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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

#201

Post by ipython »

contravariant wrote: post #107
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.

You can blame a different megacorp for the desktop.ini files: those are artifacts from windows explorer (I’m assuming you’re using a windows machine with the google drive mounted)

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#202

Post by beeandapenguin »

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…

Tangentially related, if you've ever had the pleasure of migrating away from Google Photos/Drive with Google Takeout, prepare to spend some time fixing photo metadata in your library and re-embedding exif data with exiftool. Takeout strips out the exif data into a non-standard JSON sidecar, as opposed to something more standard/well supported like XMP.

It's unfortunately hostile for non-technical users that care about their photo metadata, which I assume is most people since it includes data such as creation timestamps and location. It's not too bad to script this if you're savvy (and careful), but otherwise you'll have to pay for a third-party tool[1]

[1]: https://metadatafixer.com/

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#203

Post by omoikane »

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…

Anecdotally, I know a handful of my photos that were posted via Google+ are gone after that was turned down. I have been able to find all my other photos that were uploaded through Google Photos.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#204

Post by bobbob1921 »

I suggest users look into cube backup, it’s great for local backups and versioning of G suite data. I’ve been using it for three or four years now, and couldn’t be happier. (Dev is very quick to reply and helpful.). Still just 5$ per year per user (I’m not sure if it supports Gmail free, but it definitely supports G suite users.)

Additionally, it does not help that the search giants, search functionality for Drive and Gmail is so incredibly poor (more so Gmail, I have found drive search has improved,). For example, you still cannot do AND searches in Gmail properly. You also cannot do wildcard, searches of any kind. (And no regex nor partial regex)

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#205

Post by spuz »

Configure0251 wrote: post #161

My partner has been experiencing emails coming and going in big chunks - months and years at a time - but if we search support forums all we can find are "support agents" blaming the individuals complaining about this phenomenon. It's gaslighting all the way down. Even when it's actively happening, checking moment to moment and having another few months vanish, and they'll still tell you "you must be deleting things,…

When did this start happening and which time period is it affecting? Since November 21, my friend has had all her Gmail emails since May 2023 go missing. It matches the time period mentioned in the article but this is Gmail rather than Drive.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#206

Post by netsharc »

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 noticed a while ago the UI would just show some photos for a day, and I'd have to click the down-arrow at the top right of the group of pictures for a date to get all the pictures of that date.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#207

Post by Dylan16807 »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #150
Dylan16807 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's free if it's big enough to get their attention, and the culprit is known.

But I don't want free revenge, I want my stuff/money back. An actual remedy.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#208

Post by Dylan16807 »

Kalium wrote: post #157
Dylan16807 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

A tool that cannot parse the files is not a diffing tool.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#209

Post by nvy »

vel0city wrote: post #170
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 do a takeout quarterly and stash the data someplace safe. I've been burning the data to M-DISC blu-rays for a while now as a deep archive copy, they seem pretty reliable. I also now have multiple apps syncing all the photos from my phone so they're stored in a couple different cloud photo locations on top of that.

I do this too, and I include par2 files on each disc. You sacrifice some space on each disc but the incremental cost of a few more discs is minimal.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#210

Post by bobbob1921 »

bobbob1921 wrote: post #204

I suggest users look into cube backup, it’s great for local backups and versioning of G suite data. I’ve been using it for three or four years now, and couldn’t be happier. (Dev is very quick to reply and helpful.). Still just 5$ per year per user (I’m not sure if it supports Gmail free, but it definitely supports G suite users.) Additionally, it does not help that the search giants, search functionality for Drive an…

One other note (and I haven’t read every reply here yet) – other than the anecdotal evidence of drive data loss, one way to 100% prove drive data loss is occurring, is if someone has an example of data, not showing up on Drive, but that same data is present in a cubeback up local back up (as cube backup Supports versioning, and it’s only source of data is directly from G suite).

This would prove the data was on drive at one point, but is now gone along with the date and time it was retrieved and saved locally via cubeback up. (Additionally, one can show that it wasn’t deleted via user action by looking at the logs in Gsuite admin, or I think cubeBackup would log a delete as well, assuming you’re retaining those cubebackup logs)

(to be clear I’m simply a user of cubeback up. I have no interest or affiliation with them)

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