Doug Mejia

12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge ❄️

Christmas brunch

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12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge ❄️

Traveling in style!

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12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge ❄️

Spiced Pecans and Almonds

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Watched: Apocalypse Now 🍿

What an intense, dark movie this was. I know I watched it years ago, but it never really resonated with me. I just watched it and moved on. I decided to watch it again, but this time I really took it in. I watched it and appreciated it as it really was with no preconceived notions. It is extremely disturbing and sad to think that, with all of its horrors, the film is just an approximation of what war may really be like. Confusion, sadness, lapses of judgement as one loses their humanity. All of this was masterfully portrayed in the film.

#movies

12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge ❄️

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12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge ❄️

Photo by my Beautiful Wife, who claims that she does not have a photographic eye. Evidence to the contrary. Thank you!

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12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge ❄️

#MicroBlog #WinterWonderPhotoChallenge2025 #WWPC2025

12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge ❄️

Gentle Giant Known to play Santa once or twice Great Grandfather Forever in our loving memory

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12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge ❄️

#MicroBlog #WinterWonderPhotoChallenge2025 #WWPC2025

Imagine walking into your local big box store to buy a $500 gift card. You try to redeem it to pay for your iCloud storage, but the card number gets declined. To make matters worse, Apple flags your account for fraud. Suddenly, they lock your entire account. Now, you are completely shut out. Your iCloud account, photos, music, and every other Apple service you subscribe to are now inaccessible.

Everyone always talks about using long and complex passwords and two-factor authentication to keep hackers out. But what if the company you entrust with your data is the one that locks you out? What is the recourse? What if they don’t see the problem the way you do? They might simply say you violated a policy, never tell you the specifics, and leave you with no access.

taking pictures or recording video with an iPhone and having it automatically back up to the cloud is incredibly convenient. I am not going to stop doing that anytime soon, and neither are most of you. However, we really need to think about situations like the one I described above because this isn’t just a hypothetical scenario; it actually happened to, Paris Buttfield-Addison, a user in Australia. As of this writing, I don’t believe he has resolved the issue. Apple reportedly won’t tell him exactly why they locked his account, at least not with enough detail for him to fix it. You can read all about his nightmare situation on his blog.

Do you have a backup of all your data in case that happens to you?

I wrote about a possible solution a little while ago using an app called Parachute. This tool connects to my iCloud account, downloads all the synchronized pictures and videos, and backs them up to my NAS at home. I also have another instance running that downloads my pictures onto an external hard drive or SSD at a different location. The app even lets you download your iCloud Drive files, which I have opted to do as well. Just in case.

If you don’t have a plan yet, I suggest you start thinking about your exit strategy. Just like it happened to that gentleman in Australia, it could happen to any of us. The folks at MacBreak Weekly did a great job explaining the problem and discussing solutions, so check them out in the video below, too.

#DataBackup #iCloud