Google Drive files suddenly disappeared
support.google.com
support.google.com
E.g. in this case their volunteer customer service is left with this and there is no way to even know if Google sees this:
“Sorry Yeonjoong,
As a group of volunteers, we do not have access to user accounts and can only help by sharing our experiences. In this case there is nothing we can do. “
I posted a question a while back questioning why After Effects drive-by installs Cinema 4D without warning, and they just could not understand why the lack of notification or consent was a problem, feeling strongly that I should shut up and be grateful even the tiniest of blessings our lords and masters at Adobe see fit to bestow upon our hard drives.
Which then furthers the question, why? I could understand the odd person just trying to be helpful because they had the same problem, found the post with no solution, figured it out, then answered with theirs, but for the ones who seem to spend countless hours ranking up, either by gaming it, or the few actually being helpful, does it lead to a chance of being hired or something?
Creating a system like that almost feels like it should be illegal, almost like the companies that give extensive case studies for interviews and take the work with no intention of hiring the interviewees, or unpaid internships where they don't even bother teaching and just give grunt work.
So, here I am, stuck between two idiotic bureaucracies with no way to resolve the problem on either side. Google doesn't answer to anything, the bank is - at least on paper, I've managed to stretch this for three years now - unwilling to bend their rules because the amounts are so tiny. But you can see the ghost of what I'm worried about: you'll see that if that card eventually does get cancelled that that $0.49 or whatever is a reason to lock my account or some other idiotic move.
Simple doesn't mean easy, practical, realistic, suitable, or many other things.
Simple doesn't mean good.
I had a weird experience with a bank where they seemed to re-open my account after it was closed. I got a letter (as requested) within the 15 day window stating the account was closed and I wouldn't be responsible for any fees on the account in the event it opened again.
They spent most of the 15 days bombarding me with calls and emails trying to resolve it outside the CFPB, but I wanted it on record. That letter is now a PDF attached to the complaint with a complaint ID in case I have problems.
Hence the common recommendation to start spamming first.last@Google.com addresses until you annoy someone internal who is willing to file a ticket on your behalf if you don't have any capable Googlers in your social graph.
Considering through the amount of times that someone said "did you try turning it off and on again?" AND it has has solved the problem, make such forum users/helpers like that very useful.
Should Google be paying more to provide customer service? Absolutely! But it’s just not in Google’s culture to do customer service. Google likes to develop products with extremely lean / efficient burn rates. Googlers value efficiency orders of magnitude more than human connection.
They “gamify” volunteer support with badges etc.
One place I worked called it “Level 0” support in that it cost the company zero dollars.
Often these purported super users reply with silly generic suggestions, or meaningless requests for information. There's nothing worse than posting highly specific debugging information to a forum, which is not read by engineers, and is instead replied to by someone suggesting you try logging out and in again.
For example, in this thread, "Device", "Drive for desktop version", and "Sync mode" isn't remotely relevant to restoring user files. And the super user cannot do anything with that information. If that information is truly necessary, a Google engineer can post in the thread requesting it.
And they do it all for a meaningless diamond badge. You may as well have AI doing it.
This exactly, it's the most frustrating thing ever as a user, and makes me wonder what the point of these forums even is.
That being said, I understand what the Google Drive team is going through here & as long as they are aware, the support threads aren't going to be useful until they root cause the issue & hopefully fix what happened.
Some of them get invited to Product Expert Summits too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/9vqyf0/attended_the...
I don't deny that AI could take over that role soon
(looks like they got acquired and had some big companies using them so google using something similar I imagine: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/css-corp-acquires-s...)
My guess is it's the same motivation for those who volunteer to help others in any other support forum. Human nature does not change based on the market cap of the company (if any) behind the product. What difference do you expect between this, and Stack Overflow contributors for Microsoft SQL Server or Blender? I wouldn't expect there to be a difference in motivation: some people simply enjoy helping others (even if it's in return of made-up internet points).
On the paying tiers of FAANG-like, Is crazy that these companies charge market price for their services yet the support is usually quite poor.
Called Walmart and they got extra bike racks installed at my location. Have had to call eBay a number of times as a small-time seller. PayPal too. Got Google to replace my chromecast remote and they went through thorough troubleshooting steps before RMAing it.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions but not worth pretending that paid (by the vendor) support doesn’t exist.
The outcome is support that makes you feel like you're bothering them, is barely concealing their hostility, lies about what's happening, and one wrong word and horrible, horrible things will happen to you.
That's PayPal support on the best of days, like after the support person just received a 20% raise, or had a baby. On the bad days...
<Flips through calendar>
- "Sorry, I'll get my new dishwasher then"
Finding good support is also hard. I worked in product areas with dedicated support for paying customers, and the number of support staff that I would consider actually helpful is precisely 3 people, out of a few hundred. Those 3 people are paid a ton to keep them around, and while I don't know exactly what they're paid they usually get moved up and into a role that at minimum exceeds typical senior eng pay, the rest just bounce tickets back and forth collecting traces with at best a poor understanding of the product. On average no understanding.
Another problem is that a good support staff would probably do better to be a dev anyway, the knowledge required is pretty much the same, just missing development experience.
knowing code quality levels at those companies and how they replace actual designers with PMs... it was their goal to have the most expensive support!
On the bad side I can think of Google and Databricks.
So it's not an unsolvable problem, there are people getting support right.
I've had experiences where they will claim that something is possible when it is absolutely not, and you have to provide a lot of supporting information to get them to see reality.
Surely the company must provide customer service for advertisers. Perhaps it's excellent.
Not sure that people using Google Drive for free are customers. They are potential ad targets and potential sources of data useful for an online ad services business, though.
Not really. Google is a monopoly with a huge moat, so pretty much everything they do is pretty shit. (But yeah, for actual Google customers there's actually some sort of customer support.)
I was confused why someone had wasted their time doing this, so I snooped around a bit. As far as I can tell it's a CV building exercise for some people and nothing more.
I can help you find out information about why people staff customer support forums for free.
Please follow the instructions first here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428901
A page ( https://github.com/pricing , I am a verified teacher, what happens if I already subscribed to co-pilot ) clearly tells me to contact support. I've decided it's simply impossible to contact anyone at github, every attempt just leads to an automated reply and my post being closed. I'm not sure there is anyone there. I tried posting ont he help forum, where I (of course) never got a reply.
This has made me make sure nothing I care about is only on github -- as I don't expect to any recieve any help if I have any other problems in future. I should of course be careful anyway, but when you hit these problems you realise quite how hard it is to contact any modern large company.
Like why not Dropbox or Sync?
And for personal use, it's much cheaper than Dropbox.
I pay R$6.99/month for 100GB of Google storage (most of which is used by Google Photos), while Dropbox costs R$10/month for 50GB of storage and doesn't integrate very well with Google Photos.
I’ve contacted them many times in the past (before MS acquisition), and every time I got a non-template response from a human being within a few hours, sometimes within half an hour. Example request: pushed something I later regretted, asked them to gc on the server and purge cached pages; I asked this a couple of times and had it promptly taken care of each time.
Maybe someone from MSFT/GitHub can help
I sent in a tech support request, and it was solved in less than 2 hours. They even replied, telling me they added my institutional e-mail domain.
So not only did a human reply and fix my problem, I'm not even a paying customer. I get the free education account.
Not all companies miss this, Amazon has strict SLAs on responding to user requests, and this even includes GitHub issues. Personally, I find it rare, though not non-existent, to have a good experience with Google customer support or OSS while Amazon generally feels pretty good. Maybe just lucky of course but the brand effect is obvious to me and perhaps worth the companies spending a bit on.
Google support is also poorly trained on social engineering.
Not sure how much you're following financial news these days, but trillion dollar companies are getting outright massacred on Wall Street if they dare spend money on things deemed "unnecessary" by the bankers.
Customer support organizations were the ones most targeted and hit by layoffs across the board to cut costs. After all, Google products are still being used after they fired large amount of support staff (not that support experience was good with them). It's a good example for other corporations to do the same - it's not like you'll go elsewhere, riiiight? Time to "cut the fat" (term I've seen on HN).
(And that doesn't include internal pressures in these corporations to avoid unpromoteable, unsexy, expensive and boring work of supporting customers.)
How do you think the became a trillion dollar company????!!!
There. I said the quiet part outloud.
Where a competitive marketplace exists I don't see ads (especially ads purchased by big incumbent vendors) adding any value: it would be better overall if competitors spent that money improving the product (or service) rather than trying to persuade customers to purchase a less-good product (measuring "good" as value/cost, since there is a place for lower quality but lower cost options).
But I do think there might be an economic argument in favour of at least some advertising to bring awareness of new market entrants, and especially of new categories of product/service. (One counterargument might be that this should properly be the role of journalists, and I agree that in an ideal world it would be. But the current dismal quality of the mainstream media suggests that economic incentives may actively hinder having ideal journalism…)
If this means people see fewer ads, then that's a great way to reduce over-consumption.
Although I'm not in favour of completely banning advertisements, just taxing advertising revenue heavily, as it sidesteps any censorship accusations. The government still lets you say what you want, but you can't become wealthy just by shilling for corpos.
Exceptions will be made in the name of encouraging viable consumer evaluation content, such as review copies, listing fees and suchlike as long as they are clearly stated and meet a stringent set of requirements.
Even for pretty bad things (e.g. really toxic pollution), the taxes just need to be set obnoxiously high. By "obnoxiously high," I mean the trade-off might be cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch or removing a billion tons of CO2; something which clearly helps more than the harm done.
For mild things (e.g. device shitification or not having service manuals), even very modest taxes can help (e.g. a few pennies per device), without throttling innovation. In a commodity market of Chinese off-brands, a few pennies is enough to make-or-break a vendor.
That's the standard argument made: Consumers learn about new products through advertising.
In fact, this is not what happens. At least I've virtually never seen it. The most effective ways to learn about new products are things like trade journals (including ones like Hacker News), blogs, etc. In those contexts, writers select for products which are interesting or which work well.
To the contrary, advertising strongly favors entrenched players with money:
- If Microsoft builds a SaaS, you build a better SaaS, but you have $50k to advertise, and Microsoft has $500M, there will be a gap in consumer perception, in favor of the inferior player.
- If I know, from advertising, that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, and Microsoft has additional generic brand recognition, you're at an even greater disadvantage.
In practice, advertising almost always favors entrenched players over new market entrants. Perhaps there's an exception to new market entrants from big players, but that's not nearly enough to justify the economic cost.
And then you realize that we're over-consuming, and the planet would be in a much healthier state if ads didn't exist as they do now.
Mainly a little tickle of pleasure in helping someone out combined with the pleasing puzzle solving.
Left Reddit after the whole 3rd party app shenanigans sadly.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
>For each of your apps, you must: >Respond to user questions about paid apps or in-app purchases on time: You must respond to customer support questions within three business days. If Google contacts you about an urgent product issue, you must respond within 24 hours.
Or any customer service. The support forums are worthless except for really trivial things that can be resolved equally well elsewhere.
It's a shame they don't do this.
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245534268/a-spreadsh...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245524854/data-in-go...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245596891/5-months-o...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245661673/disappeari...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245407620/i-can-t-fi...
I store the local drive in a "fireproof" safe (note: fireproof is a bit of a misnomer, since stuff can still burn in a fireproof safe, though it's a better bet than not having one in the case that your home/apartment catches fire).
I also back up to Amazon Glacier as a third offsite backup. One could also use S3 for this, though it might be a bit more expensive than Glacier.
What emergency could affect both you and Google, but not lead to the kind of apocalyptic situation where you'd prefer an extra first aid kit, food or ammunition to a hard drive in your go bag? Perhaps if you're on the US West Coast, a huge earthquake is a legitimate worry here.
It’s basically the good old 3-2-1 backup rule: Three copies of your data (your production data and two backups) on two different media, with one copy off-site.
For online storage I've found cloud S3 storages to be substantially better than customer-faceing services like Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. Amazon S3 may be expensive but you can use Backblaze B2 for $6/TB/month which is as good and as fast. Then use rclone as file browser. You can share single files by generating download link so others can download at 1Gbps no hidden limits.
Is an untested backup really a backup?
For cloud backup of anything i've never trusted Google for shit, even aside from its grotesquely parasitic "privacy" policies (a complete joke of a word for anything to do with that company).
Instead, so far I've tried several and maybe unexpectedly, the most easy to work with and simply functional across multiple machines and several external drives has been SpiderOak. Its desktop interface is shit, but the overall service is easy to use and has never failed me one so far, and it constantly, incrementally conducts deduplicated backups of even minor file/folder changes as long as it's running.
As a second option, Arq has been nice too, though its UI is also rather clumsy.
I've been thinking about getting a NAS, but I feel like I probably need something more than that. It's all pretty new ground to me, though. I think I want to run my own "cloud" from my home that my phone can sync with, helping me organise this stuff and show it to people I want to share it with. But controlled by me and not by Google or some other cloud service.
I wasn't too worried, as I sync everything to a local NAS. It was actually quite an interesting trip down memory lane. The next day, it was back to normal.
Also to clarify; while its technically possible that the Cloud Sync application on my Synology NAS could have done it; it can be configured with bi-directional sync and is fully authenticated to commit files back to Google Drive and delete existing ones. I have it set to "Download Remote Changes Only" and always have; and while a software bug there could have caused it, the files that re-appeared were long, long deleted to me, everywhere, and I didn't have copies of them on the NAS. Very nice to have them re-appear for a day and get pulled down for actual long-term backup locally though!
Almost certainly. This is a feature, so that when users accidentally delete everything, the sysadmin can fix it.
> the Workspace admin UI requires a PhD to figure out
It's designed for trained sysadmins, not end users. Still, it's pretty easy to figure out with some google searches.
A lot of bad things can happen that are even invisible to the user until they find out data is missing.
You save a file on a disk, something goes wrong with the cloud client, especially on bad connection and your file is either never synced (you will lose it on OS reinstall) or even deleted on your side.
Cloud provider has some issues, they restore the backup and things are synced back on your computer to their restored state.
Cloud provider started to dislike a file (their antivirus marked it), so they remove it from their side and it syncs to your computer. But that was a false positive (well, you could have your reasons to keep the infected file as well).
Ok, I know, at least for Google Drive their official client is pretty well written (I was using it for a long time), but bugs happen.
Conclusion? Make your own backup.
This is like saying it’s easier to eat healthy if you cook your own meals using fresh ingredients. We know that backups are best if you carefully and regularly make and test them but we also know that very few people diligently do so. There’s some room for automation there but you’re generally right back in the risk of bugs causing it to silently fail & someone busy noticing until it’s too late.
At the end of the day, everything is a risk and you have to decide your own risk tolerance.
Does the cloud have issues? Yes. But most people are far more likely to screw up their local backups than a cloud provider. Have you seen how an average person treats an external hard drive? It's like they don't know there are fragile glass disks inside.
No no no, that's not a backup!
A backup has to be at least offline (a snapshot/clone of your "live"-data), off-site (not in the same place as your "live-data"), search for 3-2-1 backups.
Google Drive is live, that's why your files are away and you cant do anything against it, again THAT'S NOT A BACKUP but your files on someone else's computer.
The most important thing with backups, test your restore periodically, my rule is: No successful restore = no backup. Sound's logical, but it happened many time to customers, always a mail with "Backup ok" but when checking the data there was nothing written since half a year.
Clearly, what happened here should not have happened. It doesn't matter whether you call it backup or cloud storage. Google promised to store that data. They failed to do so.
My backups are supposed to protect me against my own mistakes, not against Google's mistakes. Protection against Google's mistakes should be Google's job. They should have redundancy. They should have backups.
If they provide a storage system that does not reliably store data, they should put a big fat warning label on every single one of their products that uses this storage system:
Do not ever trust us to store your data! It could be gone any second. Always make offsite backups!
At the end of the day you are right of course. But the users's mistake is not actually to have mistaken live data for a backup. The mistake is to think that Google reliably stores data when in fact there is absolutely no contractual obligation for them to do so.
The key word being "some", not "all".
Yes, file versioning means you don't have to go back to clunky backups to restore an older version.
But it does absolutely nothing for data loss, which has always been the primary purpose of a backup. Accessing older file versions has only ever been a secondary purpose.
Overwrites and deletes should largely be covered by versioning and soft deletes.
Data loss caused by failing or lost hardware should be covered by a business relationship with a data storage service provider.
This service provider role is what's new and different when we're talking about cloud storage. And this is why I reject a direct comparison with traditional backup systems.
Yes you're right, the data should have been backed up to protect against data loss. But why is it the user's job to do that rather than Google's?
I think users should be able to have a reasonable expectation that their backup needs are covered by using a cloud storage service with versioning and soft deletes.
The fact that this expectation isn't met borders on false advertising.
Sure, of course they should. But nothing in this life is perfect. Google engineers will roll out a configuration change that has unintended consequences that results in data loss. Or your account gets falsely flagged for abuse and you get locked out. Or your computer gets infected with ransomware that accesses your cloud sync, creating duplicate encrypted files, deleting the originals, and emptying the trash -- so much for your version history.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket, create your own backup. It's "the user's job to do that rather than Google's" because at the end of the day, other people mess up, and it's your personal responsibility to safeguard against that if you want to protect against losing your data. It's always been this way and always will be.
But I think it's a bit unfair to blame users for using something like Google Drive as a backup system, because it does in fact have all the main features of a rather mediocre backup system.
Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers, such as making proper backups, copying files to multiple devices, keeping it all up-to-date and in sync.
These things are hard to get right. Most people's backups are utterly chaotic, unreliable, insecure, incomplete and vulnerable to some of the same attacks you describe.
That's the point, OP had it's data just once (on Google Drive), that's not even a bad backup, it's non-backup.
>Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers
"Supposed" was never good enough for my data, but now you have Cloud services AND your computer AND you phone AND your password/key AND the chance that they block your account for whatever reason, i just see more burdens not less ;)
That's rapid recovery NOT a backup. A backup should survive an exploding computer or a burned down house.
>My backups are supposed to protect me against my own mistakes, not against Google's mistakes. Protection against Google's mistakes should be Google's job.
Should be someone else job was never good enough for my data, and i think i have been proven right (once again).
>Do not ever trust us to store your data! It could be gone any second. Always make offsite backups!
Yes just trust yourself. Yes always make offsite AND offline backups, if your key/password gets stolen for example "insert storage provider" your data is also in danger.
>But the users's mistake is not actually to have mistaken live data for a backup.
Both made a mistake, one did not make a backup the other one is...well google.
In that respect, cloud storage was supposed to be a major step up for the average person.
Wanna make a bet that OP makes now real backup's?
Figure 1: https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/comp-internetuse2016.pdf
True, like checking the pressure in car tires, but if you loose your data once "competency" will increase ;)
If you have sync enabled, then if the cloud copy gets deleted (e.g., account compromise), so does your local "copy".
So GP's point stands.
(This is also why Syncthing, a Google Drive "replacement" of sorts, is careful to point out that it is not a backup)
We figured out these problems 20+ years ago.
[0]https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/239104039/can-n...
It was quite a task to unzip them all, perform deduplication, and import them into iCloud photos.
To keep them synced with S3, I am currently using an app called Photosync.
Im now using synology photos to backup new photos to my nas as i take them
Now that I think about it though, Takeout might include the location data until... they patch that "bug"to be more in line with the Photos API.
Sorry for this but on the off chance a single person anywhere near Photos sees this, your management chain is full of unrespectable scum. :) Gotta love Google.
I'd recommend combining it with something like rmlint for your daily cron jobs.
I don’t understand why anyone relies on this.
The alternate suggested by Tinyapps was to use Parallels or VMWare running on an M1/M2 Mac and use the Windows version of Veracrypt which is a universal app that runs x86 and Arm, to mount your volumes.
Veracrypt is evolving and I think the latest release dropped some Truecrypt compatibility though.
Sometimes a file download takes longer than 30s to start, either because it's converting, but also virus checks on large files. (For me it was always virus checks on PDF's over ~30MB).
You may need to change a timeout setting, so that your client will wait up to e.g. 5 min for a download to start its first byte.
Should be very simple:
ssh user@rsync.net rclone sync dropbox:rsynctest rsynctestdirectory
Oh, you meant rsync the command ...
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Hope someone is doing this to backup their Dropbox :-)
> I did have gmail fail to deliver a bunch of email from Thursday - Friday.
I'm honestly just stunned to be reading stuff like this. I'm only just now realizing this that I'd always implicitly assumed that Google would not make mistakes like this. I guess it's time to go frantically run Takeout on all of my Google accounts... and figure out somewhere to save the ZIP files other than Google Drive.
Just curious, how do you know that Gmail failed to deliver the email? Is it possible that you just genuinely got no email for a couple days, and then got a spike of email on Saturday? Poisson processes do be like that sometimes...
I kind of agree, but I noticed a little while ago that there some quirk in my Google Drive where a directory was empty but the directory was also appearing in two separate parent directories. I'm moving off Google Drive for different reasons but I'm sure I had a file in there that has disappeared.
Another counterintuitive thing about Google Drive is items with the same name can coexist in the same directory.
Also, I was buying something on gumtree. I missed out on the sale because I didn’t receive any emails with the reply from the seller to my messages. They did reply I found in the app, but I didn’t realise until they sold the item to someone else.
So I had the messages in gumtree app. The emails turned up on Saturday.
So I can 100% confirm the emails were late.
Given that I can see older emails when filtering or searching, I'm hopeful none of the messages are actually gone, just unreferenced.
I should probably switch to Microsoft already. Excel has dynamic tables support even on mobile. Or better yet, make a proper Android app to replace this thing.
Basically, a 3-2-1 strategy is also a good idea. A physical HD/SSD in a safe place for one, along with synced working copies of documents in a machine you're using, and then in case of deep catastrophe, some sort of cloud solution, preferably one that's zero knowledge, either because it has it baked in or from using something like cryptomator.
So far I've tried several online backup services and maybe unexpectedly, the most easy to work with and simply functional across multiple machines and several external drives has been SpiderOak. Its desktop interface is shit, but the overall service is easy to use and has never failed me one so far, and it constantly, incrementally conducts deduplicated backups of even minor file/folder changes as long as it's running. As a second option, Arq has been nice too, though its UI is also rather clumsy.
I know that internally this is different, but until there’s anything a user can do, this is data loss for users.
And we aren't talking about regular users. These are workspace admins. People that are/should be technical in larger roles.
Things reverted to May. Until solved, it's just lost and you need to revert to a data loss incident - which is revert to backups... _if you have any_.
I am simply bringing up the point Google probably has the bytes somewhere. Why are we talking about hearts and minds here? This is a purely technical statement.
1) What's happening internally at Google, which you are right of course. The bytes could be somewhere. This could be a limit reached, a bad index, something wrongly rebuilt, actual data loss, etc.
2) What's happening to the users that posted on the thread. Which is what I was saying in regards to it being the same since they can't do anything about it and Google's not providing insight and already skipping meetings.
Both are right and just different lenses.
It's like on /r/sysadmin when something goes down and some people are writing 'Good luck', 'godspeed' while others are complaining about the outage.
Fellow sysadmins vs users. Two different lenses to the same issue.
Yes but I am the original poster to bring up how, internally, they probably didn't lose data. I was trying to make a point how despite what users see in the UI, etc, they still have the data.
Both may be right with different lenses, but I've already specified which lens we are talking about here (internally at google, not what people perceive in the UI).
I have tried to keep on-topic to #1, but everyone wants to talk about #2 and how its a valid view. I agree its a valid view, but why can't we have a discussion on #1? I don't care about #2 and there are pleanty of sub-threads about #2. #2 is almost off-topic or irrelevant for what I wanted to bring up.
This is a good reminder to everyone: Your cloud data still needs backing up.
3-2-1 guys!
Would love some more insight on this! Anything or any article you can share on how this is implemented at such scale?
They're still sold by Oracle, as far as I can tell: https://www.oracle.com/storage/tape-storage/#rc30p5
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/03/01/gmail.lost.found/...
Again, all guesses. But if someone offered me a bet, I'd wager 1:10,000 that the data is permanently deleted. Extremely unlikely.
It's basically a continuous backup.
How do you know this?
> (maybe hours worth of data, worst case scenario)
Or you’re saying they could have lost data permanently?
At this point Google is as trustworthy as musk.
Or they don't notice at all because the support forums have no way to get in touch with engineers.
I have been a customer of Insync[1] since its early buggy days and have been grandfathered into quite a few licenses. I set it to sync offline of many of my Google drives (which are mostly work-related), and then I asked it to convert my local copy to OpenDocument Format[2]. I sync that local copy to a backup.
I had had enough crashes and data loss in my life to conclude that I needed backups of the backup of the backups. Have backups. Have Time Machine[3] or similar setups for regularly used documents. My daughter thinks I’m a magician when I make her documents fly out and choose the version she lost or wants to recover.
I’ve no affiliations with InSync; I’m just another happy customer.
I have been very happy with Arq [1], have been using it since 2014. Incremental encrypted backups, many targets (SSH, S3, B2, etc.), etc. I restored files from backups many times. I also use Arq with object lock, so that my backups are immutable for a while.
The developer also really listens to users. In Arq 6, the Mac and Windows UI were done in Electron. Users didn't like it and they switched the UI back to native in Arq 7.
People always looked at me as if I was wasting my time for taking a monthly takeout backup and storing it on a local disk.
At times I thought I might be too, but now I'm glad I did it.
One strange effect of vault export is that it converts all docs to word format. This seems odd in an evidentiary process, but I guess lawyers only use word anyway. It also doesn't export them is the same layout (I guess that's probably somewhere in the metadata though)
I'd guess their lack of format is deliberate - by never letting their own format leave their own machines, they have no need for backwards compatibility and can do data format changes easily and update all the data too.
I guess it must actually download it if you select 'work offline' but probably still obfuscates it somehow.
It's an official google product, and now seems to be called "Google Drive for Desktop".
Sounds like very risky to do as some users have reported and running their company off Google Drive with no local drive counterpart! Why in heavens name not. Drives are cheap.
Even many years ago, I had some issues uploading a few thousand files at once and never really relied on it as a critical infrastructure service but always saw it more like an automated cloud backup or convenience service geared for consumer use at best.
You need to be in good charge of your own data first and foremost. Then it can be nice if a recovery scenario helped you in that Google had some files too of course.
In earlier times, their desktop app would synchronize the files in Google Drive with a folder you designate on your computer, because that was what was supported; these days, it mounts as if it's a network drive (at least on macOS; I don't believe I've actually seen the desktop app in operation on Windows recently).
I have absolutely no affiliation with CubeBackup, but I highly recommend it (and a personal Google Workspace account) for anyone who uses the Google app suite. It costs me $5/yr and is worth every penny.
I feel much better since doing this (apart, of course, for the fact I now need to back up my Synology too to really feel good!)
And for those who think Google Takeout is there to save you, just bear in mind it can be very erratic with large volumes (I had the biggest pain to get my Google Photo despite taking out less than 200 gb, it took several tries to have all the files)
No one is safe against account issue, or as it seems to be the case in the help thread, pure data loss. Just back things up and rely on cloud for flexibility rather than storage.
- Cloud Sync to keep a copy of my Google Drive. - Synology Photo on my phone to backup every new photo/video I take.
That way I benefit from Google software and storage + backup of my stuff without worrying about it.
If anyone has figured out a way to automate all this, I'd _love_ to hear about it.
rclone is awesome :)
I've been thinking of going full archivist and burning all the family photos onto blurays though.
It has been a long time since I used Drive, so I can't remember if has a Dropbox-like desktop sync app, so this may not apply.
I used to have it not mirror deletes, but then if you ever have to do a full restore it's a bit of a mess.
Everything clear about th possible file disappearing. But I have a question: what about the consistency? If I have 4 folders and 20 files, maybe I realize that something is not accessible. But how can we be sure everythin is there if we have tousands of files?
Seriously, what else do you expect from Google?
If you keep using their products, then you're part of the problem.
I use only the web interface, so I don't know what clients are available these days.
It is run by a small local webhosting company, at which I've been a customer for my whole adult life (~20 years)
Is it a quite dangerous idea to link your NAS go a Cloud drive?
() It is OneDrive.
Waited weeks to upgrade so that upgrade issues could be resolved by Google.
Lesson learned.
Learn to backup and don’t blindly trust a single company. Depending on the data, a single external USB drive might be enough, but if you have important files you’d better have a backup strategy in place (like the 3-2-1 backup rule).
This, combined with the fact that Google has said nothing officially about this, leads me to believe this is a hoax.
Edit: ok, it was in 2011, which is a bit more than just a few years. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/03/01/gmail.lost.found/...
On average, I lose two or three local media devices every decade. I will happily outsource that problem to somebody with full-time concerns of backup and restoration. Especially at the price point of free.
Two or more copies is still the inescapable rule, but having a cloud store is preferable to no cloud store.
The ability to consolidate his medical history into a Google Doc and have it synchronized across devices, history-stamped, and accessible by the family members who are helping him is life-changing. It has kept him in his own home for years longer than of we lacked these technologies because it allows us to seamlessly coordinate his care among visits and specialists better than the local hospital network does.
When people say "provides no real convenience," I have to conclude they don't have the challenges we face.
This tech has quietly changed the world for the better.
> convenience and privacy typically stand in opposite realms
And thank God the trade-off can be made. We damaged the efficacy of medical care in the name of privacy in this country; were can use Google Docs to counterweight that in our family. If Google gets to know intimate details of my relative's cascading dementia as a consequence, fine.
Not bad, but still... no copy, no data.
PS: This was written by power generated by a generator I built myself, it's super relia