Honestly dude, I always check my recycle bin before emptying it for this exact reason: I never know what I accidentally put in there, and I will almost never do a full delete, I'll go in there and remove things in groups.
I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
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Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#22If he has the local copies of his documents from the local Google Drive sync, wouldn't he at least have that backup, or are the local files not really files at all but just pointers to the cloud storage files? If it's the latter, does that mean that's it's literally impossible to make backups of your Google Docs documents? If I were to use a another backup program to backup my Google Drive folder, it wouldn't be poss…
.gdoc don't actually store the document content. They are just small json files with a url and id that point the the actual document on google servers. There is no way to actually get a copy of the google document.
Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#23Huh? If you remove the files from the copy of Google drive on your disk, they get removed on the web. It's one "drive." That's KIND OF THE WHOLE POINT. It's not poor user design. That they go to the trash is good user design, to prevent users from doings things like this guy did...
Well, if not clear to the users, then it isn't good UI -- even if it's obvious to you.
By this logic, you can trivially prove any UI to be a bad design. Find a single person who finds it unclear, and voila: the UI must be bad.
As blcknight alluded to, this rule is only relevant when the proportion of users for whom it is an issue is non-trivial.
Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#24Man, I don't know. I feel for this guy, but not every computing tragedy is the software's fault. The author never says what he expected would happen when he moved stuff out of the Google drive.
I learned along the way never to make assumptions about how file syncing works. There's no right answer to what to do in all situations, so your expectations aren't always going to match what the programmer/product owner decided to do.
Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#25Everyone hates making backups. Everyone loves them when something happens. There are many free online data storage systems. If you're happy with the privacy implications, it's not hard to run Google Drive, Dropbox and box.net on the same directory for some degree of resilience.
You can't make backups of gdoc files, the content is never stored locally, it's only on googles servers.
Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#26Everyone hates making backups. Everyone loves them when something happens. There are many free online data storage systems. If you're happy with the privacy implications, it's not hard to run Google Drive, Dropbox and box.net on the same directory for some degree of resilience.
Note that this wouldn't have helped him in this case.
The .gdoc files are only "links" to the online version, which he deleted from the online interface, while clearing the trash.
Backuping them over Dropbox/Box/Skydrive/* would have been useless, as he still has those .gdoc files anyway. To actually get a backup, he would have saved the files as .doc/.pdf/any other classic format from Google Docs.
I'm not saying that backups are useless, mind you - Only that they wouldn't have helped in this specific case.
Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#27Google Drive does that
Dropbox does that
Skydrive does that
All of them have poor user interfaces?
Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#28Huh? If you remove the files from the copy of Google drive on your disk, they get removed on the web. It's one "drive." That's KIND OF THE WHOLE POINT. It's not poor user design. That they go to the trash is good user design, to prevent users from doings things like this guy did...
Well, if not clear to the users, then it isn't good UI -- even if it's obvious to you.
But this is how EVERY DAMN cloud drive works.
It's how EVERY DRIVE in the history of computers work!
If I take my files out of my HD, they will be deleted from the HD. If I move my files out of my flash drive, they will be deleted from my flash drive.
The only way that I would be surprised by this behaviour is if I had never used a computer at all in my life.
Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if not clear to the users, then it isn't good UI -- even if it's obvious to you.
And most other people, I imagine. Dropbox would work the same way. Although it might be permanent, but I've never tried something so ridiculous.
Dropbox lets you recover a file if you've deleted it recently.
Re: I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface
#30Well, he deleted years' worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface, but he lost the Google Docs files because of an irresponsible backup policy.
Sad, to be sure, but there's no kind of critical document storage that doesn't need a backup.