Google Drive was down | Hacker News Reader

Google Drive was down

drive.google.com

66 pointsnsp90 comments

I don't fear the cloud, because I remember a world where most computers were mainframes and minicomputers, and you had a terminal, not a personal computer.

The difference, of course, is that in the 1970s and '80s, one machine going down affected dozens or maybe hundreds of people. Now, if Google Drive goes down, millions of people are stranded until it comes back online.

I like the return to the terminal/server model. It's convenient and familiar. That being said, monolithic services like Google Drive, iTunes Match, Dropbox, EA's game servers, etc., should really be more distributed and resistant to failure.

Could someone more knowledgable than myself explain how cloud services could be less vulnerable to universal failures?

Dropbox _is_ distributed and resistant to failure by design.

edit:

Not sure why I'm getting downvoted, maybe a link to a source will help.

"Everything in your Dropbox folder is always on your hard drive and merely synced with our online service, so you have access to your files even if you're offline. If you have multiple linked computers on your local area network, we'll even sync from those computers rather than via the Dropbox service whenever it can."

https://www.dropbox.com/help/42/en

If running the same cryptographic key for all accounts is resistant to failure, you and I have different definitions of precautionary measures.

Dropbox is not the shining example of corporate citizenry, especially when it comes to security (although they're fairly good on uptime).

> "Everything in your Dropbox folder is always on your hard drive and merely synced with our online service, so you have access to your files even if you're offline. If you have multiple linked computers on your local area network, we'll even sync from those computers rather than via the Dropbox service whenever it can."

There was a bug a couple months ago where Dropbox zero'd out some files, and then synced the 0 byte files across all of your connected computers, thereby destroying every linked Dropbox file that was affected.

There was that bug a few months ago where Dropbox left all accounts open, with no passwords, for four hours or something like that.

They are not resistant to failure by design.

IMO, the issues you are describing are not design errors. They were _bugs_. I would argue that Dropbox's design is quite resistant to failure since it allows for offline work and can even provide some P2P sync functionalities when the backend servers are down.

Wishful thinking is not design...

As I said in another comment, how is that going to help on a Chromebook that comes with 100GB/1TB of free cloud storage and ~9.5GB of available local space?

The Chromebook is Google's retarded child, we shouldn't challenge it or make fun it. Just let it be.

This is exactly the same with Google Drive.

What astounds me is that Google encourages me to type emails when I'm in the metro underground by allowing me to start new e-mail drafts. But Drive? "Error creating document" (yes, they lead you into thinking you can make a document by letting you get 99% of the way there before the app displays an error). You literally cannot type a single character in a document offline in Drive on Android. It's outrageous. If they improve their offline support, and become more resistant to downtime, I'll be very happy using Drive. Otherwise, I'll wait for a startup to fix collaborative Document editing.

Edit: I'm going to update my pending YC application with another secondary idea; fix Google Drive with open source tools, build it into a protocol and not a single proprietary product.

That's just an issue with the Android app. On my Chromebook I can start documents offline no problem, and on the Android app you can work on offline documents without a connection.

> and on the Android app you can work on offline documents without a connection.

Did they fix this recently? As of last week, my experience says this is false. I have been unable to edit "Offline" documents on Android ever since I started trying.

I had this feature available on my Transformer ~2 months ago.

I didn't believe you so I flipped to airplane mode and opened Drive. It crashed.

Then the crash reporter hung, so I had to Force Quit from the App manager in order to try again after enabling WiFi.

Then I opened and "offline" doc amd found that "offline" mode is "read only" mode (taps cause zoom instead of highlight/edit) even though the UI says that nowhere.

"Could someone more knowledgable than myself explain how cloud services could be less vulnerable to universal failures?"

Setup your own system and then you will have better control of all the parts of the system and create the redundancy that fits your particular purpose. Yes it's more expensive and yes it's more difficult obviously.

Charge a million dollars per minute in fines if a service is essential (e.g. Google, Gmail, Facebook, etc.) and goes down.

That will fix the issues.

While we are at it, some law that forces companies to give service to everyone (no bans) and extends free speech to privately owned websites (no censorship) is also sorely needed.

Right now the level of unpunished abuse of power by service operators whose service has become a de-facto monopoly is immense.

No bans? That'd be fun to see. What service do you run, so I can spam it with impunity?

And yeah, let's fine these service. It's not like poorer people need email anyway, so why not massively increase their costs?

Hopefully they'd be able to keep the service up for less cost than advertising revenues.

If not, the fine is too high.

Decentralization.

AFAIK the biggest downtime-related issue for cloud services is network infrastructure. Single configuration changes, even distributed across dozens of global sites, can quickly bring down an entire network. Sometimes it's a bug in firmware across multiple hardware types from a single vendor. Sometimes it's a network storm. Sometimes it's a crappy BGP change.

There's no simple way of fixing this as unified configuration and deployment of changes is necessary to manage enterprise networks. Beautiful networks that use anycast and a single network protocol to manage distribution of load also have a single point of failure. And of course the application-layer systems themselves can carry bugs that lay hidden in software until one global change brings it out.

I recommend decentralization. Don't let a single company govern how the service runs. Let everyone on the internet participate in running it. This is how mail works, this is how DNS works (sort of), and this should be how HTTP works.

Shit happens and things will go down (or accidentally/maliciously deleted) so dont put all your eggs in one basket. Back in 1970s and 80s companies were replicating data between different systems for redundancy. They do that even today.

So that is reason that if you depend on the cloud (and mobile) you should replicate all your data to some other cloud service. Just in case.

(And that is reason we built http://cloudHQ.net)

I feel like I should do something like this:

~/Dropbox/Google Drive/Skydrive/[ALL MY ACTUAL FILES HERE]

That way I'm syncing with three different providers and if two go down my data is still available.

I pay for dropbox so I can fit all my ISOs in dropbox, but the high priority docs (which total under 2gb) would be synced to all three (with the confidential stuff in a TrueCrypt file of course).

Maybe someone did ~/Google Drive/Google Drive and created a rift in the space time continuum.

That's an interesting approach, but I wonder if it isn't subject to "thrashing" as soon as you start dealing with documents that are edited in more than one place.

For instance, imagine that you have a laptop L and a desktop D. You edit shared document X in your "actual files" folder on L. Version 2 of X is saved on L, and you currently have version 1 of X on D.

1.) Dropbox happens to notice that X needs to be updated from v1 to v2 on D. Dropbox updates X to v2.

2.) Skydrive has not yet been notified of the changes to X. It changes X back to v1 for you on D.

3.) Dropbox notices that X has been modified on D. It sees that the new v1 X has an updated timestamp, so it assumes that this is a better version of X. Dropbox saves this as v3 (which is identical to the original v1).

4.) Dropbox pushes the v3 change to L, erasing your v2 work. Oops!

Basically, unless every synchronization service follows precisely the same protocol, you're gonna have a bad time.

This is beginning to sound like the script to Primer. Ugh. I'd have to somehow force skydrive to do its sync before google, before dropbox.

Better to use one primary sync service and one secondary backup service , and during a primary outage, revert to hand management of edits.

Any decent synchronization system must not replace a file with a version with an older timestamp, must set timestamps on synchronized files to exactly the same values as the timestamps on source file, and must replace the files atomically.

As long as everyone follows these basic rules, and you only edit files on one system at once, it's going to be OK.

(which is pretty obvious, btw)

Just write a cron job to sync a folder to S3, it works pretty well for those of us doing that as a backup to all these services.

Or use any commercial backup system.

Use git-annex assistant and set up multiple remotes.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...

Seriously? Google experiences such infrequent outages that it really is a reasonable alternative to most normal home storage solutions.

I'd be interested to see an aggregation of data on down time for a PC, for the average user, due to viruses, malfunctioning hardware, broken HDD, stolen PCs, etc. VS common issues with Google drive and chromebook combination: stolen credentials, ISP outages and downtime.

This is a good time to go check out other services and see if you like them better than Drive, but let's keep put the pitchforks and tar away for right now.

And yes I realize this can severely affect a good subset of users, and disrupt their workflow, but let's really analyze the difference rather than just giving into our gut reactions eh?

I tried to like Google Drive, It was half the price of Dropbox and being a poor student I really needed the alternative.

After a month I closed Drive down and went entirely over to Dropbox, it wasn't just one thing but many many little things that just showed how bad Google can be at desktop software. You get this feeling they hate the desktop and want it all to be online.

Dropbox is so easy to use and does everything very well. I really wish it was a little cheaper though.

Google's hate for the desktop is extremely well advertised, and is their core value proposition.

You mean you don't love having to manually 'retry all' on 'unsyncable files' every day?

Haha wow! Now your bringing back memories! I never understood this, Dropbox never had this issue and I don't think dropbox even has a "retry" dialog!

It's no secret that google hates the desktop. I remember getting a sales call from Google to move one of my clients from Exchange to Google Apps. When I asked about Outlook integration the rep was very upfront that Google's goal for Outlook integration is merely to get users comfortable with the transition to full-on web client. Doing everything online is Google's whole thing.

google have just updated apps status: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1...

Apparently should be back up in 30 - 60 min

    3/18/13 7:47 PM
    We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly.

This is what it says. Where can you see the 30-60 minute recovery time frame?

It just seems the list page is slow. I can open up documents directly and they load instantly as normal.

shrug

What are the alternatives to google drive, and how do they compare?

There's Microsoft's Office 360, but I haven't used it myself.

SkyDrive and DropBox are the two that come to mind.

SkyDrive is quite good offering from Microsoft, I've not had downtime yet, but I just don't like the idea they scan my photographs for the old nudies! (Which apparently violate their TOS).

DropBox is for some reason a darling with some people on the internet, I think because they love Python. However they had a security oopsie, which I don't care how short it was for, wasn't adiquately explained to my liking as to how such a mistake could be made.

I like Dropbox because it has a great & simple UI that masks some clever engineering. Does SkyDrive opportunistically do P2P LAN transfers?

(More cynically, their reputation on "the internet" may be slightly inflated due to a very clever referral link scheme)

Skydrive, and most of Microsoft's online services, went down for hours last week.

Back when I was deciding what cloud drive to use I considered SkyDrive for a little while. However, after they admitted to the scanning of your files for nudes and illegal material I dropped them straight away and will never return.

I've heard of the security issues with Dropbox so I always have any possible private/sensitive data encrypted in case the worst ever happened. (I use Dropbox because I have not found a alternative that just works)

Dropbox and your choice of editing program

Dropbox, Skydrive, Box.net and Amazon Cloud Drive are some of the bigger alternatives. But as with any cloud service, downtime is always a risk.

Since a number of other people have already mentioned Dropbox, I'l mention something slightly different: git-annex (http://git-annex.branchable.com/)

It's a more general piece of software, but combined with git-annex assistant and your choice of hosting provider(s), it lets you create your own cloud storage, so you have potentially no concerns over privacy[0].

If you're looking for fault-tolerance, git-annex lets you distribute this storage over an arbitrary number of providers easily, so you can get redundancy between an array of cloud hosting providers.

I've been using git-annex for several months now, and while it's still a work in progress, I haven't had any issues at all with it. It seems to be very reliable and bug-free; the main things being developed now are additional advanced features and an improved GUI interface, etc. For people already accustomed to using git on the command line, though, it should be a seamless experience.

[0] This depends on how much you trust Amazon/Rackspace/your colo/etc., but that's a separate level of trust altogether.

I've got to reexamine git-annex some day, but I've been happily using unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) for the past seven years or so. It's rock solid. I use it to sync my home directory, 2TB of media files, and retrieve email (Maildir).

The only one I can really recommend is SpiderOak, due to their zero-knowledge policy on what users upload. Everything is encrypted with your password, and if you lose that, you're SOL. They have no way of seeing what you've uploaded, so they're just providing you some drive space. It's a wonderful service altogether.

If you would like to help me out and use my referral link (so you and I get some extra free GBs), it's https://spideroak.com/download/referral/049cbbf6bc2c2df3b005...

I'd love to give spideroak another try if someone can confirm their mobile apps (for iOS and android) function.

Their android app functions, but it's more of a client to access your files rather than automatically sync them. I might have missed something in the options, but as far as I know it's just a file browser.

Very slow, but seems to be working for me. Ocassional "The server encountered an error. Please try again later" and Go Online error messages.

Same for me.

I honestly wonder how much this is costing them:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html

How do they calculate "Monthly Uptime Percentage"?

I didn't notice, since Google Drive pretty much always says "Unable to connect" for me. If I restart it, it'll stay connected for a while and then go back to "unable to connect" Anybody else have this issue?

Yes, that is my experience too. But I don't care; google drive is for google docs, and google docs aren't useful at all on my desktop. I'm not sure why I even run the gdrive desktop app.

Yeah, the sync features are just there are a bare minimum checklist requirement. Drive was delayed for over five years for one single reason: because the VP in charge believed that storing files on a local machine was antithetical to Google's entire vision of how computing should work.

(Source: In the Plex,by Steven Levy, interviews)

Drive isn't down for me. Just a bit slow.

It is down just after I uploaded a file... Is it related to the news of the shut down by the beloved Reader..?

Any good Google Drive x Dropbox Sync Tools available? I guess, I need one such tool.

obviously this is the best solution: http://www.dilbertfiles.com

Works for me (I'm in US if that matters).

I'm pretty sure I broke it.

Looks like someone has a case of the Mondays.

This is one of the dangers of the Chromebooks' reliance on Google Drive and paltry local storage. Having 1TB of cloud storage is not very useful when it's inaccessible.

Shit happens. It was also possible if all your data was on the hard drive. And Google drive has an offline version of the app, so server downtimes limit the usage but don't make it completely useless. And if my hard drive breaks, it's not like a bunch of very well paid engineers are working relentlessly to bring my hard drive back as quickly as possible. But they are in case of a services like dropbox or drive. And not to mention that the whole backup work is being taken care of.

>And Google drive has an offline version of the app

How useful is that on a Chromebook that comes with 100GB/1TB of cloud storage and ~9.5GB of available local space?

Even if you have >9 gb of docs, you are not going to use all off them at once. Offline version is to keep a cache of most used/important files. Offline deals with temporary service downtime or network unavailability. It is not meant to provide a complete experience.

Is that why Google is invested in AI? To figure out which documents will be important tomorrow, before I board a plane or the servers go down?

Nope. Only your most recently used documents are cached.

Sorry, but you can't seriously compare uptime of cloud-based services to hard-disk failure.

I've been using computers since I was 12, so about 17 years, and in that time I've had two hard disks break on me. I'm sure you're going to say you've had a lot more, but if your hard disks are going out of action at a rate even near to how often Google's core services drop out, well, you're doing something wrong.

"Shit happens" is never a valid excuse, even for a service provided at no cost to the user.

It's not just hard drive failure. Account stolen laptops, out of charge laptops and convenience of accessing any file anywhere anytime (tablet, phone or PC).

If shot happens less frequently than the SLA's limits, it is a fine excuse.

I nearly never use Google Drove on my Chromebook outside of things I'd have in Drive anyway (Docs, etc). The only 'hard' ties to Google in ChromeOS are logins, updates, and a special Drive interface.

I also don't treat it as a computer, just a slightly smarter thin client. And that's fine by me (in fact, that's part of the appeal).

Interesting this post is getting flagged off the front page.

http://hnrankings.info/5394475/

If this was news about Skydrive being down, this post would be #1 for days.

The flag abuse by HN moderators with good karma continues...

I believe this is because of Reddit.

Some chap (maybe an HTC employee?) posted on the /r/Android subreddit that he was giving away a couple of HTC smartphones[1], and all one had to do to enter the giveaway way fill out their Reddit username in the linked Google Spreadsheet.

This post has now been deleted from the front page as well as the subreddit -- I'm not sure why.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1air46/hi_reddit_i_...

Interesting. It appears the contest was held previously and it brought down Drive then.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1air46/hi_reddit_i_...

This can't be the issue, even if it's get 10k submission per seconds, it can't make the system like Google Drive down. come on. that just ridiculous.

About as ridiculous as shutting down Jabber federation on GTalk because that was the only measure Google could take to limit spammy invites.

Google has come down a lot from their pedestal last week. In my book, this Jabber federation issue put them on par with "two teenagers in a garage".

So, ridiculous as it may be, today I believe one spreadsheet can bring GDrive down. Last week I had a different opinion.

They shut down federated invitations, not federated conversations, I thought?

That can't be right. A file sharing site from Google cannot handle a Reddit thread? Seriously?

I agree. Google Drive supports an entire world of Chromebooks, startups, small businesses, and quite a few large businesses. I can't imagine the traffic from a Reddit thread would bring the service down. Even if the doc had something malicious in it (which I doubt is possible because Drive doesn't allow for executable code), they surely have failsafes to wall off any bad files from the rest of the service.

How could one spreadsheet bring down Drive?

Thousands of people attempting to write to it at the same time? Maybe Drive wasn't prepared for such an eventuality.

In any case, I'm just speculating based on the mighty odd timing.

It can't. that just ridiculous reason. Google Drive can handle pretty much all what reddit can handle.Currently, it's got around 3000 points. it still not reaching the reddit frontpage yet. i don't think that that kind of traffic can make Google Drive down. that just silly. We are talking about google. not just random start up on HN.

A little OT: but the article in question had reached the front page. It was then "deleted" by mods.

A mod removal on Reddit just removes a post from any visibility, and doesn't actually delete it. So people with the link can still see the thread, but it won't be discoverable.

Sure, that could crash one spreadsheet and maybe the server that tries to serve it, but send the whole fleet flapping?

lol a bunch of Reddit traffic cannot pull down Google's servers. When a doc has heavy traffic, Google has ways of limiting usage of doc by making it read only), but a Reddit thread can never pull down a file sharing site. Esp big ones like drive, dropbox and skydrive.

Reading tea leaves?

I find that highly unlikely given how Google's services are built.

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