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Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

theregister.com

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Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#101

Post by chimeracoder »

uptown wrote: post #41
Medox wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this like saying "not your house, not your possessions" ? But landlords cannot just take or misplace my stuff, especially if I pay rent and have some rights.

"But landlords cannot just take or misplace my stuff, especially if I pay rent and have some rights." They sure can. Years ago I had a shitty landlord clear an apartment I'd moved 95% of my belongings from but before the term of my lease had ended. Now you may have some legal recourse, but the cost/time associated with litigating a matter like that tends to outweigh the remedy.

> They sure can. Years ago I had a shitty landlord clear an apartment I'd moved 95% of my belongings from but before the term of my lease had ended. Now you may have some legal recourse, but the cost/time associated with litigating a matter like that tends to outweigh the remedy.

The existence of legal standing is what defines the property rights. If you're going to move the goalposts to "you don't own it unless you have legal standing and the means to pursue legal recourse", then you might as well say that only the extremely wealthy have any property rights at all.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#102

Post by nix0n »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #89
londons_explore wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could... But writing and deploying a diffing tool for every different gsuite application is probably 6 months of work for a whole team... There are so many corner cases. What will the users do for 6 months waiting for their data to return?

"let users compare" doesn't require diffing tools. Worst case put the versions next to reach other.

> Worst case put the versions next to each other.

For some files (anything encrypted, for example) this may actually be the best you could do.

Dropbox had this behavior ten years ago, so it's kind of inexcusable for Google today to be just mindlessly overwriting.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#104

Post by r3trohack3r »

Anecdotal, but with Google Photos, I've observed data loss to the point where I no longer trust the service with anything valuable.

Photos I know I've taken are missing. There are periods of time when I walked around a city 10+ years ago taking a large volume of photos, like when I first moved to Seattle. Going back to that window of time in Google Photos, I only have a handful of photos from that walk.

There are also partially corrupted photos from many years back. Photos that only partially render, or render as noise.

Luckily, all of these are random low-value photos from my youth. They aren't core memories of my kiddos growing up or anything. I'm glad I discovered the data loss in that window of time, and not by losing photos of my kiddos' birthdays.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#105

Post by datagram »

londons_explore wrote: post #26

Guess at root cause: Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data). Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the d…

Wasn't Google starting to delete old files? My guess would be that something screwed up in that process.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#106

Post by krisoft »

mrweasel wrote: post #62

How does people even notice that their data has gone missing? I can barely find my own documents in the train wreck that is the Google Drive UI. Any document written by anyone else in the organization can generally be considered lost unless you have a direct link sitting in an email or bookmark.

> How does people even notice that their data has gone missing?

They need the data and look for it and it's not there, but they remember they put it there?

At my job if a log file or data recording is too big for jira, but need to be attached to a bug report we sometimes store them on google drive. And then we link it from the ticket. If much later we get back to it and the link is 404 that would make us suspicious. If someone remembers the link working before that would make it clear it is not just a copy paste error with the url.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#107

Post by contravariant »

mrweasel wrote: post #62

How does people even notice that their data has gone missing? I can barely find my own documents in the train wreck that is the Google Drive UI. Any document written by anyone else in the organization can generally be considered lost unless you have a direct link sitting in an email or bookmark.

I mount it using their desktop client and use voidtools' everything to search for files.

Works reasonably well, though Google seems intent on breaking stuff every so often. Also Google hasn't figured out how to make it stop creating desktop.ini files everywhere yet. I'd say it makes them look like amateurs, but amateurs tend to be better at making software.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#108

Post by burgerquizz »

i was tracking about once a month my portfolio from various brokers in spreadsheet for years. One day that spreadsheet disappeared. I still don't know if it was miss-manipulation from me or something else. today it reinforced me in the idea of it being on the google side.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#109

Post by jqpabc123 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #96
jqpabc123 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "legal recourse" is what defines "ownership". If someone can take or destroy your stuff *without* legal recourse, then you don't really "own" it'

Okay, and how does this connect to home ownership? You have even less recourse against the average burglar than the average landlord.

You have even less recourse against the average burglar than the average landlord.

???

Where I live, you can literally kill the average burglar for breaking into your home. That is pretty much the ultimate recourse.

If you're not home and the police can find your burglar, you can legally press charges against him/her.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#110

Post by mrich »

RobotToaster wrote: post #73

Is there any word if this is actively syncing deletions to local storage? I have my google drive synced to multiple computers which I assumed was enough...

It's certainly not enough if you assume there can ever be an error in the backend which Google is unable to recover from.
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