Live data from Hacker News

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

theregister.com

281–290 of 293 posts

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#281

This is a royal fuck up. Anyone using any g cloud service better be suspect when using their services. Amazing how some folks can't get a job at google if they can't invert a binary tree. Perhaps hire folks with relevant skills rather than folks who can solve 2 leetcode mediums in under 45 mins?

That's not actually how it works, that's an ollllld viral article. Source: worked at google for 7 years, 2.8 gpa dropout from state school economics EDIT: upvotes for reality-detached rant, upvotes for "you think you are The One" -2 for a polite concise reality.

My friend, don’t take this the wrong way, but you need to hear this.

It would benefit you to take the downvotes as constructive criticism. You opinions may need recalibration based on feedback.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...there is much to hate about the process. That's a signal that's trying to tell you something. > But leetcode over qualifications is not one of them. A lot of people hate leetcode and the state of interviews at tech companies (17k people liked that tweet), but it looks like you do not. Tech is probably the only field where you have to study unrelated subject matter than the job you actually end up doing. > I have…

> > ...there is much to hate about the process. > That's a signal that's trying to tell you something. Indeed, and what it is telling me isn't what your points are about. I'm fairly vocal internally about certain changes I believe need to be made. But I'm also not really in a position to do anything about it but suggest changes. There have been non-generalist interviews for over ten years, although not for every team…

From what you described, Google needs to work a great deal on its recruiting practices, bc right now it is an incoherent mess.

The consequences seem to manifest into serious technical problems, like losing customer data on its cloud storage service.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#283

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…

OOC, was this a google doc or a docx file uploaded?

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > ...there is much to hate about the process. > That's a signal that's trying to tell you something. Indeed, and what it is telling me isn't what your points are about. I'm fairly vocal internally about certain changes I believe need to be made. But I'm also not really in a position to do anything about it but suggest changes. There have been non-generalist interviews for over ten years, although not for every team…

From what you described, Google needs to work a great deal on its recruiting practices, bc right now it is an incoherent mess. The consequences seem to manifest into serious technical problems, like losing customer data on its cloud storage service.

[deleted]

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#286
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have backup both to Google Photos and iCloud. The probability of both failing and/or both deciding to just delete my account because I look "suspicious" is very small. But I _have_ had iCloud mysteriously not being able to retreive old photos.

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%

My concern about my own backup strategy (which, for Photos, is exactly the same as yours) is that I don't have a system in place that notifies me if files get corrupted or randomly deleted, and I'm not sure how I would go about implementing something like that. Any ideas?

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#287

Be me, self host my own cloud drive. No fees, no surprises, infinitely scalable, insanely fast local backups.

I'm sure everyone reading Hacker News can cobble something together in a weekend or two or knows someone who can. What should the rest of the world do? (Also, my hats off to you that you're seeing "no surprises." So you never discovered your backup machine has a flaky wifi card or bad Ethernet jack? Never had bit-rot or errors on your backing store, or are you just not detecting them until it's too late? You're testi…

> What should the rest of the world do?

Educate and help those who do not know? I helped setup my cousin’s NAS and gave it a subdomain.

What i meant by no surprises is: the backend and front end stays the same forever, short of me manually updating it. My server and their apps, will not suddenly lose functionality or have cruft added because someone in Mountain View deems so.

Key to making this work is keeping things simple. Meaning no container or any burying of my data under any layer of abstraction. My files are laid bare on the platter, making it very portable because any application that does file system operation can immediately operate on my files. Unlike the clusterfuck that is owncloud.

Every quarter I do an incremental offline backup of all the drives in the NAS, to address all the issues you mentioned.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#288
post #184
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sharepoint is killing productivity. It's so sad that Microsoft does not see how they ruin productivity of big orgs. Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily. They even broke the windows taskbar, which automatically combines things together. They assume that people working in an office have only 1 email open and 1 spreadsheet open, while most have 20 and dont know how to turn off this s…

> Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily. I actually found a way where I work now, I made a shortcut to the sharepoint folder from teams that appear in the file explorer, I can then link the document. Of course this only works for me and not if I share the file. Can't wait for the merge of the desktop and web excel to finally break it all... I also overwrote an important document tod…

The thing is that the documents are shared out by default and it simply craps out when you have flows like:

Source1 + source2 -> summary report -> consolidated report

(With like 20 source files)

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing I said disagrees with your statement. In fact, I specifically said they could do better. My point is that it's wrong to say google drive is easy to build or maintain.

Yes, not disagreeing with you. :)

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#290
post #143

Earlier 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%

My concern about my own backup strategy (which, for Photos, is exactly the same as yours) is that I don't have a system in place that notifies me if files get corrupted or randomly deleted, and I'm not sure how I would go about implementing something like that. Any ideas?

I use a synology for TM (raid 1) and it uses btrfs which has checksums to prevent bitrot. Either that or something running ZFS would be the obvious options:

https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_enable_fil...

Post reply on HN