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Technofeudal overlords pick and choose what customers can lease temporarily when they erroneously believed they bought ownership.
>If you used this account for Minecraft, we regret to inform you that the game cannot be recovered. A new purchase will be required on a newly created account.

Welcome to the club of people who Microsoft stole Minecraft from. They deleted my copy since I did not migrate my account in time.

Even enterprise M365 solutions dont have backups unless you pay extra. Always have your own separate backup, ideally offline.
What a bunch of wankers ...

Timely reminder to back every fucking thing up.

Trust none of these valley assholes to do the right thing.

Just make sure YOU do the right thing.

Who the fuck designs these flows...
This is why I always ensure I have a big enough HD. I've used my current cloud backup for almost 15 years, and am really happy with it. But I never rely on them exclusively. If they go out of business tomorrow, I still have all the data locally!

And of course, if my HD crashes, I sync back all the really important stuff.

(OK, I would lose prior revisions of a file - I can live with that).

Baby pictures.. That's really sad… Reminds me of when the executive editor of wired magazine, Matt Honan, trusted all of his baby pictures and movies to iCloud only for it to get hacked and have it all deleted. Always have that off-line back up.
Another reason why no one should use OneDrive and ignore all the damn prompts by Windows telling you to use it.
A bitter reminder for all of us that we don't own digital content at all.
Since he spent Euros, he must be somewhere on the EU. This is a GDPR violation and I bet he can reach actual people that are able to help by mailing their GDPR legal contact.
Check the TOS, it was never the user’s account.
Man, I love the PlayStation is going purely digital, who needs physical media for the games or movies you buy, nothing like this ever happens
#1 This sucks

#2 This is the personal version of what europe is going through now, with the realization that those cloudy cloudy services may be convenient, but don't bet your life on one.

Keep a local backup!!!

In fact, local backup first, with the cloud as a backup of your backup.

Microsoft doing Microsoft things. That being said, I hope this gets enough visibility to force Microsoft to be better. Doubt it.
I could understand locking the files. Having this compromised would be devastating and you should have a backup of them elsewhere.

But locking the games out is unacceptable since you can not back these up and they are not sensitive data. At the very least Microsoft should either offer a new account with all the purchases included, or a full refund.

Back in college, I did a hackathon where I striped data across different clouds like OneDrive and Dropbox so that even if one of the providers went down you would still be able to recover your data. Had the additional benefit of no single provider being able to read your files because none of them had the full data set.

Ended up not pursuing it but every time I see a story like this I think I should have.

I truly hope you get this resolved if it is at all salvageable. The more stories I hear like this the less I am inclined to do any kind of backups with these companies because they are notorious for not giving a single fuck.
Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend’s NAS in a different city. And his to mine.

My wife’s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would.

TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over. Highly recommended if you can put up with replacing a hard drive every few years.

Yeah, of course you should keep your own backups of important files, but we’re in a time that tech companies—including Microsoft—are causing hardware prices to skyrocket.

Price out a beefy home NAS in 2023 prices vs today. It’s absurd.

My good, when will people finally realize that local accounts are the only rational option?

Like, do people have to learn in such a needlessly painful manner?

It is not "your account", it is literrally called "Microsoft account".