Although I have Linux and FreeBSD machines, most of you know that I mostly live my digital life within the Apple ecosystem. I like the tight integration between my iPhone, iPad, and Macs. The downside, of course, is that it’s a closed system and not by any means Open (let alone Free) Software. But being an apostate doesn’t mean I have to be stupid.
If apple were to disappear tomorrow, I would be only slightly inconvenienced and I certainly wouldn’t lose any data. That’s because I never commit my data to closed systems using opaque data formats. Almost all my data—other than things like music, photos, JPGs, and stuff like that—are stored as plain text. All those exceptions are kept in open data formats.
The other day, I saw a post on reddit complaining about the difficulty of exporting data from Google Docs. I wasn’t sympathetic. If you lock your data up in proprietary applications, don’t be surprised when you find you can’t get it out again1. If you want to keep your data available, keep it in plain text and use open source tools to manipulate it.
Of course, others will complain that you’re not using Word or Google Docs or some other abomination but they’re the ones making other people’s life difficult. Almost always you can export your data to DOC/DOCX format so there’s little excuse for not writing in Org-mode, Markdown, or something similar.
If you want a horrifying example of what can happen when you ignore this advice, imagine losing 14 years of artwork and an unfinished book manuscript because Google decided it didn’t like something you said or did. Yeah, this guy deserved what he got but many many people are guilty of the same thing to a lesser degree. Indeed, Cooper isn’t the first to lose data when Google2 decided it was no longer interested in supporting an application or felt you violated it’s standards in some way.