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Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

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Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#231

Mea Culpa I'm in the industry. I knew we should have had backups. She is brilliant but not technical and while the backups would have been expensive and difficult due to size, I should have built multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated. To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is…

Since you are paid customers you should escalate your issue through Google Workspace support https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213?hl=en

Insist that your issue be escalated to an internal bug so that it is properly triaged.

Even if the videos were deleted as part of the suspension, it's highly likely that there are still multiple backups and cached versions in Google's systems. They should be able to help you restore them at the very least.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#232
Google is the fucking worst. A few years ago I uploaded a bunch of music to Google Music, rather than carrying it around with me through different computers and backups. This was a bunch of priceless stuff -- mp3s from tiny bands (some of whom I personally knew) that cannot be gotten anywhere anymore, recordings of my own bands in college, etc. Of course I deleted them from my devices, and then a few weeks ago I want to listen to one of the songs, and it turns out they're all gone forever. Google Music discontinued a while ago. How do I get these songs back? I literally have zero recourse.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a paid G-Suite user, you might be able to get help that way. I'm pretty sure I have heard of others doing something like that.

In my experience, paid GSuite "support" are just underpaid contractors in developing countries who don't have much power to do anything outside of a few common actions in response to customers' requests.

Yep, even if you pay Gsuite you get some guy in the middle of nowhere earth just feeding you macros for support. They don't care at all big gov contracts is their business

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#234
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post reminded me to back using my gmail locally and to ensure a script does so automatically from now on. I need to do the same with google docs as soon as possible. I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”

The danger is not just that Google may one day delete your data, maybe. The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable…

> The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe.

There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#236
You delegated the only and original copies of the works to a cloud entity?

This wasn't YouTube's fault. It was your company's. Let this be a lesson to you and start making offline, offsite backups of your work.

Today it was YouTube, tomorrow it could be ransomware. Be glad it was only some videos.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#237
YouTube deleted my account a few months ago. The reason was totally unfounded and I had no recourse. I’m pretty certain some AI flagged my account and instead of a sensible approach like 1) notify the user that something they did was flagged. 2) point to the instance where the supposed bad behavior happened and allow review/context by humans 3) see that my YouTube account was 12-13 years old and had only a handful of personal videos and 1-2 public videos and that I have a long history of not behaving badly

Instead I got a flippant response to my query as to why it was deleted and I quote: “Yeah I’m going to go ahead and deny your claim”.

As far as I’m concerned the less Google I have in my life from now on the better. While I don’t think that the other options are much better, this incident has changed me from having not much of an opinion on Google to having a pretty seething dislike for them.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#238

Google is the fucking worst. A few years ago I uploaded a bunch of music to Google Music, rather than carrying it around with me through different computers and backups. This was a bunch of priceless stuff -- mp3s from tiny bands (some of whom I personally knew) that cannot be gotten anywhere anymore, recordings of my own bands in college, etc. Of course I deleted them from my devices, and then a few weeks ago I want…

Over a year ago Google Music sent out notices that users can download or migrate their uploaded media to YouTube Music via https://music.youtube.com/transfer. There really wasn't a shortage of notices and blog posts across a wide variety of media outlets instructing people to migrate and warning when Google Music was shutting down.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#239
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about if durable archival was an upsell alongside upload?

So the issue is Google often takes down accounts with illegal content using the same process as here. Imagine the very real scenario that Google found CSAM on an account: They aren't going to let you access it or download it again for any amount of money. And that's the problem here: With no humans in the process, YouTube treats ordinary users and predators exactly the same way, because ultimately, algorithms are stu…

YouTube can undelete accounts. All of their old videos are still there.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#240
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about if durable archival was an upsell alongside upload?

So the issue is Google often takes down accounts with illegal content using the same process as here. Imagine the very real scenario that Google found CSAM on an account: They aren't going to let you access it or download it again for any amount of money. And that's the problem here: With no humans in the process, YouTube treats ordinary users and predators exactly the same way, because ultimately, algorithms are stu…

Solution: A button that says "Click here to pay $5 for a human to review your situation."
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