Sounds like you’ve got quite the esoteric setup, hehe :)

My personal solution isn’t exactly small as I have two identical four-disk NAS servers which operate with one as primary and the other as a read-only mirror of the primary. For off-site I don’t have an automated solution but just backup onto external every so often and leave it with a family member.

A good solution could be as simple as a raspberry pi with an external SSD at a friend or family’s place, and then make that accessible via VPN to your home network.

SSDs at the end of their lifespan do tend to fail more gracefully than HDDs, as even when they become fully worn and unable to take new writes, they will often still allow reads.

But, that depends on the specific type of failure.

I had an SSD fail in the same way as yours, where the controller chip or something along the path there died, and it went from fully working to toast in an instant.

Some drives are more reliable, some drives are less reliable, but the only rule is that any drive can break, at any time, old or new.

Always have backups.

Turned out that scratches can easily be avoided if you are careful, and - more importantly - a few scratches won’t prevent the disc being read, thanks to the error correction.

Back in the day I remember using one of those AOL internet sign-up junk discs as a drinks coaster, for several years. As you’d expect from grinding around on my desk it was filthy and scratched to total hell, never mind the thermal stress of hundreds of hot tea mugs being sat on it. I’d never seen a CD looking so bad.

One day out of curiosity I decided to wipe it off and put it in the PC to see what would happen. I was genuinely surprised when the AOL splash popped up (and also a little disgusted because I had no love for AOL and was hoping I’d killed it)

Fair, some good points there :)

I’d argue that tiered licensing wasn’t really enshittified as it was still just a one time thing where you bought a license and got a product. Not enshittified but simply unnecessarily confusing. And they somehow made that even worse with Vista.

In a similar manner I’d suggest online activation isn’t enshittified either, as that’s a pretty reasonable behaviour even for an ethical product as it helps prevent piracy. And a key again is that it’s a one-time thing, not something constantly bothering you or interrupting your experience over and over.

But the rest of your examples definitely count!

Was it?

A lot of people hated XP because of it’s ‘childish’ visual design, but that’s not what enshittification is about.

Enshittificstion is when a service becomes progressively user-hostile by implementing patterns that exploit the user and their data for profit.

I used XP plenty, and I certainly don’t remember it pushing ads in the start menu, or trying to force me to register a Microsoft account, or constantly harassing me to sign up for paid subscriptions.

You may have personally thought it “was shit”, but it certainly wasn’t “enshittified”

I agree, 11 definitely was shitty from the beginning.

With 11 Microsoft are not even attempting to “sell” the operating system anymore, but instead are dragging people to it kicking and screaming, while they desperately try to cling to Windows 10.

Tells you everything you need to know about whether it’s the consumer or Microsoft who are on the winning side of that “upgrade”.

It wasn’t shit from the start though, was it.

Back when Windows 95 was a new thing it blew everything else out of the water. Suddenly there was an operating system that even regular people were paying attention to and getting excited about, and it actually deserved the hype.

Windows was a product at that time, where Microsoft made their money by people purchasing the operating system. And so the incentive was to make a great product that people wanted to buy and use.

This was true all the way through the Windows XP and 7 days, and only with the release of 8 and especially 10 did we start to see things change.

Microsoft - who used to put so much effort into trying to prevent people installing cracked Windows - suddenly didn’t seem to care so much anymore about enforcing that. They’d realised that the true exploitable value was in the online ecosystem and the data, not the product, and that was the turning point for everything.