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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

#21

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #13
jqpabc123 wrote: post #4

Not your drive, not your data.

If I pay for the storage, then it is my drive and my data. The article didn't say anything about the free or paid GDrive accounts. If it is a free account, then that is up for debate. If it impacts the paid consumers, they paid for the service and it is their data.

do you have a link to the legal decisions that confirm this is the case and establish what rights the customer actually has in this relationship?

What rights do the contracts that a paid customer signs with Google say they have over the data?

From what I see in the free terms of service: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours." which is neat.

You have the rights to your data, but there doesn't seem to be any stated obligation for Google to keep that data or make it accessible to you.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#23

Post by roody15 »

potency wrote: post #19
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox constantly scans your data and can easily block your whole account permanently. It's hard to recommend it unless you encrypt your data.

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.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#24

Post by sebmellen »

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 personal Google Workspace account) for anyone who uses the Google app suite. It costs me $5/yr and is worth every penny.

https://www.cubebackup.com/

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#25

Post by libraryatnight »

Medox wrote: post #6
jqpabc123 wrote: post #4

Not your drive, not your data.

Isn't this like saying "not your house, not your possessions" ? But landlords cannot just take or misplace my stuff, especially if I pay rent and have some rights.

You put the analogy there, then broke it down - which should answer your own question. They are not the same, it's not like saying that at all. Once again HN misses the point on the quest for the perfect comparison.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#26

Post by londons_explore »

Guess at root cause:

Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data).

Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the data, and some users are going to permanently lose data (where they edited an old version of a document for example, and those edits cannot be automatically rebased onto the new version)

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#28

Post by taneq »

arshxyz wrote: post #22

This is likely very paranoid behaviour but I recommend downloading all your Google data from time to time: takeout.google.com

This is absolutely not paranoid and everyone should keep local copies of any data that is important to them in any way.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#29

Post by __jonas »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #14
__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.

Dropbox constantly scans your data and can easily block your whole account permanently. It's hard to recommend it unless you encrypt your data.

It wasn't really a conscious choice on my part, I had to get the subscription since I needed to collaborate on some files with people who were using it, and it forces you to add shared folders to your own Dropbox if you want to use them for collaboration, causing them to count towards your quota which is very annoying.

So I thought I might as well use it as a backup location if I have to get this subscription. I don't really expect privacy from these services, I guess it's a tradeoff.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#30

Post by causality0 »

londons_explore wrote: post #26

Guess at root cause: Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data). Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the d…

and some users are going to permanently lose data

Why couldn't you write code to let users compare and choose which version of the data they want to keep?

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