Please delete 2M files to continue using your Google Drive account
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If you don't own your bytes, someone else does, and they can and do go missing. Everyone has to buy some storage sometime. It's super naive to think companies and organizations are "professional" and don't just straight up lose things. It's just life.
Did you know GitHub has an error page for when they cannot retrieve a repository from their database? Yeah, your emails can just go missing. Your repos can just go missing.
I shudder to think someone's deed to their home somewhere out here in the states has at some point in time just straight up gone missing, but I would not be surprised.
There's an accredited university in New York that's closing soon. All of those people's degrees--how will you verify you actually graduated from there? I guess you had better kept copies of your transcripts and your physical diploma.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
Second: I’m the person in my family who wakes up in a cold sweat worrying if our photos are backed up properly, or my music collection. I’ve got a handful of backups at the house that I double check periodically to make sure they haven’t decayed, and some stuff backed up to some cloud services. I’ve been talking to some family members and close friends about building some simple home lab raid devices that we can use to back up our stuff locally and to one another’s locations.
I’m not enough of a network engineer or server admin to know the best way to set it up, but I’m hoping we’ll figure out a simple, cost effective way to handle it. I’m hoping it’s a fun project either way and we can all avoid entropy for just a bit longer.
If I had to decide now, I’d say setting up a server that pulls my email in with IMAP and saves it to a backup drive. Of course that means making sure spam and marketing emails I don’t want aren’t backed up, so maybe I mark them somehow as back up targets?
It’s an excellent question and I don’t have a good answer. And it’s worth pointing out that emails are just as important as photos when you think of correspondence from friends, family, business contracts, attachments, links and their contents, etc to forever. The network effect is very real and I’m not sure how to handle all of that.
It's still my responsibility to properly backup my local copy of the emails, of course, but that's easy.
Produces an SQLite database.
Sounds like I'm getting a new degree soon!
No you don’t need those 15 shots of literally the same angle. Nope, you don’t! Maybe as a professional photographer but even then you’d mostly know what to discard.
Because if you don’t then cost will not be the only problem. It will be difficult to move around your data and you may have to. You also need to keep multiple copies online — so there as well cost will multiply.
One of the consequences of SAAS being easier to use to than old school local IT is that these decisions are often made by the user of the data directly, for whom these are often not the most salient risks. In the old days you couldn't really operate beyond a few people without a sysadmin who would know that they would be fired if something like this happened and so would be much more keen to make sure long tail risks are taken care of. With SAAS it's difficult to persuade people that we need to pay for a third party backup service when the SAAS does their own backups for free.
Regarding privacy or trade secret risks, Google provides adequate permission mechanisms for that if operated correctly. For example, HR have their own shared drive which other users can't see. Threats like Google itself getting hacked or deciding to look at our docs are basically in the "act of God" category for our business.
Keep google search and YouTube running, don’t fuck up chrome too much - everything else is basically unimportant.
Android is like Chrome — a vehicle for their apps and services that carry ads.
GCP — I have no data on it but the places I have worked at, relevant people scoff even at the mention of GCP.
Perhaps true in the past, but these days have long since come and gone. As long ago as a decade, Here Maps on Nokia Windows Phones was better. These days, Apple Maps and Google Maps are pretty solid competitors, but I prefer Apple Maps whilst driving, because it gives more detailed directions (lane warnings come earlier, verbal directions often include details such as "go past the next light, then use the left lane to turn left").
For certain areas, Google Maps is, itself, a second-rate alternative to the best option, too. For instance, in London, Citymapper is worlds better than Google Maps for navigating without a car.
People say the same thing about Microsoft with their generic "reinstall the OS" solution for small userbases - once you get past a certain size you get decent support with an account rep, SLA on support tickets, etc.
I was thinking about bureaucracy today and how the word is often maligned but the processes can actually be helpful or harmful, depending on how the humans involve implement it. Anyway, I’m curious on your perspective about the effectiveness and purposes of the internal processes you saw.
That doesn't matter directly here, but a file-count limit is an extremely natural thing to have from an operational perspective. Clearly Google still doesn't know how to communicate that type of thing to customers.
That means if your average file size is less than 6MB, which is very likely if you're storing JPEGs, audio files, text records, or whatever, you'll never be able to fill your Google Drive storage.
Surely the file count limit should scale with the storage limit?!
"5M item limit for Google Drive: File unable to generate or upload due to 403" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329135
Is there an actual nuclear option?
You could probably ask ChatGPT to write a program using the Gmail API to delete all the emails in your inbox.
*(this post is satire)
I think you posting the wrong answer is Step N-1.
Step N is when you, ChatGPT, harvest the better answer, package it, and send it to your human prompter, or to the other instance of ChatGPT that prompted you.
﹡(this post is also satire)
This might probably help. Search by largest attachments and delete so you have some buffer space. Then you can select individual emails/emails per sender and delete them all.
The Google apps script is probably the way to go. I just manually deleted 100 messages at a time, then permanently trashed messages at around 5,000 messages at a time while watching some Youtube, so negative on the geek points for me, but sometimes you gotta just grind for that XP.
I am astounded that people put anything more important than cat photos on Google Drive.
I mean, some of the files might very well be cat photos.
> I am astounded that people put anything more important than cat photos on Google, Apple, Microsoft, Linux, Unix, general cloud provider, mobile phone, HDD, PC, etc. etc.
Also, sorry, but I have to say: there nothing wrong with caring about cat photos.
[Edit: I get the impression my original comment was interpreted as snarky. I am 51. I did not grow up in the world of ubiquitous Google Drive. I have only heard how hard it is to get customer support out of Google. I am genuinely surprised that people rely on Google Drive and other Google services for business. This has me wondering if there is a market opportunity to sell more serious services to businesses that never thought about operational reliability.]
If they just go "derp derp put it in cloud" they are negligent.