People who follow the same types of blogs I do will probably have already read about the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the hacking of Mat Honan's online accounts a couple weeks ago. These weren't minor services either, but stuff like iCloud, Amazon, and Gmail. If you haven't heard about this saga yet, click that link and go read it, because it might change the way you look at online security and privacy. I know it did for me.
As scary as the entire situation sounds, nothing hit me as close to home as the part where he said that the entire collection of photos taken in the first year of his daughter's life had possibly been erased forever. As a fairly new father, the thought of losing all of the records of my son's life these past 8 months terrifies me, and I was incredibly saddened to hear about this part of Mat's situation.
As promised, Mat has released the story of how he managed to rescue some of his lost data. I was curious to know how he did it, but mostly I wanted to know: did he get those photos of his daughter back? Well, as it turns out:
“My data came back to me on an external hard drive, organized by file types. The thing I cared most about, above all else, was my photo library. And there, in a folder full of JPGs, was photo after photo after photo that I had feared were gone forever. Subfolders were organized by the year, month and day files were created. I went immediately to the folder that bore the date my daughter was born. They were there. Everything was there. We were floored. I nearly cried.”
I'm not ashamed to say, I teared up a little myself. I've never even met Mat, but I'm incredibly happy for him.
Throughout all of this, I've become a big believer in backups. I already use Dropbox for certain things, but I plan on investing in some external hard drives and setting up an automated online backup too. I don't want to see my data become compromised, nor do I want to be put into this kind of situation. I hope you guys take the same thing away from this story.
Mat Honan | How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking
