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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

#341
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your expectations from free service should be zero. So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot? It doesn't work that way in the physical world. I don't see why it should work that way in the digital world. Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.

> next time you park on a free parking lot? The closest analogy is; if you park without paying, your car might get impounded.

So you are saying uploading to YouTube without paying is illegal? Nowhere on YouTube does it say that I have to pay anything.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not that expensive. Vimeo cheapest plan is $7/month (w/ limits) and $50 for unlimited plan and cloud storage (for backup) is cost competitive. Even having it on a local disk would probably be enough. But... it's not your fault. It's just that despite the propaganda these companies don't give a fuck about their users.

cost competitive against free? lol

Evidently "free" has other costs, like "we're going to delete your stuff and there's nothing you can do about it".

So on balance I'd say paying for something is a pretty good deal.

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

#344
No backup and ‘all the eggs in one basket’. Seems to me like a high risk to take. ‘Backup being too expensive’ surely there can’t be that many videos (a $business$ should be able to afford a few ~10TB usb disks for a few hundred $/€).

I have no trust in services like YT (where I am the product) so I host my own data on my own server and roll my own backups - on/off-site - (thus have only myself to blame if it goes bad).

I have actually been thinking if I should yt-dl the good videos I have found on YT for exactly the incident you have been exposed to!

I really feel for your loss - and really hope that a human contact will be made so the content can be retrieved. Hopefully HN attention might help!

It’s a sad world where so-called AI makes the decisions and it’s almost impossible to get in touch with a real live human being. I fear for the future (your experience being a good example of how bad it can go). Just think about when those methodologies get applied to the legal-system or health-system. ‘Appeal - not possible the AI knows better and have decided…’ Hmm - I think I read it already started in the police-domain with face-detection…

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

#345
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recommending Google as a backup in case Google decides to delete your videos sounds a bit suboptimal. Go with hosted backup; sure, for this use case that makes sense. But do so with a different company.

acquiring talent to manage google drive is easy. Not cheap or easy for Amazon/B2.

Please note that Google are perfectly happy to ban all of your accounts simultaneously. And your neighbors' accounts, apparently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ckoej1/googles_...

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

#346

If I had to speculate based off my experience at other FANG companies, the videos still exist in the Youtube infrastructure somewhere to allow for the possibility of a human intervention to restore them (For example, to allow for recovering from a system gone haywire or just to give time for manually reversed decisions). That said, I'd also guess there's a countdown timer before they get deleted permanently. I hope y…

This was my thinking as well, it's safer to never delete data and simply null route requests to it. It's what I've done in the past when I was on their side of the ethernet cable. The youtube channel in question. https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/

I'm sure the 'why' this happened doesn't matter much to you now, but noticed in just searching for channel name "tranresearchtraining" google would auto-correct and search for "trans research training". Maybe that flagged the review algo to be extra sensitive to certain phrases, etc. Also, where you're dealing with multiple nationalities, wouldn't be surprised if it included non-native english speakers and/or words outside the standard english dicts... so their auto speech-to-txt may have taken creative liberties, and a mistranslation triggered other flags. So, basic edge case nightmare. Their automated support is the worst too. Probably worth trying to spread this story on twitter and linkedin as well to increase the chances of it reaching someone who might be able to help or create enough negative PR to get on the radar. good luck.

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

#347

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 r…

Worth a try but I’ve tried doing this before and they said it’s outside the scope of paid support.

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

#348
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

acquiring talent to manage google drive is easy. Not cheap or easy for Amazon/B2.

Please note that Google are perfectly happy to ban all of your accounts simultaneously. And your neighbors' accounts, apparently. https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ckoej1/googles_...

Note that in 7 years OP had one problem now... I know people with local NAS one need to do maintenance and so on. Again, depends on your technical ability. Bit-rot, power failures etc.

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

#349
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated As some one working in storage, please do not get tons of NAS they are pain to manage eventually. Example: linus-tech-tips could not do it properly. If you use youtube-dl how large is one video? Lets say 2 GB. I presume, every week you create have 2 videos? Then 4GB per week. Google gives you $20 for 100 GB. Every year create a…

Linus Tech Tips built and installed a custom ZFSonLinux server, which I'd also not suggest OP does. The difficulty in managing a NAS is completely different if you buy two off-the-shelf Synology boxes and log in and point-and-click turn on snapshot sync between the two and create an Amazon Glacier backup task.

Perhaps you need to look at average human trying to setup a router/DSL modem in a house hold. Then you may note that all your second sentence is a large task for any CEO. (No offence they are good in their field but anything more than dropbox or email or drive is a no go!)

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

#350

It might be too late, but for others, PeerTube, open source replacement of YouTube, is the solution. Longer discussion https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2021/4/30/peertube-to-repl...

I don't see how this is a solution.

Either you host it on a public instance and the admin can delete your videos as well, or you host it yourself, but it requires technical abilities and lots of money.

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