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Comment by anonymous246 | Hacker News Reader

So your reply about atrocious customer service (i.e., a post about a PAYING customer being unable to get access to his file) is to say "well, you should have backed up"?

The real story here is that a paying customer was unable to get anything better than a free user.

FWIW, I must be lazy or something, but I don't think the user of a VERSIONED online document storage service should be reasonably be expected to also have his/her own backups. What the hell am I paying for then?

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> The real story here

Why can't there be two stories?

If I park my car and don't lock the doors, and come back to find it gone, is the story that I'm an idiot for leaving a car unlocked, or is the story that the neighborhood is unsafe?

They're both problems, but I can actually solve one of them myself. That doesn't excuse the $BAD_THING that happened, but it does offer me options for when it inevitably does.

The issue here is that he paid someone else to do it.

So in your analogy: You park your car at a garage with a guard, pay them to keep it safe and leave your car unlocked. And when you come back it's gone.

Yes he could have done something to make it less likely it, but he also explicitly paid someone else to handle it for him.

Personal responsibility can never be outsourced. If one does not want to lose something, one makes an independent backup. Google or whoever offers a probabilistically reliable system at a certain price. If one does not like the odds, pay a little more for another backup. Recurse. (Or just curse when data is lost.)

In house or external doesn't matter. You always backup.

Because it seems to be a foreign concept in this day and age, I will repeat it again.

You always backup.

Do you backup your backups? And backup your backup backups? You have to draw the "good enough" line somewhere, and to most people, Google backing up their stuff is backed up enough.

Then they should accept responsibility for the outcome of their decision when Google backing up their stuff isn't "backed up enough".

Sure, and that's why we're moving off Google for hosted Apps.

I entirely agree- When things are mission critical to you, you need them in an environment where you can control it, back it up properly, and ensure it stays up.

We're not a priority to Google (Understandably.)

For things that really matter to your company, you should bring them in-house, so you can ENSURE they're backed up, and available when necessary. At least that way when things do fail, you can make fixing it a top priority, rather than a nice-to-have.

I don't follow. Why does the fact that you have to do your own backups mean that you can't use Google (or, conversely, why does using Google mean that you can't do your own backups)?

You certainly can pay to use Google Documents and do your own backups. It's just that doing so would defy the biggest appeal of the service. The appeal is that Google handles day-to-day operations for you.

There's more to "day-to-day operations" than backups.

The reality is that Google is much less likely to damage or lose your data than you are, but it's always good to keep extra copies around locally. This is important for many reasons, like access when either Google or your whole net connection is unavailable, and more flexibility with the data.

I think you are unfairly contrasting he flaws of something that exists against he perfection of something you want to exist.

In-house IT fails plenty of the time also, and plenty of organization cannot afford to fix some failures. One must consider the probabilities in all cases.

key, I think, is to make sure that more than one entity needs to screw it up. If it's really important, make that three entities. But the point is, if google hosts your email, make sure you have backups somewhere else.

Personally, I think this applies to yourself, too. As much as possible, make it difficult for you to overwrite your own backups before they expire. If possible, encrypt and outsource.

How do you perform backups through Google Hosted Apps for your organization of 25? 250? 2500? +n?

"You always backup" is an oversimplification. If you run a medium-size company, chances are, you don't back up stuff yourself. Instead, you pay someone else to do it. You trust them to do it right. This article raises a good question. Why can't you trust Google to do it right as well?

You should always have at least 2 different backups, one on site and one off site (disaster recovery) these are completely separate from "it's in the cloud so I don't have to worry about it." And this is why I personally dislike "the cloud" because too many people rely on it and don't have a proper plan in place. You can rely on it sure, but don't only rely on it.

A decent hoster or mail service provider takes care of that for you. They have at least 2 different backups, one on site and one off site. You don't take care of that yourself and the backup is entirely transparent to you. This is why service providers can make money: because they can take care of things for you. It is their raison d'être. Taking care of that yourself is as ridiculous as hosting the email servers yourself. It's not cost effective anymore. The only conclusion from this story is that Google is not a decent hoster or email service provider. The company using them can be excused for expecting better service and they are rightfully moving their business elsewhere.

And to address who does it, it doesn't matter. Someone in the company should be in charge of doing the backups. If no one else will, then take it upon yourself to do so. If you have a medium sized company, someone in your IT department should be doing it. And if you are a large company, there is simply no excuse.

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