tl;dr: You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers, and someone always comments, "If you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer"?
This is not one of those situations. Ancestry.com charged as much as $240 annually for its service [1]. Furthermore, the MyFamily.com social network was just one small part of Ancestry.com, meaning the parent company still has the money (and I would think, the actual servers/backups) to make its paying customers whole here. What the OP describes is a seriously incompetent handling of a shutdown...and one of the variety that is most painful for customers.
My Family had years of chat history and photos on "MyFamily.com" when they shut down. This included information from members who have now passed away.
I agree fully, their handling of it was insensitive and incompetent and I'll never have anything to do with any of the "Ancestry" products again.
Fortunately we found Spokt.com which (after a few rocky starts) was able to "sort of" import most of the data into our new Spokt account. I feel terrible for those families who didn't and permanently lost a large chunk of their family history.
You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers
Yeah, this is a shitty thing to do to any users. Always make sure there's a way for them to export their data. After all, it isn't really yours - they just let you have it because you seemed trustworthy. Don't betray that.
Ancestry has a borderline monopoly on web-based genealogy, and unfortunately doesn't seem to be a very good steward for that data.
Generally, the genealogy community is very open and sharing. Distant relatives (n cousins nth removed) will spend hours helping you out. Random people will go to local libraries or town halls to pull hard copies of vital records. LDS has one of the largest free genealogy libraries in the world.
Then here comes Ancestry. $240/yr. to use their software, which puts everything you do behind a paywall. Want to share your family tree with others? They have to pay Ancestry for the privilege.
There's serious value in digitized records that might well be worth the subscription fee alone. But these are public records that Ancestry has bought the exclusive rights to digitize. They're aggressively monetizing public data while shutting out competition.
It's great that family history is so easy for the masses, but I'm worried the long-term future is going to be silo'd and less effective in the long run.
Ancestry was given that monopoly by their users. Served up to them on a silver platter. Without Ancestry, some other business would have come along as long as the users are so willing to put their work behind a paywall. The core fault lies with the users who are willing to do such.
> It’s natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good custodians of our data,
No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else. In this very moment my computer is running my daily back up my Google Drive (customers write stuff there) to my USB disk (I know, I should need a better disaster recovery solution). Not that Google doesn't provide a good service, but I don't trust them to preserve all my data until I need it, possibly tens of years in the future. I better care about it myself.
I consider anything stored "on the cloud" as expendable. If I really care about it I back it up in multiple copies. I have a couple of servers where I send encrypted backups using duplicity.
Is this too much for the average computer/tablet user? Yes, but there won't be a market for proper consumer backup until enough people has been burned by this kind of things and all cloud services will start offering an export procedure.
Meanwhile I think it's worth using self hosted services. For my company I have a self hosted redmine with all the details of my projects.
> > It’s natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good custodians of our data,
> No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else
I respectfully disagree: it is natural for people to assume that companies won't callously discard their customers’ data. If it wasn't natural, we wouldn't need to have so much effort going towards education about the terms of service to watch out for and how to make your own copies. Too many people have a mental model for corporations which grossly exaggerates the level of stability and long-term planning.
I think you're wrong if you're saying that "it's NOT natural to assume ...". For sure it's natural to assume a company whose sole preserve is digitisation and archive of family history -- which it has been doing for several years for millions of people -- is going to be a "good custodian".
Is that the best way to proceed? Nope, abject paranoia seems like the only way to preserve data -- assuming there is a nuclear war, have you archived your data on a different continent, have you got a plan for retrieval!?!
I like to backup my data to storage that I own too and I try to keep a copy of it on all my devices but while storage is getting cheaper everyday, hardware makers try to limit local storage on mobile devices every way they can to increase cloud business (even remove microSD card support), Google being a good example...
You would think that by now a $650 phone would have a lot more then 32gb of storage.... But even if you have a phone that supports an external microSD card, Google makes it difficult to write to it using a 3rd party Android app (stating security as a reason).
There should be a law that prevent companies from keeping root to themselves on devices that you own.
A service's customer data must persist somewhere. "On the cloud" is a marketing abstraction to fool customers into a false sense of integrity.
Just remember that most cloud services do not do backups, do not have a disaster recovery / BIA plan, do not use ECC memory in network, compute and storage systems. Users must take personal responsibility for ensuring their private data is safe, because wishing is not a winning strategy.
I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period for the future, and that we opted not to out of short-term financial interests. It may actually be harder for them to do things like construct family genealogies for today's people than for those living in the 1700's because with digital data stored in the cloud, preciously little of it will survive across the next few centuries.
There should be a role here for government, to let people give digital data in permanent archival for historical purposes. But given how poorly governments are preserving their own digital data, I doubt it could actually work.
This exaggerates the problem. There is more preserved data about people than ever before, just like there was more preserved data last century than there was the previous century. There is simply vastly more data collected. I speculate that deleting 20% of this century's data would still leave an order of magnitude more data about people than was recorded last century.
I think future historians will look back in the same way we do now. We're horrified that people discarded, burned or reused records from every century in history, but technology allows us to record and preserve more every year.
> I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period for the future, and that we opted not to out of short-term financial interests.
People of the future will probably be very disappointed with us about a great many things that we could have done with our technology, knowledge and resources, but neglected or opted not to do out of short-term financial interests.
But I don't think properly documenting our time period will be very high on that list.
I'd love to be wrong.
If in a few hundred years, there's people, society, culture and at some point again a level of civilisation and technology that allows them to dig back into the past, and the worst thing they'll have to say about our addiction to short-term financial interests is "aww, if only they had documented their time period better", then I ... well, the only likely scenario I can think of is if we also somehow manage to sell out severe-global-brain-damage-in-a-couple-of-centuries for our short-term financial interests (surely right now, there are some very smart people working on this very idea).
No. This is what historians of the future will say if we would indeed meticulously document our current time period, and they could read about our day-to-day lives, important events, culture, media, etc.:
"... they did WHAT?! while the planet was ... and the oceans were still ... they burned WHAT?! in order to be able to ... gosh well at least thanks to our ancestor's meticulous documenting, and millions of hours of video footage we can now theorize what these 'kittens' are supposed to have looked like ... mammals used to have hair?? ..."
No, I think we better start deleting and encrypting our data. To save face.
(small disclaimer: I am half-kidding, of course. While I am not particularly proud of the 'big picture' behaviour of my species in this particular era, we shouldn't actually try and hide our planetary blunders in shame, but indeed document them so that future civilisations can learn from us, and who knows, maybe one day can forgive us)
Well, there is a whole family who will look at hosted services with a much more jaded eye now. Who wouldn't?
Truth is, this kind of garbage devalues everybody. When a large family like this loses out in such a painful way, word gets around. Clearly they are not alone either. People who tend to be into this stuff are very seriously into it. Understandable. It matters.
Future offerings, however well their intent and execution might be, will have to work to overcome the painful experiences. And that is just a waste.
One thing nagging at me though. Did they really just delete it? Seems that having a fall back would make great sense, if anything, for legal reasons.
Or maybe it's better to have it really, really gone. Limit the potentials, so to speak?
From time to time, I export various things. Just ordinary worry, but I'm reasonably informed. Who here isn't?
Perhaps ordinary people really do need to advance to the next level of literacy. "The basics" today are different. In some ways, simpler. In other ways, potentially more complex.
Just saw danso comment. Yeah, my thoughts too. It was possible to treat people right. Do they really just not care?
If this were me, I would have a very hard time sleeping at night, particularly given some options. It was easy enough to set up and make the money...
Word should get around. Centralized services suck. I long for the days when people cared that the internet was decentralized, and some of the best apps were too. Email, the Web, even IRC. We can do it today, but instead the startups want to capture as much of the market as possible and rule their little world while maintaining huge datacenters.
One can only hope word will get around, and people will wake up to the fact that "the cloud" is not a fairytale place of infinite storage and security where you no longer have to worry about database backups because "it is in the cloud"
I started out using Ancestry's web-only approach but once I really got going on my family history (i.e. < 1800AD) I quickly hit the limits of what the web UI was offering. Many others hit this wall as well, and that is why there is cheap desktop software, Family Tree Maker, that integrates seamlessly with the online web UI. My entire tree (~4.5gb) lives offline on my Mac, is backed up with Arq and is two-way sync'd to Ancestry's online version. Of all the providers out there that have "data lock-in", I really don't consider Ancestry one of them. If you really care about your data, keep the copy-of-record on your computer. If Ancestry's online service ever folds, your official copy will keep working perfectly.
This isn't the same thing as replacing a social network service, but the actual trees do capture comments, stories, submissions, etc. from other users.
How is the data stored? Can anything else read that data?
Having a local copy is better than not, especially one you can back up, but in 50 years it won't help much if the format is too difficult for anything else to read.
(Honest question, though. I don't have this software, so I don't know.)
OT a bit, but I am surprised that the author's family managed to keep a family-based social network going for so long.
When my family tried to create one on Geni, it brought a few crazy relatives out of the woodwork, and Geni's "growth hacking" strategy of spamming anyone who was invited to join the tree led to angry real-life confrontations between inviters and invitees. Our family tree is maintained a little, but the social aspects died a quick death.
What archive format would you back up to, and what application would you use? I looked at this a few years ago and, if I recall, the choices weren't obvious.
And this is why I tell the spouse to periodically back up everything from the Ancestry.com account to local GEDCOM files. Never trust an online service with the only copy of your data.
I'm not sure about that: the converse is closer to the truth now due to copyright law, giving people's private family correspondence and data to historical organisations without the families say so seems as wrong as wiping the data. Ancestry could have kept the data archived and offered it up for download to their users for a payment - their whole raison d'etre is supposed to be preserving family history after all.
It would be interesting to know why they shutdown the service, presumably not making enough profit, whether anything replaced it?
Moreover, why not make an effort to warn users? My best guess is that Ancestry intended to export the data properly, hit a technical snag, and made the cynical decision to not follow through, in the hopes that nobody would call the company out on it.
Perhaps it isn't the cynical decision, rather it's the result of nobody being left to turn on the lights, let alone handle a technical task. Once companies enter shutdown mode, there's frequently nobody left to complain to. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the specifics here.
Ancestry.com still exists as a (paid) service, they just shut down this subset of their offering, so it's definitely not "nobody left to turn on the lights".
I'm surprised Ancestry.com doesn't charge people for the data recovery. They would clearly pay since many paid $60 for the third party service beforehand.
There is no way I can believe Ancestry.com doesn't have the technical talent to pull the raw data from the system pretty trivially. Unless it was running on some obscure in-house database backend that doesn't exist anymore and thus can't be read, I don't see why they can't put an engineer on this project for a month [and if it takes them that long...] and at least give people the raw data. Or partner with Spokt or whatever and have them charge a fee to transfer it if they want to cover their costs. People are willing to pay for this data, even if it is incomplete or difficult to digest in the delivered format.
I also can't imagine they don't have a copy of the data somewhere... on some old magnetic backup tape or squirreled away in some DB admin's folders.
I realize the article speaks about the frustration this user had with trying to work with Ancestry.com to try to get his data back after the closure. However, has anyone gone to Ancestry and stated they will take on the liability of looking through the data and getting it into an exportable format and returning it to these users? Seems like an interesting open source project. Maybe Ancestry hasn't been given the right offer just to have the data taken off their hands.
Certainly there are legal issues and privacy issues. Are these really insurmountable? If enough people really want their data, I somehow doubt that this couldn't be worked through. And I absolutely cannot imagine that Ancestry just deleted all of it when they shut down. It's probably sitting in cold storage somewhere.
Isn't Ancestry a subsidiary of MyLife.com now? What incentive have they to preserve this data, since their money is made off "Nice identity you have there, be a shame if something happened to it" spam?
[+] [-] danso|11 years ago|reply
This is not one of those situations. Ancestry.com charged as much as $240 annually for its service [1]. Furthermore, the MyFamily.com social network was just one small part of Ancestry.com, meaning the parent company still has the money (and I would think, the actual servers/backups) to make its paying customers whole here. What the OP describes is a seriously incompetent handling of a shutdown...and one of the variety that is most painful for customers.
[1] http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press-releases/2004/01/m...
[+] [-] jqm|11 years ago|reply
I agree fully, their handling of it was insensitive and incompetent and I'll never have anything to do with any of the "Ancestry" products again.
Fortunately we found Spokt.com which (after a few rocky starts) was able to "sort of" import most of the data into our new Spokt account. I feel terrible for those families who didn't and permanently lost a large chunk of their family history.
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
Yeah, this is a shitty thing to do to any users. Always make sure there's a way for them to export their data. After all, it isn't really yours - they just let you have it because you seemed trustworthy. Don't betray that.
[+] [-] basseq|11 years ago|reply
Generally, the genealogy community is very open and sharing. Distant relatives (n cousins nth removed) will spend hours helping you out. Random people will go to local libraries or town halls to pull hard copies of vital records. LDS has one of the largest free genealogy libraries in the world.
Then here comes Ancestry. $240/yr. to use their software, which puts everything you do behind a paywall. Want to share your family tree with others? They have to pay Ancestry for the privilege.
There's serious value in digitized records that might well be worth the subscription fee alone. But these are public records that Ancestry has bought the exclusive rights to digitize. They're aggressively monetizing public data while shutting out competition.
It's great that family history is so easy for the masses, but I'm worried the long-term future is going to be silo'd and less effective in the long run.
[+] [-] suninwinter|11 years ago|reply
https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account-familys...
[+] [-] ra88it|11 years ago|reply
What exclusive rights are you referring to? I'm trying to learn more about Ancestry.com.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|11 years ago|reply
No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else. In this very moment my computer is running my daily back up my Google Drive (customers write stuff there) to my USB disk (I know, I should need a better disaster recovery solution). Not that Google doesn't provide a good service, but I don't trust them to preserve all my data until I need it, possibly tens of years in the future. I better care about it myself.
I consider anything stored "on the cloud" as expendable. If I really care about it I back it up in multiple copies. I have a couple of servers where I send encrypted backups using duplicity.
Is this too much for the average computer/tablet user? Yes, but there won't be a market for proper consumer backup until enough people has been burned by this kind of things and all cloud services will start offering an export procedure.
Meanwhile I think it's worth using self hosted services. For my company I have a self hosted redmine with all the details of my projects.
[+] [-] acdha|11 years ago|reply
> No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else
I respectfully disagree: it is natural for people to assume that companies won't callously discard their customers’ data. If it wasn't natural, we wouldn't need to have so much effort going towards education about the terms of service to watch out for and how to make your own copies. Too many people have a mental model for corporations which grossly exaggerates the level of stability and long-term planning.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|11 years ago|reply
Is that the best way to proceed? Nope, abject paranoia seems like the only way to preserve data -- assuming there is a nuclear war, have you archived your data on a different continent, have you got a plan for retrieval!?!
[+] [-] Istof|11 years ago|reply
You would think that by now a $650 phone would have a lot more then 32gb of storage.... But even if you have a phone that supports an external microSD card, Google makes it difficult to write to it using a 3rd party Android app (stating security as a reason).
There should be a law that prevent companies from keeping root to themselves on devices that you own.
[+] [-] vgabios|11 years ago|reply
Just remember that most cloud services do not do backups, do not have a disaster recovery / BIA plan, do not use ECC memory in network, compute and storage systems. Users must take personal responsibility for ensuring their private data is safe, because wishing is not a winning strategy.
[+] [-] Joeri|11 years ago|reply
There should be a role here for government, to let people give digital data in permanent archival for historical purposes. But given how poorly governments are preserving their own digital data, I doubt it could actually work.
[+] [-] iand|11 years ago|reply
I think future historians will look back in the same way we do now. We're horrified that people discarded, burned or reused records from every century in history, but technology allows us to record and preserve more every year.
[+] [-] tripzilch|11 years ago|reply
People of the future will probably be very disappointed with us about a great many things that we could have done with our technology, knowledge and resources, but neglected or opted not to do out of short-term financial interests.
But I don't think properly documenting our time period will be very high on that list.
I'd love to be wrong.
If in a few hundred years, there's people, society, culture and at some point again a level of civilisation and technology that allows them to dig back into the past, and the worst thing they'll have to say about our addiction to short-term financial interests is "aww, if only they had documented their time period better", then I ... well, the only likely scenario I can think of is if we also somehow manage to sell out severe-global-brain-damage-in-a-couple-of-centuries for our short-term financial interests (surely right now, there are some very smart people working on this very idea).
No. This is what historians of the future will say if we would indeed meticulously document our current time period, and they could read about our day-to-day lives, important events, culture, media, etc.:
"... they did WHAT?! while the planet was ... and the oceans were still ... they burned WHAT?! in order to be able to ... gosh well at least thanks to our ancestor's meticulous documenting, and millions of hours of video footage we can now theorize what these 'kittens' are supposed to have looked like ... mammals used to have hair?? ..."
No, I think we better start deleting and encrypting our data. To save face.
(small disclaimer: I am half-kidding, of course. While I am not particularly proud of the 'big picture' behaviour of my species in this particular era, we shouldn't actually try and hide our planetary blunders in shame, but indeed document them so that future civilisations can learn from us, and who knows, maybe one day can forgive us)
[+] [-] walterbell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddingus|11 years ago|reply
Well, there is a whole family who will look at hosted services with a much more jaded eye now. Who wouldn't?
Truth is, this kind of garbage devalues everybody. When a large family like this loses out in such a painful way, word gets around. Clearly they are not alone either. People who tend to be into this stuff are very seriously into it. Understandable. It matters.
Future offerings, however well their intent and execution might be, will have to work to overcome the painful experiences. And that is just a waste.
One thing nagging at me though. Did they really just delete it? Seems that having a fall back would make great sense, if anything, for legal reasons.
Or maybe it's better to have it really, really gone. Limit the potentials, so to speak?
From time to time, I export various things. Just ordinary worry, but I'm reasonably informed. Who here isn't?
Perhaps ordinary people really do need to advance to the next level of literacy. "The basics" today are different. In some ways, simpler. In other ways, potentially more complex.
Just saw danso comment. Yeah, my thoughts too. It was possible to treat people right. Do they really just not care?
If this were me, I would have a very hard time sleeping at night, particularly given some options. It was easy enough to set up and make the money...
[+] [-] EGreg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_ancient|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apaprocki|11 years ago|reply
This isn't the same thing as replacing a social network service, but the actual trees do capture comments, stories, submissions, etc. from other users.
[+] [-] jerf|11 years ago|reply
Having a local copy is better than not, especially one you can back up, but in 50 years it won't help much if the format is too difficult for anything else to read.
(Honest question, though. I don't have this software, so I don't know.)
[+] [-] Raphmedia|11 years ago|reply
Now this is impressive. How did you get back that far? I've trouble finding out who my great-great-grandparents were.
[+] [-] ern|11 years ago|reply
When my family tried to create one on Geni, it brought a few crazy relatives out of the woodwork, and Geni's "growth hacking" strategy of spamming anyone who was invited to join the tree led to angry real-life confrontations between inviters and invitees. Our family tree is maintained a little, but the social aspects died a quick death.
[+] [-] Spooky23|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breakingcups|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpravetz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitJericho|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|11 years ago|reply
It would be interesting to know why they shutdown the service, presumably not making enough profit, whether anything replaced it?
[+] [-] mathattack|11 years ago|reply
Perhaps it isn't the cynical decision, rather it's the result of nobody being left to turn on the lights, let alone handle a technical task. Once companies enter shutdown mode, there's frequently nobody left to complain to. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the specifics here.
[+] [-] mejari|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoblessWonder|11 years ago|reply
There is no way I can believe Ancestry.com doesn't have the technical talent to pull the raw data from the system pretty trivially. Unless it was running on some obscure in-house database backend that doesn't exist anymore and thus can't be read, I don't see why they can't put an engineer on this project for a month [and if it takes them that long...] and at least give people the raw data. Or partner with Spokt or whatever and have them charge a fee to transfer it if they want to cover their costs. People are willing to pay for this data, even if it is incomplete or difficult to digest in the delivered format.
I also can't imagine they don't have a copy of the data somewhere... on some old magnetic backup tape or squirreled away in some DB admin's folders.
[+] [-] trcollinson|11 years ago|reply
Certainly there are legal issues and privacy issues. Are these really insurmountable? If enough people really want their data, I somehow doubt that this couldn't be worked through. And I absolutely cannot imagine that Ancestry just deleted all of it when they shut down. It's probably sitting in cold storage somewhere.
[+] [-] bitwize|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nebstrebor|11 years ago|reply