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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

#151

Post by Dioxide2119 »

"Scary cloud things" like this are why I moved off of Dropbox and Onedrive years ago and got to a new normal of "syncthing all my main devices together" for file sync, then have Backblaze backup my machine that holds the linux ISOs etc. that I'm not necessarily wanting to have redundant storage space used for them at that time.

Now, the failures are my own fault, but at least I can do offline backups to HDDs and BD-Rs, and I don't have to worry about any of the cloud services (TM) messing with my data and me having little recourse.

Yes, I could do separate backups of the cloud things too, but at that point, that just adds 'cloud service' as an option to the first part of the equation:

cloud device storage / local device sync (on and off-site) / NAS

+ offline on-site backups as HDDs & BD-Rs

+ online off-site backups

Doing syncthing with local device sync is cheaper than cloud device storage (recurring costs) and NAS (fixed costs / hardware maintenance)

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#152

Post by cornstalks »

SamBam wrote: post #137
fareesh wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5/yr + hosting, which is way more than $5 unless you have a terabyte going unused in a box somewhere

I assume that "self-hosted" meant precisely that they own the box. A hard drive is under $10/terabyte.

I was about to ask where you're seeing such cheap hard drives, but then I checked diskprices.com and saw that yes, there are indeed some drives for <$10/TB (current lowest price is $8.332/TB, and there are only 10 drives that are <$10/TB; I'm only looking at new drives).

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#153

Post by jqpabc123 »

withinboredom wrote: post #116
jqpabc123 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/drive/terms-of-service/archived/ The total liability of Google, and its suppliers and distributors, for any claims under these terms, including for any implied warranties, is limited to the amount you paid us to use the services (or, if the subject of the claim is the free service, to supplying you the services again). In other words, they can delete *your* data any time they want and claim it…

You can't sign away your rights, no matter what a contract says, in some places, tort still applies. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but just because there is a limit on liability, does not mean there is a limit on damages and tort.

a limit on liability, does not mean there is a limit on damages and tort.

This is exactly what Google intends it to mean. Good luck convincing a judge otherwise.

In some places, the fact there is no signed contract and no exchange took place (free tier) means there is no liability --- the user received everything they paid for.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#154

Post by roblabla »

sergiotapia wrote: post #135
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…

The Google photos user this is really fucked up. I primarily use Google photos to manage my kids pictures as well what did you move to?

The solution isn't to move. Every storage mechanism is going to have some amount of failures. The solution is redundancy. Store your valuable files on multiple medium. I know a lot of people that have both google photo and icloud - that works okay. You can also schedule backups to a NAS or some other cloud storage.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#155

Post by stateofinquiry »

sergiotapia wrote: post #135
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…

The Google photos user this is really fucked up. I primarily use Google photos to manage my kids pictures as well what did you move to?

This is not for everyone, but I host my family photos myself, most recently with this: https://piwigo.org/. I have been doing this since 2007 (started on a different software, called "gallery". Was able to migrate from gallery2 to gallery3 and now piwigo), and so far no major issues. Advantage: I can easily share photos with family, no need for iCloud, Facebook, or indeed any service- they just need a web browser on their desktop computer or phone.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#156

Post by swatcoder »

sergiotapia wrote: post #135
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…

The Google photos user this is really fucked up. I primarily use Google photos to manage my kids pictures as well what did you move to?

You want to pursue uncorrelated redundancy more than you want a signular alternative.

People who came up in the cloud era were promised the false (impossible) idea that large conpanies could and would eradicate your risk of data loss if you just paid them a few dollars a month.

That's not a thing. If you really can't tolerate some loss, you need to coordinate something more robust across a few different and dissimilar options. And even then you'll still have risk.

That said, even just making sure you keep local copies of your archive or print your treasured favorites can go a long way towards greater reliability that without a lot of extra effort.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#157

Post by Kalium »

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.

That's an excellent description of a basic diffing tool.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#158

Post by 101008 »

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…

Is there something similar for Google Accounts (not Google Workspace)? I do it manually: I have the every 3 months automatic backup and I upload it manually to S3, but I'd totally pay for a service that does this automatically providing my S3 keys (or similar).

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#159

Post by noveltyaccount »

bloopernova wrote: post #43

Can anyone recommend a Google Drive backup to something like AWS S3 Glacier or other long-term storage provider? I was running BorgBase but had some financial difficulties and couldn't pay for it, plus copying 2TB of data from home at around 40Mbit/s isn't great. Ideally something that pulls from google directly without involving my home computer would be best.

Maybe an rclone script that runs from AWS. Package it in a Docker image and run it from a Lambda function for pennies per invocation. Schedule it to run nightly.

https://rclone.org/s3/

https://rclone.org/drive/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h...

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-...

My script, though I run locally

  rclone -v copy /source/location s3:backup.bucket.name/ --transfers 1 --copy-links --filter-from /config/syncfilter.txt --max-delete 20 --stats 5m --stats-log-level NOTICE --update --use-server-modtime --fast-list
My Dockerfile includes

  RUN curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | bash
And I've configured the S3 remote to use Glacier

  [s3]
  type = s3
  provider = AWS
  ...
  storage_class = GLACIER

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#160

Post by rvba »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #54
yeutterg wrote: post #49

This happened to our business about a year ago. Many random files went missing from GDrive. Eventually many turned back up (usually after a few weeks or months), but in the root folder instead of the folder the files were actually organized in. Google support told us we were crazy. As an aside, we are looking from moving to a Google + Slack + Notion to OneDrive + Teams + Loop. What is appealing is the ability to coll…

I wish I could go back to google drive even with the file loss issues. OneDrive appears to be a sort of different view into Sharepoint's file management system, and boy is it painful to use.

Sharepoint is killing productivity.

It's so sad that Microsoft does not see how they ruin productivity of big orgs.

Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily.

They even broke the windows taskbar, which automatically combines things together. They assume that people working in an office have only 1 email open and 1 spreadsheet open, while most have 20 and dont know how to turn off this shitty UI.

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