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Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

> The added grievance to this is that my drive also included my own personal family photos and my current book on the subject

I mean, how many times does this need to come up for people to learn the lesson? If you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data, including locking you out of it. We certainly don't like this state of affairs, but that is the world many of us have created.

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Have you seen the TV ads for cloud storage services? They’re advertising themselves as being dependable. We cannot blame average consumers when events like these happen.

We need to stop pretending that software, including free-as-in-beer SaaS, doesn’t have an implied warranty. It does. The implied warranty in Google Drive is that “we’ll host your files for you”. Google screwed-up (an “honest” mistake, it pains me to say) but a consumer advocate (the FTC in the US?) should be going after Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty.

Google is well aware this is a problem and actively obfuscates ways to get connected to support (unless you pay them extra, of course) so I have a real hard time accepting this as an "honest" mistake.

I mean the account lock-out was probably an honest mistake.

The lack of support, however, is not - and is part of Google’s business model.

Hmm, Isn't this moving the overton window? Should we accept that they were viewing his data in the first place?

So much this. Host locally, and push encrypted backups to a cloud service.

Doing this will screw Google’s ability to optimize storage for identical files, which may drive up costs, but it’s the best way to ensure your data stays private.

>"So much this. Host locally, and push encrypted backups to a cloud service."

Host locally and RENT backup servers in couple of places. Those cost peanuts and are highly reliable.

Do you have this automated?

We should but, g00gl e employees are 10% of HN it seems.

No one who works for a powerful entity likes admitting they are more or less powerless to daily statments they see on here.

It's like how anyone with tech awareness watches the goal posts keep moving.. Yes, I know alternatives and mitigation and ECT.

Power is a fickle mistress.

@skosie >Host locally, and push encrypted backups to a cloud service.

Is there any "grandparent friendly" way to do this today?

Give them a NAS / old PC with shared network folder (Windows context menu or Samba on Linux), replicate the parts they want on phones etc. with Syncthing, and use any encrypted backup tool of your choice for the cloud backup.

Often people put quotes (or even air-quotes) around things to imply it's sarcasm or that it's only that thing if you can suspend disbelief, so I don't think there's any disagreement there.

Additionally, making them accountable for these mistakes is a way to actually have them resolve them, so honest or not, it's likely to stop of decrease in occurrence then.

And what, a refund for 99% of the time what is a free at point of service to the consumer?

For paying private customers yes I'd day fine but in most of these cases in ruling to bet the "free" 1GB was more than enough

> And what, a refund for 99% of the time what is a free at point of service to the consumer?

No, but give them a punitive fine (on the order of a percentage of their daily average profits) for failing to live-up to their own expectations set in their own advertising.

Daily average profits for free service are 0.

Then make it a simple fee/fine for screwing the customer. You promise that you're gonna host files and you deleted/restricted them? Pay $100 for every day that the files are unavailable.

Legitimate companies will have no problem with that. Scum that wants to lure users in (to capture their personal data) but doesn't even have the decency to hold up their end of the bargain will have to reconsider whether they still want to provide such a service.

> Have you seen the TV ads for cloud storage services?

Google Drive is not a "cloud storage service". You're not a paying customer of Google and you have no leverage with them at all. Putting your only copy of any data that you can't afford to lose on Google Drive is just asking for trouble.

> Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty

There is no implied warranty for a service that's being given to you for free and for which you have no customer agreement or contract with Google. If you want a warranty, express or implied, you need to be a paying customer.

This should serve as a reminder that Google has been scanning the entire contents of your account for the past decade, and as usual (for Google), no human beings are in the loop to review the decisions made by algorithms.

Yup.

If a service is free, you're the commodity that is being bundled and sold.

If a service is paid for, you're a Premium Commodity with Money that is being bundled and sold.

How’s Synology NAS? Safe local storage or can they back door in and fuck with your data?

A NAS is generally safe if you don't do anything stupid with it (there are footguns available of course). But you can easily cut it off from the broader internet entirely.

Keep it patched. Use strong passwords. If not, a botnet will ransom it. Nothing is a substitute for Offline backups.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/synology-warn...

ugh, that's not confidence inspiring. I'd like to get a NAS to get my data out of cloud services.

Would periodically swap out drives and store the backup ones at a relatives house.

Would keep it disconnected from the external internet other than for pulling in updates.

But this makes me nervous.

Sounds to me like you would probaby be fine. As the article states there are various safeguards against it. Even just 2FA helps against brute force. Alternatively don't have it accessible from the internet.

Synology is a good compromise for ease of use and being able to actually set it up the way you want and need it. I have been using them for a few years and I'm happy with them. You actually get a good range of options for setting it up securely. I'm much more concerned about my router being taken over in some way as it doesn't get security updates and there is not much you can do with it.

And yes, I use it amongst other things for local backups. But then still back up to Dropbox and Google Drive from the NAS and other devices. And to external hard drives to swap around. It doesn't make me use cloud storage less, but I'm a lot less concerned about losing access with having everything local as well.

That's a good point I hadn't thought of. My motive for "get out of the cloud" was more about losing access than risk of breach / leak / spying etc. So that doesn't require getting out, it just requires the local backup copy.

Take a look at FreeNAS. It is FreeBSD, which is self-recommending for things like NAS, built on ZFS (all the nice parts of a modern file system like snapshots, easy backup, etc.) and has a nice management GUI.

https://www.freenas.org/

(I also don't recommend exposing your NAS directly to the internet. They frequently make doing so attractive with the ability to run addons like file sharing or "private cloud" services. If you must, run them in a VM on the NAS and isolate the VM from everything else on your network. And keep up with patches.)

Synology is great if you want to stick to using their GUI, which is very capable. If you are more of a DIY/CLI person, I would avoid Synology and similar products. They have everything set up in a very particular way, and you can’t mess around in the backend too much without risking corruption of some kind.

You spend less on a used computer with Ubuntu or FreeNAS or some other distro, have way more flexibility, but a lot more to maintain.

> Synology is great if you want to stick to using their GUI

Symnology supports rsync, ssh, scp, custom docker images, etc. you can probably run Borg server on it, although I have not looked into that.

So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I own one. Do you?

Synology works reasonably well, but is not setup and forget.

A few months ago, I decided to migrate to my new laptop by restoring a backup from the old one , just as a way to test the DS216j backups. I found:

a) I was on an old backup solution of them, and they had migrated to something new. I had a hard time to find the old backup software's installer to do the restore.

b) The old backup was good enough to restore individual files, but had no real way to do a full restore. It seems they thought I'd click on each individual file, even if there are hundreds of thousands in my home folder. I believe there was an option for zipping a folder, but it just timed out.

c) Their site had great documentation for telling me about how to do backups, but I could not find anything for the I-urgently-need-a-full-restore use case. Maybe I overlooked it, or their new software is better documented.

Now all the data was safely on the NAS, and I think I could scrape it out with a few days work, but none of the above would be fun to find out in the middle of an emergency. I've since thrown their backup software out and replaced it with a custom rsync to the NAS. At least I know how to deal with that when the full cow farm production hits the turbofan.

If you rent a flat, can landlord take your belongings because he thinks you have drugs?

If you rent a flat without a contract, absolutely. Which is why I specifically said:

> f you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data

> If you rent a flat without a contract, absolutely.

In many jurisdictions, absolutely not.

No, this is generally where the government steps in and dictates what is allowed contract or not.

What makes the landlord think you have drugs? Did he come to check the flat when you are not around?

Apple is looking to do that.

Sorry, but you've got the wrong take here. Google is presenting this service as a reliable place to store and share files. They have a responsibility to provide adequate human customer service. Sure, people shouldn't trust them, but not everyone follows Hacker News to know how common this sort of thing is. Regardless of whether the next person should trust Google, the right thing to happen here is for Google to restore access to these files, not to blame the victim.

> They have a responsibility to provide adequate human customer service.

A moral or ethical responsibility, maybe. A legal or financial one? Not under our current system, unfortunately. And corporations are not ethical actors.

Just to be clear, I'm not victim-blaming here. It is abhorrent what has happened to this person and to many like them. This is why education about avoiding snake oil I believe is essential in the school system. Economics courses should devote a full module to identifying snake-oil claims and inherent risks of "something for nothing" swindles, which Google Drive is a classic modern example of.

Especially Google, which still OWES me money after they closed my adsense account for bullshit reasons (and they know it since they sent me a worthless adwords voucher at my physical address). But at least I get to tell every single business I worked in (and some were huge) to never use any Google SAAS as a revenge and will continue doing that.

Welp - affordability. It's expensive and arguably less reliable to get an external hard drive.

I have HDDs running longer than most Google projects do. So that point is really moot.

Ditto. And when I felt it was near end-of-life, I just moved it over to a more stable SSD.

I'm honestly thinking I'm going to have to backup my entire G-Drive externally and wipe it (for the security of my Google account). I mean, who knows what will trigger the deletion of your Google account these days... I guess the storage I pay for is just for e-mails.

Incidentally, I’ve had more SSDs fail - or misbehave - on me than spinning-rust drives now. And I don’t just mean cheap SSDs either, but an Intel Optane 905p I own results in hundreds of PCI Express bus errors every minute when plugged-in to any ASUS motherboard I own, while a SATA Intel 530 woke-up one day completely unreadable. And throw-in a couple of Samsung SSD failures too.

It’s enough to make me anxious between backups: at least with spinning rust-drives we can transplant the platters and controllers (separately, even!) while SSD hardware recovery is almost unheard of.

thats interesting, its been the exact opposite for me...

though the ssds i use are for backup and arent used very often for writing... i wonder if that makes a difference?

I keep SSDs less than half full and use trim, paranoiacly. Because of this I use an SSD for a year or two before I get a larger one, or an additional one (software and game assets keep getting larger!).

I've never had even the cheapest mwave or microcenter special ssd die. Sata or nvme m.2, nothing.

I also haven't had a spindle die in 15 years, ever since I started letting them sleep and using UPS to smooth out power.

That noise you hear is me knocking on wood pretty frantically.

Sounds like a plan, it’s actually cheaper in a sense. Today I saw my webhost had nextcloud one-click installs, that might be useful for those files you want accessible everywhere. I already pay for the space, so it doesn’t cost me extra.

>assuming the emails you're sent won't also eventually result in the locking and banning of your Google account

Try explaining RAID (not just RAID0/1, but RAID6 and RAID10) to an average consumer and expect them to maintain their own NAS - that’s a bit too much.

I have vanilla HDDs who do their job nicely for years now. The most important files are duplicated across a few HDDs.

RAID is overkill and bad designs can cause more issues than it saves.

Two or more external-DDs, copied regularly per how much they are willing to spend time and lose data. One stored in some other place if possible.

A Synology NAS with RAID1 and a few terabytes is $400 to $500 including taxes. Seems pretty cheap for not having to back it up regularly. Although, the second location risk would remain.

Until you get ransomed:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/synology-warn...

You really want offline backups. Never recommend “not having to back it up regularly”.

Yes, I guess there is no easy way out.

the thing is, if you back up bad data to a RAID1, the mirroring isn't going to save you - you just wrote the bad data to both copies.

RAID is not a substitute for rotating backups.

Good point!

The author of this article is not an average consumer. He's a person undertaking a particular project that requires a lot of digital data storage, and anyone doing that needs to take the time to think through the risks and benefits of the various available options. "Just put it on Google Drive and hope it's safe" does not qualify.

"the author of this article"

uhmm... there is no article. It's a link to a google support forum thread. And the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader.

> there is no article. It's a link to a google support forum thread

Fine, then s/article/post/ in what I said.

> the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader

I agree; I'm simply pointing out that if you are going to try to execute a project that requires a lot of digital storage of important data, you should be tech savvy, or collaborate with someone who is. You certainly should not expect a free service like Google Drive to be a secure, reliable data store for your only copies of important data.

> Welp - affordability. It's expensive and arguably less reliable to get an external hard drive.

I think multiply redundant back-ups get expensive, but one external hard drive with scads of space is cheap (at least from the perspective of someone who grew up when you measured space in MB). It won't provide you the security against data failure, but it will provide some recourse for when the cloud provider yanks your data.

Won’t protect you from fire or theft either.

Well, it will if it's in a different location. But that's just what I mean—you don't need one solution that protects against everything; different solutions can protect against different threats, and all you really need is one to make it through.

I don't think this really deserves to be downvoted does it? Even if it's simplified. And I say that as someone who is in a tiny fraction of the population in terms of having my own fairly serious business TrueNAS system at the core of my data story, behind an OPNsense firewall on a fairly fancy network setup and with also my own offsite backups and Backblaze B2. I'm working on upgrading my ESXi system too, continuing to take more stuff self-hosted. And I'm pretty happy with it all, as well as any other benefits it's just plain faster to do stuff locally.

But it's definitely fundamentally more expensive because there are tons of fixed costs that would be much better amortized across more parties. The hardware could handle far more than I throw at it, and importantly the incremental cost of expanding the setup is much much lower then the setup cost. My NAS could easily have nearly triple the storage space at "only" the cost of the drives themselves and maybe a bit more memory (which is dirt cheap). It's not processor or bandwidth limited. I don't need that much space, but if there were another few folks joining me on using it and we split the cost between us we'd each pay less for more. And the whole thing as-is leans heavily on my own personal amortization and professional knowledge, I can justify some of it as a business expense and I actually already knew tons of the basics before doing anything for the first time. A larger group could have someone devoting even more time to it.

That's the simple relentless logic behind "cloud services" really behind whatever layers of fancy marketing or conversely outrage. It really is cheaper at a basic level, but unfortunately the way it's often been implemented lends to centralization and perverse incentives.

Efforts to address it have to tackle those head-on. Ideally at a minimum there'd be legally mandated offering of standard "cloud APIs" for every platform so that iCloud or whatever could be slotted right out for something else compatible. It does seem like there is potential for more decentralized sharing and discovery, but the UI and reliability challenges are quite significant. We'll probably see a lot of gyrations back and forth as everyone searches for the right balances depending on their own situations along with whatever semi-ignorant semi-opportunistic bumbling responses governments come up with. Unfortunately even on HN lots of people tend to reach for sledgehammers over scalpels when it comes to the law.

Most web hosting providers will give you plenty of space for a pretty low price, particularly if it's just data you want to store, not make accessible through a web interface. Also there's tarsnap.

Don't know how it is today, but decade ago it was admins favourite pastime to rummage through people accounts and look for juicy stuff. Girlfriend pictures, movies, diaries. Always encrypt data locally before sending to the cloud.

Is there a way to get a complete download of your data from Google? Maybe an online guide or something.

Drive alternative is simple enough with "cp -r" and your own bucket. For something like, Gmail and other services, it gets complicated.

Sure is, and it’s excellent. I make a backup of everything Google stores about me every couple of years. I’ve never needed them, but they’re really interesting and give me peace of mind.

https://takeout.google.com/

Google takeout

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