Storm Clouds: Gmail Failure Reinforces Danger Of Becoming Too Cloud-Dependent | Hacker News Reader

Storm Clouds: Gmail Failure Reinforces Danger Of Becoming Too Cloud-Dependent

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14 pointsacconrad24 comments

US Airline Fatalities in 2010: 0

US Motor Vehicle Deaths: ~32,000*

What are people more afraid of? Planes. Why? There's a few theories, but one is people are afraid of dying due to somebody else's mistake, the same with surgery: powerless. Even in a car accident, there's a bit of victim-blaming: the insurance company always says a person could have been more wary.

A cloud failure is much, much more rare, but more scary because we're not accountable. When it happens, we're "more helpless."

*Estimated from a drop from 2009. Can't find the actual number.

I've always thought it had to do with control - in a car, you "have control" over your vehicle, whereas in a plane, you don't. Which is essentially the theory you're referencing.

If it was simply a control issue then that wouldn't that imply that people should be as scared to take the bus or the train as they are flying in a plane?

I don't doubt that there's a component of control involved, but I expect that the whole "we're flying in the sky and if anything goes wrong we're all dead" has a bigger part to play where fear is concerned.

> What are people more afraid of? Planes. Why?

Well, for me one reason is that I've watched countless hours of "Seconds from Disaster" and "Air Emergency" on the National Geographic Channel.

Seriously, though, I think the control thing is big for me. I'm pretty sure that if I was wealthy, I'd be a private pilot--and still would not like flying commercially.

I don't like buses all that much, or cars when I'm a passenger, so that's more evidence in support of the control theory.

I'm OK with reasonable sized boats (e.g., the ferries in Washington State).

Ambivalent about trains--I was OK with them until I took Amtrak from the Seattle area to Beaumont, Texas, and back (yeah, patent lawsuit), and saw just how poorly maintained the tracks are. Fortunately when my train derailed, we were only going about 5 miles an hour so no one was injured. It just caused a several hour delay.

Agreed. Also I believe our subconscience (or primal instincts) plays a role here.

Flying in a plane is more or less akin to walking in the dark. Our conscious mind sees it ordinary, but our animal half still is behind the times, and feels afraid.

No problems in being cloud-dependent. The problem is not backing up stuff because you think that Google is 100% safe. You could use POP3 and get your disk wiped out for any reason, so local-dependent isn't safe either.

You would rather risk losing your data more keeping with yourself. This is a stupid post. Clouds solutions generally implement good backup solutions and with almost 100% availability to the data. Google has anyway restored more than 50% of the lost data.

Sorry, meant to upvote.

I have tossed him an upvote to counter your accidental downvote.

Thanks, I upvoted you to restore the karma balance.

I can't put a number on the amount of people I know who don't regularly back up their files themselves. One in particular lost gigs of precious photos during a laptop hard drive failure.

A company whose mandate is to provide continuity of service is going to be more reliable than 'oops I forgot to copy my files to this cheap crappy consumer drive I bought'.

Still, this incident should serve to remind that the so-called 'cloud' isn't invincible and we should try to cover our bases through multiple backups.

I suppose a cloud app is needed which would help us to backup data across multiple/popular cloud services. Chances of data being lost reduce drastically (almost to zero) if multiple clouds are keeping a backup of the same data.

Contrast Google's 0.08% fail rate here vs. the real world 3% hard drive fail rate - by that measure Google's cloud is 37x more reliable than your local storage.

Feels like cloud-bashing is becoming a regular sport - for techies we know that redundant back-ups are important, for average consumer the cloud drastically INCREASES reliability and the chance that items you store are going to be available when you need them.

ref for 5 year hd fail rate http://lwn.net/Articles/237924/

It doesn't make sense to compare the percentage of Gmail accounts that lost data in a single event to the annual failure rate of a hard drive. It also doesn't make sense to assume my local storage is a single hard drive in a world where a RAID array fits in a Macbook.

gmail is more than "good enough" for the vast majority users, any valid criticism of it as a "could-based" email service (whatever that means) would have to compare/contrast it with the alternative "non-cloud" email service.

More importantly, it probably is not a good idea to use email (of any form) as long term storage. Much better to "zero" your inbox periodically and only save what really needs to be saved outside of the email system.

Finally, there's are HUGE distinctions between losing some/all of one's emails, temporarily being locked out of email, and whatever other problems actually occurred. It is not at all clear what the severity of the problem actually was and how permanent it was. Perhaps it is premature to create a scare story about using gmail at this point?

> it probably is not a good idea to use email (of any form) as long term storage.

For hotmail or yahoo mail, I agree--but one of Gmail's founding principles is never having to delete an email--they say so in as many words. If it's not a good idea to use them for long-term storage of emails, they've failed (although having anything truly important in only one place does seem like an egg basket failure).

The fact that it's only 0.02% of users affected doesn't mean the situation should be taken lightly. I'm amongst those lucky users and trust me, it freaking sucks.

So far, it doesn't seem like Google cares much about us or is doing anything to restore our accounts. I hope I'm wrong.

Am I the only one who thinks it's nuts to describe streaming video or music as "using the cloud"? Doug Engelbart demonstrated video conferencing back in 1968, was that using the cloud as well? Sheesh.

To be fair at 0.02% affected (latest revised number) it's not even a 'micro-failure' it's a rounding error, not sure how it made the news.

It might give some opponents some ammo, but the chances of this type of thing happening on you're local machine is actually higher, and in this case all the data should be restored.

  > To be fair at 0.02% affected (latest revised number) it's not even  
  > a 'micro-failure' it's a rounding error

Would this fact placate you if you had just lost access to all of your email?

The user will be upset either way, but the chances of this happening on the local machine is higher, and at least in this case someone else will be charged with fixing it.

As far as "how upset will people get", people get much more upset at factors that they perceive to be out of their control rather than factors they perceive to be in their control.

If my laptop hard drive dies tomorrow and I realize my backups aren't bootable, that sucks but it's my fault. I just have to get better at backups.

If Google missteps and I lose access to my email, it's completely out of my hands. There's nothing I can do, and there's nothing I could have done. It's much more upsetting than something that can be internalized.

While I largely agree, keep in mind that assuming Gmail has 10 million users (i'm sure it has more), that's 20,000 people who lost their email.

.02% is still a ton of people.

I would be extremely careful with any service that claims to be on the "cloud". Backup your Email (no, not Gmail but Email) using Thunderbird or Outlook or any other old-fashioned email program. There's no better solution!. Use and keep thumb drive in your key-chain (everyone still carry keys even though we carry modern cellphones and what not). There's no better way to be sure than to keep and carry your important data to yourself.

It is a huge human fail when we treat Google and Facebook as Internet/Social life. They are not! Mind your own email, pictures, data, contacts, URL yourself.

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