lose access to this data. Imagine giving all that to Apple?!