You see, according to the Yahoo TOS they can deactivate your account for any reason, and then not actually give you a reason why they have cancelled your account. Ironically it was on a Yahoo search that I found this out, along with many other people's sorry tales of woe. No matter how important the email or trivial the reason Yahoo can cancel the account. This means you lose your contacts, email addresses, stored emails, photos and messenger details all in one fell swoop.
Ive never fully trusted either Microsoft (Hotmail) Yahoo or Google to look after my entire life by keeping all of important documents on their "virtual" storage drives. In fact I have spread them around several different services.
I mainly used the Yahoo account for password verification and also throw-away emails that I wasnt bothered about, but still there were some important (and some irreplacable) passwords and usernames that have long been lost, including a Paypal account.
I wont be getting any of the emails back, not any of the stored information, but it is a good warning to me in the future to never rely on a corporate body to look after my interests when it appears there is no financial benefit to them!
Microsoft with their Live Hotmail brand are trying to encourage me to ditch my USB Flash Drive in favour of their new Skydrive service. But on a whim they could cancel it with no comeback whatsoever. So despite the threat of losing it, getting it stolen or it failing, I think I'll be keeping it thank you. Im also in the slow progress of migrating some of the email contacts to Hotmail. As for Yahoo Messenger and the contacts, hmm well I can live without them, and those who know me will know my Hotmail email address anyhow.
So a little warning, do not rely on any 3rd party to look after all of your personal and vital data.
So this is what I use;
2x IMAP Email accounts on 2 domains I own - thereby no one can steal my email addresses or take it away from me
2x Hotmail Accounts - spam and regular forum passwords
1x Backup Googlemail account
www.zoho.com - online Word documents for writing random nonsense
omnidrive.com - multi GB storage of large PDFs I want to share
Im sure there are others, but there you go, these are the main ones.
Everything else, excel spreadsheets, Orchid main book, photos and portable programs exists on my pendrive.
evilref (159.134.57.27)
29th Mar, 2008 09:57 (local)
...do not rely on any 3rd party to look after all of your personal and vital data...
Agreed. But:-
...excel spreadsheets, Orchid main book, photos and portable programs exists on my pendrive...
Excel is a Microsoft product, and if they decide to no longer support it (or suddenly make the latest version unusable because they've decided the "look-and-feel" needs jazzing up) then your data will only be available for as long as your software is supported.
If you value your data, migrate to open-source software products. The German government has.
Agreed. But:-
...excel spreadsheets, Orchid main book, photos and portable programs exists on my pendrive...
Excel is a Microsoft product, and if they decide to no longer support it (or suddenly make the latest version unusable because they've decided the "look-and-feel" needs jazzing up) then your data will only be available for as long as your software is supported.
If you value your data, migrate to open-source software products. The German government has.
