Ask HN: Would you trust your real work to Google if they can just lock you out? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you trust your real work to Google if they can just lock you out?

13 pointssds1118 comments

This spate of people being locked out of their Google Docs is disturbing. I have now transferred all my work out of it. I can't afford to be stopped willy-nilly just because they think my journalistic work might not agree with their views.

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I would never trust any IP or business docs to a third party storage service. And definitely code including secrets would not be stored on things like github, codecommit, etc. Have known too many corporate executives and learned no one can be trusted. People used to trust sourceforge at one point. If there is any doubt about the security or confidentiality of your work...there is no doubt.

Sure, it's their software/servers/drive space. Your question is framed just to attract people who have the same view as you though.

Google isn't a government. They aren't obligated to recognize my right to free speech, and they don't have to hold files they don't want to.

I'll continue to use Google Drive as a backup, of course. Thankfully, all my computers have LibreOffice.

In the end, I'll just make sure I have multiple copies of all the current files. That's not a bad thing.

PTL I don't have a Chromebook. Those guys could be royally screwed.

I personally think, it is always a bad idea to put important IP/Knowledge(or your complete business) into the hands of other Companies/People. You play in their Garden and if they decide to "alter" the agremeent, than you have to deal with it.

Make sense of course but it can be difficult from a practical sense, not so much for Google Docs but for things like AWS/Azure. Reputation definitely matter here, I trust Amazon and Microsoft more than Google for sure when it comes to suddenly pulling the plug on services people are using.

Infrastructure is a bit different, because it is interchangeable and your IP isn't. It make sense to use IT-Services and Hosting, but i think there are also many cases when a companie should think about the cost of cloud(instead of easy and fast setup - pinterest and many others burned high amount of capital ) or a move to another Hosting/Cloud service(better price or stop paying a rival - netflix and amazon aws).

Multiple backups, local, remote-same-nation and remote-on-another-continent are essential for any data that is worth preserving.

Google, the PayPal of data. Hope you don't need it when we say you can't have it!

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