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Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

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Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#371
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you are paid customers you should escalate your issue through Google Workspace support https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213?hl=en Insist that your issue be escalated to an internal bug so that it is properly triaged. Even if the videos were deleted as part of the suspension, it's highly likely that there are still multiple backups and cached versions in Google's systems. They should be able to help you r…

Worth a try but I’ve tried doing this before and they said it’s outside the scope of paid support.

Yet it's not outside of the Law. At least in Europe, they MUST give all your data back.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#372
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely wrong. We should expect more from business. You should always be able to extract your data, period. Let’s not defend customer-hostile business models.

So let's say some startup runs a back up service with unlimited data. How many exabytes should a user be able to upload random data to them? And how long should it be available?

Always jumping to the extreme is tiresome. Plenty of disclosure laws have facility for covering reasonable or excessive costs.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#373
post #97

How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action? No warning. No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy." No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative. N…

The current alternative to me is a form of digital Epicureanism or digital Stoicism in the sense of intentionally not putting any effort into any kind of online digital presence or content creation.

I don't remember anyone being upset if they changed emails and started posting on usenet from a different email address. The discussion at hand was what was important.

People are ultimately causing themselves all this stress and worry over absolutely nothing. All these make believe missed opportunities if you don't put in all this effort to get one of the lottery tickets.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not that expensive. Vimeo cheapest plan is $7/month (w/ limits) and $50 for unlimited plan and cloud storage (for backup) is cost competitive. Even having it on a local disk would probably be enough. But... it's not your fault. It's just that despite the propaganda these companies don't give a fuck about their users.

cost competitive against free? lol

Free as in serfdom, you don't own a thing, you have no right, your content can be deleted for any reason at any time without recourse.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#375
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need education. Education to regular people that unless you have a contract with clear clauses and payments involved your data is worth what you pay. Your expectations from free service should be zero. It can go out of business at any time. Or they can stop offering it at anytime.

I find it ironic that rather than avoid these pernicious companies people instead want to enshrine them as permanent fixtures into our society by legislating universal access to them. It would be analogous to passing a law that would guarantee free doses of heroin during the opioid crisis. We need to break the addiction, not exacerbate it.

Generally speaking I agree.. but having observed human behavior long enough, I don't think it's realistic to break that addiction. People are attracted to free services like flies are to manure, and often these free services are advertised with a huge budget and hype, and often come with network effects (~all of your friends and family are using said free service). Nobody reads the ToS, nobody cares about the implications of trusting their data to someone who doesn't care.. year after year we have these reports of people getting burned by the big G and still people keep using Google and acting surprised when they screw you over.

It seems to be human nature, and also nature of the market. It's the digital equivalent of race to the bottom. The shortsighted, uninformed, apathetic, and irrational people outnumber those who care, by a huge margin. "Just educate people" isn't happening any more than we can just tell people to "git gud." And that is why, in the physical space, we have laws that offer people some protection against terrible products that are unfit for purpose, unsafe, broken, etcetra. We wouldn't need those laws if we could just fix people and make them informed & rational; in that case, the market would truly sort out itself. It's just not happening, and it's also not happening in the digital space, so it's very possible we're going to see the same laws in the digital space.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#376
post #318

Mea Culpa I'm in the industry. I knew we should have had backups. She is brilliant but not technical and while the backups would have been expensive and difficult due to size, I should have built multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated. To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is…

> multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated As some one working in storage, please do not get tons of NAS they are pain to manage eventually. Example: linus-tech-tips could not do it properly. If you use youtube-dl how large is one video? Lets say 2 GB. I presume, every week you create have 2 videos? Then 4GB per week. Google gives you $20 for 100 GB. Every year create a…

That's unnecessarily complicated and expensive.

Object storage like Wasabi and BackBlaze B2 are $6/year for 100GB, and much easier to upload, maintain and retrieve from in the future.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#377
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would describe an off-the-shelf NAS as easy and cheap. A 2-bay model with drives costs It's not a highly redundant enterprise solution, but it's decent for home and small business users, especially since the alternative is usually 'nothing'.

>I would describe an off-the-shelf NAS as easy and cheap Only Qnap offers ZFS and Synology offer BTRFS. And none of these file system are default option. ( I dont think they do scheduled scrubbing by default either ) They are also only available on mid range model. Qnap had third or forth security issues with Bitcoin ransomeware. Synology requires lot of work to turn off All internet facing features. To the point the…

TrueNAS uses ZFS by default and they have small SOHO solutions [0], too.

[0]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/#Configure

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#378
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a little trickier than that. Should they continue to give a user 60 days of access to child porn they might have uploaded? That might constitute distribution of child porn. If we permit immediate removal, what are the reasonable boundaries? Legal/illegal is a court decision but you can't run all such decisions through the courts. So now we're back to Google just deciding what they will remove and it's on you to…

Or just copy-righted or copy-right disputed content. Share the access to download option and you will soon find groups repeatedly exploiting this. Pirated content being accessible for 60 days for free is already pretty good.

Good points, and all easily manageable via a few adjustments to the rule.

If it's cporn or other felony content, then fine, shut it all off.

For anything else, allow download only from the last three IP addresses the owner personally logged in from, plus two (if they've moved or are nomadic), plus maybe the same two or three last logged-in-from MAC addresses. Limit to three successful copies downloaded, then shut off.

Alternatively, if you still think that zero future sharing through their site must be the rule, then at least provide the content on a media copy at a nominal fee such as [cost of media]+ [50% service charge] + postage.

Finding fault is the easiest thing in the world. But if you apply your brain to finding a solution instead of merely a problem, things work better.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy 16 terabyte drives for $300 or so. Cost shouldn't be a problem to back up your videos.

I second this. I can't fathom that on HN of all sites people recommend renting backup space from the same big tech companies that continuously fuck over people. Setting up a NAS is not magic. Setting up two isn't either. Put one in you parents basement and check on it once every year when you visit for Christmas. If you don't need 16TB go with an SSD (although with the current contamination situation not the best tim…

Aren't you making it sound a bit too easy and straightforward than it actually is? It might be that simple for you but buying a NAS device like from synology can be pricey too, setting it all up so it is secure but network accessible, and then also handling possible drive failures down the line (and the chances of that are much higher than google fucking you over IMHO) is much more than an average non-tech-savvy user would be interested in.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#380
post #323
post #97

How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action? No warning. No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy." No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative. N…

I'm not sure how this could work for a free service at scale. Treating a free youtube account as a video storage service is a really bad idea. I think the issue is that this works for most people most of the time, so we come to expect it. There are alternative paid options (vimeo, dropbox, S3) that should work fine. This is also a big problem with gmail, hotmail, and a thousand other email providers. Most people assu…

Even if it's paid, you should back them up really.
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