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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

#241

Post by Tempest1981 »

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.

Can you enlighten us as to an ideal choice?

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#242

Post by pretext-1 »

joshspankit wrote: post #111
happymellon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, why are the choices so bad. I wouldn't trust Google with anything important these days. But Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive is so bad. I don't think that selfhosting is a great option for corporate, but Microsoft and Google are just shit.

Feels like a good opportunity for someone to build the “do one thing and do it well” file storage on top of B2. Backblaze has a simple approach that stores 30% recovery data next to the files (and self-heals) while also storing customer data in multiple offsite locations. Build the ability for integrations (with customer-visible audit logs), inter-user sharing, and proper permissions and you have the modern equivalen…

I have a friend who lost data with Backblaze’s backup product. It can always happen. Don't trust a single provider or software. Backups should not be “integrated”, they should be as much apart as possible.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#243

Post by simonbarker87 »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #149
simonbarker87 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Amazing, thanks for confirming. Will dive into the docs properly

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#244

Post by chickenpotpie »

vasco wrote: post #85
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.

It's really hard to make a file browser in 2023 with only about 100k employees, give them a bit of a break. Some things are just hard!

I'm not defending google or saying they haven't done anything wrong here, but it is insanely hard to make Google drive. I very much doubt Google drive has a staff of any where near 100k employees and it's probably the largest file browser ever made. It's an engineering marvel. Can Google do better? Absolutely. But, it's objectively wrong to say there's nothing hard about building something like Google drive.

I think this is like looking at the Burj Khalifa and asking how hard it can be to make a building. It's not just a building, it's the tallest building ever built.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#245

Post by kevincox »

beeandapenguin wrote: post #202
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 abou…

Worse than that videos shared with you are reencoded to 1080p with crap bitrate. IIRC the JSON sidecar is also missing for these. Doesn't matter if you save them to your library. You can watch them in original quality and see all of the metadata on photos.google.com but they don't get taken out.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#246

Post by SpaceManNabs »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #241
orionex_sigma wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you enlighten us as to an ideal choice?

vim

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#247

Post by joshspankit »

pretext-1 wrote: post #242
joshspankit wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like a good opportunity for someone to build the “do one thing and do it well” file storage on top of B2. Backblaze has a simple approach that stores 30% recovery data next to the files (and self-heals) while also storing customer data in multiple offsite locations. Build the ability for integrations (with customer-visible audit logs), inter-user sharing, and proper permissions and you have the modern equivalen…

I have a friend who lost data with Backblaze’s backup product. It can always happen. Don't trust a single provider or software. Backups should not be “integrated”, they should be as much apart as possible.

I’m very interested in the “receipts” (meaning: the story and the paper trail to verify the story) if you’re able to share

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#248

Post by zippergz »

spankalee wrote: post #146
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…

I use YouTube TV with mine and that works fine, but I do agree with the general sentiment. Many, many things are unsupported or broken.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#249

Post by YetAnotherNick »

lonestar wrote: post #88
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...

I was hit by this. It looks like my laptop had not been syncing correctly for a couple months, then GDrive overwrote my local “My Drive” folder with the old cloud copy.

That sounds painful. Are you using the official Google drive app?

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#250

Post by sebmellen »

spankalee wrote: post #146
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…

It works great for me. I recommend it. I’m not sure what working at Google has to do with recommending or not.

I don’t use any of the non-core services because I expect them to be killed off soon anyway. For contacts, email, docs, and drive it works great. YouTube as well.

I have a “regular” Gmail account in case I need to use any niche services that don’t work with my Workspace account.

Overall the trade off is well worth it.

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