Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I've never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users' data. Update: Goodreads gave me a recovered copy of my data

Do you use Goodreads? Don't trust them with your data. Protect yourself with a backup; use their data export service right now. Consider quitting Goodreads entirely. LibraryThing and The StoryGraph are promising competitors. This blog post also has some ideas on DIY indieweb alternatives.

Don't trust any cloud service with the only copy of your data. Most companies are not quite so reckless but consider what you'd miss if an uncaring company lost your data. Many of the better services have data export products; Google Takeout is fantastic, Twitter has good export, as does Facebook and Instagram and Letterboxd and others.

I've enjoyed using a product like Goodreads. My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like Tom does. It will be a lot of work to set up. Fortunately not all is lost, I happened to take a data export last July and I can recover some of the more recent data from emails they sent to my friends. It's a shame they block Archive.org.

For anyone wondering how Goodreads could have simply lost all my data, I'm wondering too! It bespeaks contempt for users. And terrible system design, services should not be able to lose data irrecoverably. The specific bug is related to my removing Twitter API access to Goodreads last week (they stopped supporting Twitter login months before). Somehow that triggered their system to delete everything. Goodreads promises me it was a true delete, the data is wiped from their database. I don't believe this: sites generally flag data as deleted, they don't actually remove it. Goodreads also ignored my request to restore my data from backup. Either they don't have backups or they can't be bothered.

I've learned a hard lesson in trusting cloud services. Unfortunately just having a copy of your data isn't enough; it's a lot of work to build a useful product. In the meantime I will be more careful about which companies I trust. Goodreads has been in decline ever since Amazon bought them in 2013. Apparently an anti-competitive purchase, not a strategic acquisition.