Comment on A gripe about digital ownership and data portability options
forty2@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This right here is the fail safe that all these SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and other aaS offerings have inherently built into themselves. They make it so “easy” to get your data (as they put it) but so fucking mind-numbingly annoying to have it any kind of usable/archive-able format.
If I want to move my data from one platform to something else, it shouldn’t involve a Six Sigma certified consultant, a bag of bespoke tools, and a sacrificial offering. This isn’t a CRM migration at a multi-national conglomerate, I just want my files (you can have em!) in a usable format (they’ll work!) correctly named and structured (yeah, no…)
The average person isn’t going to go through the lengths you’ve gone through here; because they’ll try to and just go right back. I mean, the average person has a hard enough time getting affordable groceries…forget about a sacrificial blood letting.
Out of curiosity, how much time did you spend researching as you went through this process of hitting speedbump after speedbump?
s38b35M5@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You are absolutely correct about how these online offerings work. Its beyond frustrating, and most people would definitely not bother with what I went through. I suspect they’d be discouraged and give up pong before me.
That’s a great question. It was evening when the download completed, and by noon of the next day, I realized that my intended method would not be sufficient. I think it wasn’t until the third evening that I had Picard downloaded. I spent part of an evening learning how the system worked to get better recommendations and grouping. Before I found Picard, though, I bumbled through probably three or four tagger apps that weren’t really built to handle thousands of files at once, so reviewing proposed changes was unweildy. To undo the errant changes the apps made, I had to start over from the tarball.
All told, I think I had about 12 hours (over three or four days) into the process before I got it streamlined to where I am now. And Google could have simply preserved my metadata OR sent the files in “artist/album” folders.
forty2@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Which they most certainly can do. My condolences to the time you’ll never get back.
I suppose the silver lining is familiarity with a new set of tools and mechanisms for working through arduous minutia of it all. Could be a pretty neat utility if it could all be packaged up.