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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

#71

Post by gst »

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 works fine for smaller accounts, but on larger accounts it seems to be regularly failing (based on my own experience and based on other postings and reports that I found online).

Exporting my Google Photos sometimes fails consistently even with lots of attempts. Out of well over 10 export attempts or so this year maybe a single one succeeded. I have a few hundred GB of data stored on that account. I also currently have a support ticket with Google open on that issue, but after initial follow-ups haven't received a response in a couple of months now.

That said my current approach for backing up things is to upload an "age" encrypted version of the data from Google Takeout to Wasabi. Once uploaded I run a script that shows me the diff between the data sets (so that I can ensure that no old data went missing that shouldn't have gone missing) before I delete older data. Probably not the most optimal approach though. Might be better to just set up some versioning layer on top of Wasabi and to keep deleted or modified data forever.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#72

Post by armchairhacker »

mrweasel wrote: post #62

How does people even notice that their data has gone missing? I can barely find my own documents in the train wreck that is the Google Drive UI. Any document written by anyone else in the organization can generally be considered lost unless you have a direct link sitting in an email or bookmark.

If it's Docs/Sheets/Slides then I'd notice. If not...I don't really store anything else on Google Drive, just files shared with me.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#74

Post by bogwog »

happymellon wrote: post #59
droopyEyelids wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could go back to google drive even with the file loss issues. OneDrive appears to be a sort of different view into Sharepoint's file management system, and boy is it painful to use.

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.

Because Microsoft has a document monopoly via their shitty proprietary format that they make sure no competitor can effectively import/edit. And Google is just shitty as usual, but they're a giant free default.

I wonder if with all this antitrust stuff going on we'll ever see regulation in the form of required interoperability and/or data portability? Instead of trying to break up companies, block mergers, etc, I feel like simple technical solutions would be faster and more effective.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#75

Post by guestbest »

causality0 wrote: post #30
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?

I guess there may be a bevy of different file formats and a diff for a spreadsheet an an image would require building tooling, just from those examples. I was thinking of creating an application where the front end is more than just a file browser to stored file types but the interface to read/edit the content as well.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#76

Post by dcow »

happymellon wrote: post #59
droopyEyelids wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could go back to google drive even with the file loss issues. OneDrive appears to be a sort of different view into Sharepoint's file management system, and boy is it painful to use.

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.

We did the Notion + Discord thing for years and it worked well and felt modern.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#77

Post by eastbound »

zelon88 wrote: post #63
happymellon wrote: post #59

Earlier 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…

We’re perfectly willing to pay for it. An employee seat costs about $200pm of various licenses and subscriptions, there’s a lot of money to make.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#78

Post by tkiolp4 »

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.

It’s like that, but works differently depending on the country. If you live in a decent country with good laws and rules, then you have rights. If you live in a third world country, then you are out of luck. Google is a third world country on the internet in terms of “user’s rights”.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#79

Post by mathattack »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #54
yeutterg wrote: post #49

This happened to our business about a year ago. Many random files went missing from GDrive. Eventually many turned back up (usually after a few weeks or months), but in the root folder instead of the folder the files were actually organized in. Google support told us we were crazy. As an aside, we are looking from moving to a Google + Slack + Notion to OneDrive + Teams + Loop. What is appealing is the ability to coll…

I wish I could go back to google drive even with the file loss issues. OneDrive appears to be a sort of different view into Sharepoint's file management system, and boy is it painful to use.

The only thing more painful than using OneDrive is talking to the salesperson who sold it to your company.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#80

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

happymellon wrote: post #59
droopyEyelids wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could go back to google drive even with the file loss issues. OneDrive appears to be a sort of different view into Sharepoint's file management system, and boy is it painful to use.

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.

> why are the choices so bad

I've seen a couple reasons:

One, often these products are made by companies where the products are not their primary revenue source. The products are often managed as independent business cases. That means they have a budget, timelines, expected revenue figures/costs. It's common for a product to get a low level of investment that only meets the needs of adding new features [to meet sales figures] without ensuring quality. If it were a startup flush with VC money, they could invest all they have into the product, but at an enterprise, it's often the opposite.

Two, often these products are actually acquisitions of startups. You may not know this, but startups tend to churn out some horrifying, janky code just to get themselves off the ground. Buying one of these often leaves you with a huge mess on your hands. Combine that with a lack of investment or cost-cutting, or some of the lead product people leaving, and the product gets worse. Then try to integrate different products, and you're really integrating different messes.

Three, it's genuinely hard to create groupware products that are both high-quality and useful. They're often complex and need to interoperate with one another, yet are built by separate teams. And because they're complex, they each suffer from the standard problems that happen to software products (many books written about them). But the people managing and creating them fall into the same old pitfalls, because software product development is not required to avoid them. Bad management and bad engineering are common, and these products in particular are no exception.

Four, they're actually difficult things to build and sell. If they were easy, there'd be more competition. There tends to be "alternatives", but not with the same features.

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