Live data from Hacker News

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

theregister.com

121–130 of 293 posts

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#121

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every program you run can delete your data. Does that make it not your data?

Quick rule of thumb --- it's not really your data if the only backup is someone else's hands.

This needs some elaboration.

Scenario A: I take a photo. There is no backup. Is this my data?

Scenario B: I have multiple independent backups of a document. Google deletes the main copy off my computer against my will. Is that "not my data" because Google deleted it? Does the deletion not count because I have a backup? Third option?

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#125
post #35

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…

That seems like one of the more unlikely causes, among the almost infinite variety of causes that are consistent with "several people said they can't find some files". To me the most likely one by far is the deletion was actually commanded, for example by a flaw in the program they use to sync, or by malware.

Or some backend data storage system experienced transient errors and occasionally returned a corrupt pointer to a storage location.

Low frequency data loss until it reaches alerting threshold of 0.1%

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#128

I experienced different and in some ways more pernicious data loss with Google Drive several years ago: I was writing a novel, and Drive simply erased random paragraphs of text. Just poof, gone. I could find neither rhyme nor reason for it, either. Some had been edited in after the fact, while others were present in the original draft. All told, it equated to around 8K words over the course of the novel. Granted, you…

"but it will surprise no one to learn I never heard anything back" (surprisingly?) ... I have colleagues that, even in 2023 , will express genuine (not sarcastic shock) when a megacorp doesn't reply or provide decent support. I've only got a few, but the refrain will be something like "wow, I'm kinda surprised google's cloud support doesn't get back to us - sometimes for days. they've always had such a good reputatio…

Well, everybody assumed that was the norm for non-paying customers. It's surprising when you're paying to be ignored.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#129
post #93

I've been convinced for years that Google Docs loses things. I both had files vanish and have lost edits - one time I could demonstrate it with a screenshot of part of a doc that later reverted to an earlier version. Other people at work agree with me. Google support insists we're nuts. I only use it when other internal folks start collaborative docs, otherwise I do not trust it. Files don't randomly disappear from m…

Use takeout to make snapshots to compare.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#130
post #71
post #22

This is likely very paranoid behaviour but I recommend downloading all your Google data from time to time: takeout.google.com

This works fine for smaller accounts, but on larger accounts it seems to be regularly failing (based on my own experience and based on other postings and reports that I found online). Exporting my Google Photos sometimes fails consistently even with lots of attempts. Out of well over 10 export attempts or so this year maybe a single one succeeded. I have a few hundred GB of data stored on that account. I also current…

I was trying to set up a similar thing. I already do the google takeouts every few months (~400GB, I don’t have issues with export though), but so far have been storing all of them.

How do you do the diff between the old and new encrypted versions? Do you encrypt and upload the takeout .tar.gz files, or do extract first then encrypt?

Post reply on HN