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Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

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Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#141

Post by killerdhmo »

roody15 wrote: post #23
potency wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember OneDrive doing this too, where photos of parents' children taking a bath etc. were flagged as child porn. Unfortunately unless you encrypt your data locally, privacy is one of the tradeoffs in using these services.

This happens with Apple iCloud as well. Staff member had their iCloud photo collection locked because of this. Was able to regain access but I would definitely caution anyone storing all family photos online without another backup option.

You’re thinking Google https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#142

Post by jacobyoder »

Pxtl wrote: post #128
jacobyoder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That's my point though, was that there are still folks who assume "support" for everything (paying/non) is just "going to be good" ("because it's google/ms/etc - they have a reputation! they wouldn't want to jeopardize it!"). I realize I'm talking about a small number of folks, but even after these folks have been in the industry 10-15 years, their ... naivete(?) - is surprising.

And... I'm not even generally surprised when I get no support on paid for services. Indeed, I'm generally shocked when I get good and timely support from a paid service. Now... that's less shocking when it's "small startup X"; we've all seen small companies get big/acquired and the very thing that got them there - good service/support - is what is thrown out to start squeezing out profits. Staff get overworked, pissed off, leave, quality plummets, people move to the next small startup service, and it starts over again.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#143

Post by pram »

shp0ngle wrote: post #133
r3trohack3r wrote: post #104

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 als…

I have backup both to Google Photos and iCloud. The probability of both failing and/or both deciding to just delete my account because I look "suspicious" is very small. But I _have_ had iCloud mysteriously not being able to retreive old photos.

I have Photos set to download all the files locally, and those get backed up with Time Machine and Backblaze.

People forget even s3 will lose files. The reliability is high sure but it’s still sub 100%

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#144

Post by simse »

roody15 wrote: post #23
potency wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember OneDrive doing this too, where photos of parents' children taking a bath etc. were flagged as child porn. Unfortunately unless you encrypt your data locally, privacy is one of the tradeoffs in using these services.

This happens with Apple iCloud as well. Staff member had their iCloud photo collection locked because of this. Was able to regain access but I would definitely caution anyone storing all family photos online without another backup option.

they don't, but they were planning to: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-commun...

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#145

Post by cwillu »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #104

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 als…

Worth noting that archived photos don't show up in most places, including the timeline. Not saying it's not buggy, but if you haven't already specifically checked the archived photos section, it's worth checking.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#146

Post by spankalee »

sebmellen wrote: post #24

This is why I run a personal Google Workspace account which has regular (hourly) backups managed by a self-hosted CubeBackup instance. It's quite a nice system: I get daily email summaries from CubeBackup via email, and I'm able to back up all the Google Drive/Email/Contacts/etc. data to both my local Synology NAS and Backblaze B2. I have absolutely no affiliation with CubeBackup, but I highly recommend it (and a per…

> I highly recommend it (and a personal Google Workspace account)

I can't recommend against this enough, and I work at Google. Workspace accounts don't work with so many services. At least YouTube TV, Nest cameras, Google Home sharing, Google Play family accounts, Android parental controls, and Opinion Rewards are broken in my experience, probably a lot more.

It's a shame, especially for people who've had a Workspace account for many years, and have a bunch of email, documents, and media tied up in it.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#147

Post by saalweachter »

krisoft wrote: post #106
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.…

Or you open the meeting notes doc and it has notes from May 2023 at the top, or you sort by last edit and it says May, etc.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#148

Post by tentacleuno »

orionex_sigma wrote: post #117
tiltowait wrote: post #66

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…

Using google docs (or any web based office apps) to write a novel (or do any other serious "heavy" work) is a terrible choice for a writer to be fair.

On the face of it, I can definitely see the upside: "the cloud" is typically synonymized with safety ("your data is backed up on our secure servers", etc.), not to mention the fact that you can edit your data from any of your devices logged into Google. Heck, you don't even need to install Office anymore: you just go to https://docs.google.com and it's all there.

I do agree with you, though: one of the most important rules for computing in general is to keep multiple backups of everything. A while back, a friend of mine made a habit of emailing herself drafts of her work, and kept multiple copies on her computer. It did save her once or twice.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#149

Post by noveltyaccount »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #83
__jonas wrote: post #10

I recently set up rclone to do nightly backups of my entire OneDrive to Dropbox, I feel pretty safe with this in terms of reliability, I find it unlikely that both services will catastrophically fail like this at the same time. Would recommend rclone to anyone, it has worked pretty consistently so far.

Does rclone allow you to do some kind of diff or are you literally copying the full contents of OD into DB? I'm interested in doing something similar for our GD into DB or Backblaze but not if it's a full copy each day - we have 400GB in GD

It does diff, and can be configured to use various diff methods (checksum, modified datetime). I use it with S3 and to diff with checksum it needs to do an expensive, slow metadata read - so I use `--use-server-modtime` which only copies files newer than the remote S3 file time. https://rclone.org/s3/

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#150

Post by jqpabc123 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #112
jqpabc123 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can physically stop a landlord from illegally dumping your items too. I'm talking about legal recourse after the fact. You can win both cases, at your own expense, but the burglar is much more likely to be judgement-proof.

If a crime was committed, the state generally assumes the prosecution --- i.e. no expense to you.

You can't get blood out of a rock but you can incarcerate it.

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