Discussion earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Google Drive files suddenly disappeared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 - Nov 2023 (281 comments)
Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
251–260 of 293 posts
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you've made it and released it to a the public (and it has paid tiers!) then you better have made it right. This is the case for both buildings and data storage systems.
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#253This 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…
Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out, curious on maintenance cost though as I don't really want a project. 1 - How much time was setup? 2 - How many times did it break in the last year? 3 - How many of the summaries were actionable? My main concern with active auto backup is maintenance time; my expectation is I'm busy and my personal backup would take me weeks to fix if and only if I notice there is an i…
Setup was about 15 minutes getting the Docker image to run on my VPS, and it’s broken zero times in two years. The summaries are very basic and just let you know how much was backed up and if there were any errors.
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#254This 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…
Synology NAS can already do this without any third-party products via the ActiveBackup application. Supports Google Workspace and MS 365. It’s free, assuming you already own the Synology NAS. It replicates data from Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Drive within seconds or minutes, keeps a history of all changes and offers a nice timeline view to show and export data at any point in time.
CubeBackup is a nice alternative for me as it runs on a VPS. I’m often away from home for long periods due to business travel, and I like being able to remotely keep the backups working even if the NAS goes down or is turned off.
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#255Earlier 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.
> I don't think that selfhosting is a great option for corporate, but Microsoft and Google are just shit. Why? When corporations weren't capable of managing credit cards securely, PCI was created and all the lazy businesses were told to either do this correctly, or outsource it to someone who will. When corporations weren't capable of managing infrastructure, Cloud providers created an out and told all the lazy busin…
> So, if you can't be bothered to do something correctly, and you can't pay to get it done correctly, maybe you are not fit to be operating.
The amount spent on Microsoft suggests a willingness to blow money on the problem.
But with Google having no real support, always shutting down projects, and now losing a lot of people's Drive data and refusing to acknowledge it makes me reluctant to use them.
Teams is janky in other ways, such as Microsoft forcing Sharepoint everywhere, and now we have a chat program that attempts to silo data as much as possible so we a lot of project documentation that isn't always accessible or discoverable.
If you have alternative suggestions, I am open to them.
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#256This 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…
For Google Drive files, you don't need a special account or service to back up to Synology and B2, which I also do. I use the Synology Cloud Sync service to automatically sync all Google Drive files to the synology, then another Cloud Sync task to backup the Synology to B2. Works great.
Synology is indeed great, but CubeBackup is a nice alternative for me as it runs on a VPS. I’m often away from home for long periods due to business travel, and I like being able to remotely keep the backups working even if the NAS goes down or is turned off.
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#257This 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…
Have you tried a restore?
Yes, probably once every 2-3 months. There’s a great interface for restoring specific files.
I keep the version history to infinite, so even if files are corrupted or lost on newer backups I can always reference the old ones, back to day 0. Backblaze is great for this as the storage price is negligible.
I think it works in a similar way to Tarsnap or something like Duplicati, but it’s a lot easier to manage and plugs in nicely to all of the Workspace account (not just Drive).
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#258This 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…
$5/yr + hosting, which is way more than $5 unless you have a terabyte going unused in a box somewhere
Yes I host on a very cheap Hetzner VPS (which I use for other self-hosted Docker images as well) so it’s always up. The storage location is not on the VPS itself, it’s S3 and B2 compatible, so you can use AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, whatever.
I use Backblaze which is quite cheap and reliable: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037814594-B2....
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
They canceled their plans for client-side scanning. They do scan content on their servers. Therefore whether your data in iCloud Photos is scanned depends on whether Advanced Data Protection is enabled or not. It’s disabled by default. Enabling ADP will turn on E2E encryption and disable account access via iCloud.com.
Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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%
Has S3 ever lost a file yet? I know that the reliability isn't 100% as that isn't possible in the real world. But I've never heard a report of a file that was confirmed as stored being lost, and I was under the impression that this was in the category "bound to happen eventually, but hasn't happened yet".
S3 is designed for 11 9s of durability. What this means is that they model a "correctly functioning system" (i.e. replication and/or erasure coding) and the durability guarantee is about HW failures only. However, such models do not (& really cannot) account for the existence of bugs or introduction of new ones. That's a huge part of why S3 doesn't really do a whole lot of feature development (well that + it's hard to maintain a 20 yold codebase).
Also, we're talking about Google Drive here which isn't GCS (Google's S3 competitor) but a higher-level product layered on top of GCS but with it's own book keeping / ACLs etc. Thus there's more room for error. My hunch is that the data is permanently lost.
Additionally, S3 stores an enormous amount of data such that probabilistically they're bound to lose something to HW failure. 2 years ago, S3 stored 100 trillion objects [1]. With 11 9s of durability annually you'd expect to lose 100 objects a year. The saving grace is that most objects aren't accessed (maybe not ever again) & they detect & correct durability errors on access to ensure that accessed objects definitely aren't lost. So while they "admit" to 4 objects, that's likely an under count because I wouldn't expect them to regularly check if all 100 trillion objects are accessible because of how long that would take.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-s3-storage-now-holds-over-...