I puzzled why non-employees even involved in such discussions. There is absolutely zero help they can provide in such cases.
I puzzled why non-employees even involved in such discussions. There is absolutely zero help they can provide in such cases.
The “employees” you can talk to can't provide any help either; have a current billing issue due to a ui error, and there's no escalation path, it's just increasing unlikely variants of “try pressing the button on a brand new stock android device using the foo app in safe mode”.
I keep getting $0.49 and other random amounts charged to an ancient card by Google (one that I long ago used for the business). This is a massive nuisance but there is absolutely no way to trace these payments to anything in any of the Google products I'm using. So I have to keep this card alive and that's more than a bit problematic because that legal entity has merged with another and the bank really wants that card gone (which makes no sense, but that's what they want).
So, here I am, stuck between two idiotic bureaucracies with no way to resolve the problem on either side. Google doesn't answer to anything, the bank is - at least on paper, I've managed to stretch this for three years now - unwilling to bend their rules because the amounts are so tiny. But you can see the ghost of what I'm worried about: you'll see that if that card eventually does get cancelled that that $0.49 or whatever is a reason to lock my account or some other idiotic move.
this is a simple problem. Google is doing weird stuff, not replying to your questions - clearly not something you want to have a relationship with. So move away from google, cancel your card, problem solved.
For an unrealistic definition of 'simple'.
No, it is simple.
Simple doesn't mean easy, practical, realistic, suitable, or many other things.
Simple doesn't mean good.
It’s unlikely they’d cancel an account for a cancelled card. Probably the fastest approach would be to just cancel it and see where you get an “update your payment!” notice.
You might have luck filing a complaint about Google with the CFPB: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/
I had a weird experience with a bank where they seemed to re-open my account after it was closed. I got a letter (as requested) within the 15 day window stating the account was closed and I wouldn't be responsible for any fees on the account in the event it opened again.
They spent most of the 15 days bombarding me with calls and emails trying to resolve it outside the CFPB, but I wanted it on record. That letter is now a PDF attached to the complaint with a complaint ID in case I have problems.
? Maybe not in cases like this but quite a few times I've googled an issue with a google/microsoft product, found a post on their forums with an answer from a Verified Service Technician or something like that saying "Update your drivers, run sfc /scannow, and turn it off and on again", then run the same search with "reddit" at the end and got an actual answer
On the contrary, I've found those 'Microsoft experts' on the official forums to have less knowledge and poorer troubleshooting skills than a tier 1 helpdesk technician.
The community ‘experts’ on the Adobe forums can be actively hostile and rude.
I posted a question a while back questioning why After Effects drive-by installs Cinema 4D without warning, and they just could not understand why the lack of notification or consent was a problem, feeling strongly that I should shut up and be grateful even the tiniest of blessings our lords and masters at Adobe see fit to bestow upon our hard drives.
There is absolutely zero help google employees can provide too
This is not true, Googlers (at least Kirkland office based ones) can file an internal ticket if they care.
Hence the common recommendation to start spamming first.last@Google.com addresses until you annoy someone internal who is willing to file a ticket on your behalf if you don't have any capable Googlers in your social graph.
At least when I worked at Google over a decade ago, I'm pretty sure first.last@Google.com didn't route to my inbox. (And roughly 70 people worldwide share my surname, according to one of those sites that shows you where people with your surname live.)
Same here, especially since most of the time it's an unhelpful answer that dodges the actual problem or generic advice that doesn't apply, then they mark it as solved.
Which then furthers the question, why? I could understand the odd person just trying to be helpful because they had the same problem, found the post with no solution, figured it out, then answered with theirs, but for the ones who seem to spend countless hours ranking up, either by gaming it, or the few actually being helpful, does it lead to a chance of being hired or something?
Creating a system like that almost feels like it should be illegal, almost like the companies that give extensive case studies for interviews and take the work with no intention of hiring the interviewees, or unpaid internships where they don't even bother teaching and just give grunt work.
I am sure that whoever created this ticket had checked a couple of things (trash/bin) and was adamant that the state of the 'drive' was back in May 2023.
Considering through the amount of times that someone said "did you try turning it off and on again?" AND it has has solved the problem, make such forum users/helpers like that very useful.
Having done pretty much this a lifetime ago: A lot of the first level bug support work is basically deduplication (Incl "have you tried...") and asking for aditional/specific information. Excessively browsing a bug tracker is one of the best qualifications, and if you're doing so anyway, why not also help a few lost users here and there? At least that's where it starts... :D
As an aside, I am curious the motivation for customers to staff huge company support forums
My guess is it's the same motivation for those who volunteer to help others in any other support forum. Human nature does not change based on the market cap of the company (if any) behind the product. What difference do you expect between this, and Stack Overflow contributors for Microsoft SQL Server or Blender? I wouldn't expect there to be a difference in motivation: some people simply enjoy helping others (even if it's in return of made-up internet points).
I think Market Cap relates -loosely- to financial capacity of the company to have employees playing the support role.
On the paying tiers of FAANG-like, Is crazy that these companies charge market price for their services yet the support is usually quite poor.
For a minor explanation, support is just prohibitively expensive no matter what you do, and quite frankly the only people actually capable of support is going to be the devs who made the product for various bugs/issues, and that is just a handful of people, some of whom have left the company even.
Finding good support is also hard. I worked in product areas with dedicated support for paying customers, and the number of support staff that I would consider actually helpful is precisely 3 people, out of a few hundred. Those 3 people are paid a ton to keep them around, and while I don't know exactly what they're paid they usually get moved up and into a role that at minimum exceeds typical senior eng pay, the rest just bounce tickets back and forth collecting traces with at best a poor understanding of the product. On average no understanding.
Another problem is that a good support staff would probably do better to be a dev anyway, the knowledge required is pretty much the same, just missing development experience.
I've used a few SaaS products with decent support: AWS, GitLab, Microsoft (for certain products), Fortinet (for certain products)...
On the bad side I can think of Google and Databricks.
So it's not an unsolvable problem, there are people getting support right.
AWS support can be very hit or miss.
I've had experiences where they will claim that something is possible when it is absolutely not, and you have to provide a lot of supporting information to get them to see reality.
Ye support is in many cases a about as qualified role as building it. If not more qualified if the product is bad.
support cost is inversely prop to quality (code and design)
knowing code quality levels at those companies and how they replace actual designers with PMs... it was their goal to have the most expensive support!
A lot of people have forgotten that you can actually call companies and they do/will assist.
Called Walmart and they got extra bike racks installed at my location. Have had to call eBay a number of times as a small-time seller. PayPal too. Got Google to replace my chromecast remote and they went through thorough troubleshooting steps before RMAing it.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions but not worth pretending that paid (by the vendor) support doesn’t exist.
I believed, until you said PayPal support was helpful. PayPal support is what I envision the DMV in Soviet Russia was like.
The outcome is support that makes you feel like you're bothering them, is barely concealing their hostility, lies about what's happening, and one wrong word and horrible, horrible things will happen to you.
That's PayPal support on the best of days, like after the support person just received a 20% raise, or had a baby. On the bad days...
In Soviet Russia you'd be lucky to deal with the DMV. For that you'd have to have a car, and the waiting list to buy one was years long.
- "We can deliver the car in ten years"
<Flips through calendar>
- "Sorry, I'll get my new dishwasher then"
I generally hate Paypal and will happily shit on them at any opportunity for all kinds of great reasons (cough, blatant theft of client funds for completely arbitrary reasons), I also don't trust them with anything but the as-temporary-as-possible storage of the least possible amount of payment funds when I have no other choice. However, weirdly, on the few occasions in which I've had to contact their customer support, they've been surprisingly friendly and helpful so far. But maybe I've just been lucky.
It's frankly infuriating when you get generic responses from someone who has no internal systems access, means to address the problem, or ability to escalate to an engineer.
Often these purported super users reply with silly generic suggestions, or meaningless requests for information. There's nothing worse than posting highly specific debugging information to a forum, which is not read by engineers, and is instead replied to by someone suggesting you try logging out and in again.
For example, in this thread, "Device", "Drive for desktop version", and "Sync mode" isn't remotely relevant to restoring user files. And the super user cannot do anything with that information. If that information is truly necessary, a Google engineer can post in the thread requesting it.
And they do it all for a meaningless diamond badge. You may as well have AI doing it.
It’s so frustrating when you Google your problem and you read some Google or Apple or Microsoft product support page and see people like this responding. They absolutely never have the solution and it will still be marked as problem solved.
They absolutely never have the solution and it will still be marked as problem solved.
This exactly, it's the most frustrating thing ever as a user, and makes me wonder what the point of these forums even is.
To teach us to stay away from these companies?
Gathering data so when some PM wants to empire build and justify a project, or when a UX researcher person needs evidence to support their initiatives. All of this is self-serving towards their careers.
The worst are the Apple forums where some ding a ling will chastise the person with the question for some supposed failure to follow whatever Apple wants you to do.
and they're still telling people to "Reset the PRAM" in 2023 to solve some software level issue.
I didn’t want to say it…but yes. Every time I google something like that I end up on some Apple page with the borg asking “Well why would you want to do that?” to something completely obvious that people should be able to do.
I think that's because Google teams are failing to engage properly with the community volunteers. When I was at Cloudflare I engaged directly with the external community moderators on Discord and made sure they felt comfortable DM'ing me or mentioning me if they wanted to escalate a thread to my attention (this is separate from them having formal community manager contact points which I'm sure Google does). Google engineers just don't care & there's no incentive structure at Google to improve things + Google management probably views this as "these people aren't paying us enough & engineering time is expensive". My counter here is that I viewed the entire class of non enterprise customers (free tier or tiny customers not paying for support) as a whole class that's 1 enterprise customer in aggregate. Yes it costs some money, but in practice not that much & there's non-monetary value you can extract doing that that offsets that cost.
That being said, I understand what the Google Drive team is going through here & as long as they are aware, the support threads aren't going to be useful until they root cause the issue & hopefully fix what happened.
And they do it all for a meaningless diamond badge.
Some of them get invited to Product Expert Summits too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/9vqyf0/attended_the...
“ I think a trillion dollar company should pay for excellent customer service.”
How do you think the became a trillion dollar company????!!!
We should just ban ads so the customers are the customers and not the product. This entire construct should be illegal.
The unspoken secret here is that ads distort markets, suck up resources, and thereby make economies less efficient. Banning them would be an economic boon.
There. I said the quiet part outloud.
I mostly agree with you, but I wonder if this view is a little simplistic.
Where a competitive marketplace exists I don't see ads (especially ads purchased by big incumbent vendors) adding any value: it would be better overall if competitors spent that money improving the product (or service) rather than trying to persuade customers to purchase a less-good product (measuring "good" as value/cost, since there is a place for lower quality but lower cost options).
But I do think there might be an economic argument in favour of at least some advertising to bring awareness of new market entrants, and especially of new categories of product/service. (One counterargument might be that this should properly be the role of journalists, and I agree that in an ideal world it would be. But the current dismal quality of the mainstream media suggests that economic incentives may actively hinder having ideal journalism…)
I've thought about the second problem a lot, and banning ads would solve both ends of the problem. Journalism is in a poor state because of the attention economy, which is to say: because of ads.
Although I'm not in favour of completely banning advertisements, just taxing advertising revenue heavily, as it sidesteps any censorship accusations. The government still lets you say what you want, but you can't become wealthy just by shilling for corpos.
Exceptions will be made in the name of encouraging viable consumer evaluation content, such as review copies, listing fees and suchlike as long as they are clearly stated and meet a stringent set of requirements.
With very rare exceptions (e.g. nuclear weapons), taxation is almost always a better mechanism than outright bans.
Even for pretty bad things (e.g. really toxic pollution), the taxes just need to be set obnoxiously high. By "obnoxiously high," I mean the trade-off might be cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch or removing a billion tons of CO2; something which clearly helps more than the harm done.
For mild things (e.g. device shitification or not having service manuals), even very modest taxes can help (e.g. a few pennies per device), without throttling innovation. In a commodity market of Chinese off-brands, a few pennies is enough to make-or-break a vendor.
But I do think there might be an economic argument in favour of at least some advertising to bring awareness of new market entrants, and especially of new categories of product/service.
That's the standard argument made: Consumers learn about new products through advertising.
In fact, this is not what happens. At least I've virtually never seen it. The most effective ways to learn about new products are things like trade journals (including ones like Hacker News), blogs, etc. In those contexts, writers select for products which are interesting or which work well.
To the contrary, advertising strongly favors entrenched players with money:
- If Microsoft builds a SaaS, you build a better SaaS, but you have $50k to advertise, and Microsoft has $500M, there will be a gap in consumer perception, in favor of the inferior player.
- If I know, from advertising, that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, and Microsoft has additional generic brand recognition, you're at an even greater disadvantage.
In practice, advertising almost always favors entrenched players over new market entrants. Perhaps there's an exception to new market entrants from big players, but that's not nearly enough to justify the economic cost.
Ads could have a place on dedicated websites, where people go to learn about products. So we see ads only when we want to, and not whenever the company wants to distract us which is basically always.
If this means people see fewer ads, then that's a great way to reduce over-consumption.
At first glance, ads seem a win-win payment model for never-seen-before services: people trade something they're generally unaware of (their attention) for something they weren't aware they wanted or needed. Then you realize their attention is literally the stuff of their conscious lives, the most valuable thing they have.
And then you realize that you pay twice for the ads: once with your attention, and then again when you buy the product (the cost of which includes the advertising costs).
And then you realize that we're over-consuming, and the planet would be in a much healthier state if ads didn't exist as they do now.
I recently tried to access someone at github.
A page ( https://github.com/pricing , I am a verified teacher, what happens if I already subscribed to co-pilot ) clearly tells me to contact support. I've decided it's simply impossible to contact anyone at github, every attempt just leads to an automated reply and my post being closed. I'm not sure there is anyone there. I tried posting ont he help forum, where I (of course) never got a reply.
This has made me make sure nothing I care about is only on github -- as I don't expect to any recieve any help if I have any other problems in future. I should of course be careful anyway, but when you hit these problems you realise quite how hard it is to contact any modern large company.
I think above a certain threshold every company stops answering in person, and that threshold keeps being pushed down.
It’s impossible to get them to respond to my emails with a paid account. I have an enterprise account with a dedicated rep. To increase the number of seats on your contract you have to request that they do it. I had run out of seats and with a new dev starting it took a few days and emails to get the guy to do anything. I’m try to give you MORE money and it’s like pulling teeth. They’re my only option with Gitlab’s insane price increase.
Wait, GitHub doesn’t respond to support requests any more?
I’ve contacted them many times in the past (before MS acquisition), and every time I got a non-template response from a human being within a few hours, sometimes within half an hour. Example request: pushed something I later regretted, asked them to gc on the server and purge cached pages; I asked this a couple of times and had it promptly taken care of each time.
If you want to contact someone at github, you have to write a good blog post about your issue and get it on HN front page
I had the opposite experience. Github only recognised my institutions student e-mail domain, not our institutional one that instructors and staff use. So I couldn't sign up as an instructor for the educational stuff.
I sent in a tech support request, and it was solved in less than 2 hours. They even replied, telling me they added my institutional e-mail domain.
So not only did a human reply and fix my problem, I'm not even a paying customer. I get the free education account.
Usually the way to go is to come to places like here and get the attention of an employee who is dawdling on HN not working, or Twitter/X.
Maybe someone from MSFT/GitHub can help
I have a completely free, unpaid GitHub account and have always had my support requests answered by a human in less than 24 hours
In the past GitHub had a specific forum that worked outside of GitHub itself, and at that forum it wasn't hard to get attention from actual GitHub employees, but since they transitioned to the generic Discussion in the feedback repository, closing the old forums, it's got to the new state of things where it's impossible to talk with people from there.
I was Googling Pixel Watch 2 carrier availability for the Australian market and ended up on the Google Support thread where someone had asked when certain carriers will get the watch. The "accepted answer" was one of these support volunteers who was based in Europe and all they had done was regurgitated the support article and pretended it was an authoritative answer. They added no value whatsoever and caused the thread to be over thanks to their "accepted answer".
I was confused why someone had wasted their time doing this, so I snooped around a bit. As far as I can tell it's a CV building exercise for some people and nothing more.
Adobe forum is terrible for this, their "MVPs" will dismiss your question right away often without even understand it and then it'll just be the accepted answer, and that's at best often they'll talk to you with condescension, claim you're doing it wrong, claim it works fine for them, claim it's not really a real issue etc.
They're taking an inverse Turing test.
gamification, companies know people will do it for free so why pay?
It would probably be worth paying/staffing whatever though since people may do something for free, but it may not be enough to make a happy end user.
Not all companies miss this, Amazon has strict SLAs on responding to user requests, and this even includes GitHub issues. Personally, I find it rare, though not non-existent, to have a good experience with Google customer support or OSS while Amazon generally feels pretty good. Maybe just lucky of course but the brand effect is obvious to me and perhaps worth the companies spending a bit on.
I also experience generally great support(compared to average) from Amazon. Google has been the worst support I have ever dealt with.
Google support is also poorly trained on social engineering.
For most popular consumer products, there will be expert users who want to help. Official forums are a great way to engage those experts. Otherwise the experts will just start their own forums (and often do) e.g. forums for cars / mechanical issues.
Should Google be paying more to provide customer service? Absolutely! But it’s just not in Google’s culture to do customer service. Google likes to develop products with extremely lean / efficient burn rates. Googlers value efficiency orders of magnitude more than human connection.
That last line is true. If it’s ok with you, I will print it, frame it and place it in my office so next time the GCP Sales Rep comes begging for a share of our cloud presence I can tell him to thank Mr Pichar for their 4th place.
Worst “customer service” I’ve ever had with Google is with their Google Cloud FDEs and PMs. The best strategy is to use Google Cloud as leverage to re-negotiate AWS or Azure bills or use free gcloud credits and then don’t sign. Don’t ignore them, treat them as they treat you.
It is ironic that to be in the Google Play store, you must offer customer support...
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
For each of your apps, you must: >Respond to user questions about paid apps or in-app purchases on time: You must respond to customer support questions within three business days. If Google contacts you about an urgent product issue, you must respond within 24 hours.
Rules for thee but not for me.
"In some ways, it's nice for there to be a responsive community, but in other ways, I think a trillion dollar company should pay for excellent customer service."
Surely the company must provide customer service for advertisers. Perhaps it's excellent.
Not sure that people using Google Drive for free are customers. They are potential ad targets and potential sources of data useful for an online ad services business, though.
Surely the company must provide customer service for advertisers. Perhaps it's excellent.
Not really. Google is a monopoly with a huge moat, so pretty much everything they do is pretty shit. (But yeah, for actual Google customers there's actually some sort of customer support.)
My understanding is the volunteers do make some money helping via services like this:
(looks like they got acquired and had some big companies using them so google using something similar I imagine: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/css-corp-acquires-s...)
I see you are looking to find out information about why people staff customer support forums for free.
I can help you find out information about why people staff customer support forums for free.
Please follow the instructions first here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428901
It’s really sad I think. Most of the people do it because it gives them a sense of importance and authority.
Because the people who lost files are the product Google sells (to advertisers), not the customer.
In some ways, it’s nice for there to be a responsive community, but in other ways, I think a trillion dollar company should pay for excellent customer service.
Not sure how much you're following financial news these days, but trillion dollar companies are getting outright massacred on Wall Street if they dare spend money on things deemed "unnecessary" by the bankers.
Customer support organizations were the ones most targeted and hit by layoffs across the board to cut costs. After all, Google products are still being used after they fired large amount of support staff (not that support experience was good with them). It's a good example for other corporations to do the same - it's not like you'll go elsewhere, riiiight? Time to "cut the fat" (term I've seen on HN).
(And that doesn't include internal pressures in these corporations to avoid unpromoteable, unsexy, expensive and boring work of supporting customers.)
User generated content is the future, doncha know?
They're just copying Apple?
It’s a deliberate strategy to reduce costs on the part of the company.
They “gamify” volunteer support with badges etc.
One place I worked called it “Level 0” support in that it cost the company zero dollars.
I used to be a ‘Helper’ on Reddit’s /r/Applehelp.
Mainly a little tickle of pleasure in helping someone out combined with the pleasing puzzle solving.
Left Reddit after the whole 3rd party app shenanigans sadly.
Thanks for reminding me to do a dump of my data https://takeout.google.com
I purchased an external 4TB SSD and I make a point of backing my stuff up offline (downloading via Takeout) every few weeks just in case some catastrophic accident happens on Google's end that results in my data being permanently deleted.
I store the local drive in a "fireproof" safe (note: fireproof is a bit of a misnomer, since stuff can still burn in a fireproof safe, though it's a better bet than not having one in the case that your home/apartment catches fire).
I also back up to Amazon Glacier as a third offsite backup. One could also use S3 for this, though it might be a bit more expensive than Glacier.
The real question is whether it’s better off in the fireproof safe that you most likely will not have time to access in an actual emergency, or directly in your emergency “go-bag”.
If your failure mode is "Google loses my data", putting it in the secure safe is best. It's not likely Google will have data loss on the same day your house burns down.
What emergency could affect both you and Google, but not lead to the kind of apocalyptic situation where you'd prefer an extra first aid kit, food or ammunition to a hard drive in your go bag? Perhaps if you're on the US West Coast, a huge earthquake is a legitimate worry here.
it could though a couple of months after house burns down and you are kinda busy these two months and making a new onsite copy is not the main priority.
Secondary question, which of those is more likely to survive a fire while you're at work or the grocery store?
Suggestion: with these topics always start with working on your threat model and risk matrix and let everything else come out of that. This helps focus the effort and the mitigations on what is relevant for you and what you're protecting.
Glacier should be sufficient for catastrophic accidents. It's cheap to store ($1/TB/mon), the traffic costs are damn expensive ($90/TB) but you won't need to pay for it except in catastrpohic cases. However you will need to somehow make sure you will be able to access the data when you do need it.
For online storage I've found cloud S3 storages to be substantially better than customer-faceing services like Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. Amazon S3 may be expensive but you can use Backblaze B2 for $6/TB/month which is as good and as fast. Then use rclone as file browser. You can share single files by generating download link so others can download at 1Gbps no hidden limits.
but you won't need to pay for it except in catastrpohic cases.
Is an untested backup really a backup?
Wow, we've come back full circle if we're backing up our cloud data to a local SSD :-)
IMHO, that has always been a good idea.
It’s basically the good old 3-2-1 backup rule: Three copies of your data (your production data and two backups) on two different media, with one copy off-site.
I've looked into glacier as a clone of my NAS before but found it unjustifiably expensive. Do you mind sharing how much you pay?
Look at Wasabi. S3 interface but cheaper
Do you use Takeout or what method do you use every few weeks to grab all your data from cloud services including Google?
You can use Rsync to copy everything from Google Drive as a cron job. If you want copies of your Google Docs and Sheets you'll need something like SyncDocs to download and convert them to MS Office format.
3-2-1 strategy is also a good idea. The SSD in a safe place is great but in case of deep catastrophe, I prefer some sort of easy-access cloud solution, preferably one that's zero knowledge, either because it has it baked in or because you use something like cryptomator.
For cloud backup of anything i've never trusted Google for shit, even aside from its grotesquely parasitic "privacy" policies (a complete joke of a word for anything to do with that company).
Instead, so far I've tried several and maybe unexpectedly, the most easy to work with and simply functional across multiple machines and several external drives has been SpiderOak. Its desktop interface is shit, but the overall service is easy to use and has never failed me one so far, and it constantly, incrementally conducts deduplicated backups of even minor file/folder changes as long as it's running.
As a second option, Arq has been nice too, though its UI is also rather clumsy.
I keep running out of space because of the photos that my phone keeps automatically uploading to Google Photos. I've done a couple of downloads now, but now it's just sitting on my hard drive. I clearly need a better place to store my photos. Preferably somewhere where we can look at them, enjoy them and organise them.
I've been thinking about getting a NAS, but I feel like I probably need something more than that. It's all pretty new ground to me, though. I think I want to run my own "cloud" from my home that my phone can sync with, helping me organise this stuff and show it to people I want to share it with. But controlled by me and not by Google or some other cloud service.
Rclone can backup Google Drive, including Docs (as .docx) and Sheets (as .xlsx). I think it's a better file transfer tool for any cloud provider too...
Is it reliable though? I was always skeptical of the idea of conversions happening in the background..
It uses the Google Drive file export system, so it's as reliable as clicking File → Export in a Google Doc. Occasionally, complex formatting will get screwed up, but on the whole it's pretty good.
One caveat that is easy to miss: Files that are shared with you are not exported if you are over quota or are part of an organization that is over their quota. You either need to manually download everything locally or find a different tool for getting these files.
Ha I tried that with the Nest data and it just sent me an email saying "there was a problem, try again later" after a few days.
Lost temporarily, but there's absolutely no way they lost data permanently (maybe hours worth of data, worst case scenario).
Can you expound on this? What makes you sure?
My guess would be they have multiple backups. I obviously can't say for sure since I don't work there, but it's very very good guess.
Right but this doesn't necessarily have to be a drive failure. (Pun not intended.) Imagine if there was some id collision due to a db migration or something, and then one user ends up deleting the other user's data accross all backups. Unless google never deletes any data, even when the user deletes it themselves, then you can't be saved from that.
Theoretically possible, but (super super super) unlikely. I'd also think that when a user "permanently" deletes their data, it would still be on Google servers for a specified time (maybe a week?).
Again, all guesses. But if someone offered me a bet, I'd wager 1:10,000 that the data is permanently deleted. Extremely unlikely.
30 days has become the industry wide standard for keeping data explicitly deleted by a user.
There are many types of backups (e.g. replication, point-in-time replication, periodic incremental backups, periodic full backups) and not all of them project against the worst kind of issues, e.g. a software bug that accidentally deletes a whole bunch of data.
For Gmail, Google keeps backups of mail boxes and their transaction log. This way they can rewind the mailbox over a period of weeks.
It's basically a continuous backup.
Are we sure there is an actual data loss event, now? Has anyone here experienced the loss directly from Google Drive?
They had a gmail data loss issue back in the day as well. They lost a shitload of emails and contacts.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/03/01/gmail.lost.found/...
I lost all my emails around this time and presumed I’d been hacked. Now it makes sense.
The article says it was restored from tape. And it was.
Sometimes the clouds dissipate.
Sometimes the only reassurance you have is that you're in the same boat as a lot of other people who would be very angry
This is very very likely. Source: worked on the storage backing Google Drive. There’s layers upon layers of backups.
For the end user, there's no difference between "Google still has my data but I can't access it" and "Google lost my data". Especially with Google's customer service being about as effective as a wishing well
The risk is that the bug impacts a small number of users and they decide not to bother with a restore just to recover data that only impacts 0.001% of users.
Or they don't notice at all because the support forums have no way to get in touch with engineers.
absolutely no way they lost data permanently
How do you know this?
(maybe hours worth of data, worst case scenario)
Or you’re saying they could have lost data permanently?
At this point Google is as trustworthy as musk.
I use rclone to backup my Google Drive to S3. If you're not doing something similar, I recommend it (rclone will also export google docs to ODF formats).
Do you run a daily cron or something? I've been trying to figure out how to backup my photos from google.
It was quite an adventure when I exported all my photos from Google Drive. It took Google a couple of days to get everything ready. Afterward, I downloaded around 15 zip files, each with a size of several gigabytes.
It was quite a task to unzip them all, perform deduplication, and import them into iCloud photos.
To keep them synced with S3, I am currently using an app called Photosync.
Just wait until you find out you don't have location data or the dates on photos from about 5 years are wrong. I think there's a reason the drive integration got shuttered.
Now that I think about it though, Takeout might include the location data until... they patch that "bug"to be more in line with the Photos API.
Sorry for this but on the off chance a single person anywhere near Photos sees this, your management chain is full of unrespectable scum. :) Gotta love Google.
Oh I know! Google completely trashed my photo collection GPS and timestamp data, I would never trust them as a backup anymore.
i did this last week. google takeout provided 40 or so zip files that are easily decompressed with a find -exec for the existing photos
Im now using synology photos to backup new photos to my nas as i take them
Check out rclone if you haven't yet. Im also a fan of duplicity.
I'd recommend combining it with something like rmlint for your daily cron jobs.
I hope someone is "just using rsync" to backup their Dropbox.
Yes, I also hope that.
Should be very simple:
ssh user@rsync.net rclone sync dropbox:rsynctest rsynctestdirectory
Oh, you meant rsync the command ...
Sorry I was mistaken:
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Hope someone is doing this to backup their Dropbox :-)
Note that the ODF conversion is happening on google's side - which means that if you have a cloud document above some embarassingly small size (like a Slides deck of the interns' end of year presentations with a couple of videos inside) ... you'll just get a size error, and there's nothing rclone can do to fix it. (Basically, pay attention to the warnings...)
Yes -- I've encountered this problem trying to back up Google Drive using multiple clients.
Sometimes a file download takes longer than 30s to start, either because it's converting, but also virus checks on large files. (For me it was always virus checks on PDF's over ~30MB).
You may need to change a timeout setting, so that your client will wait up to e.g. 5 min for a download to start its first byte.
I also run sync to an veracrypt encrypted flash drive. I think local storage is a key part of a personal data back up strategy
Unfortunately google’s own “sync to local” software is quite unreliable, at least on the Mac. Anyway its synced “files” are often just urls, so you can’t search them and the content isn’t actually downloaded.
I don’t understand why anyone relies on this.
This certainly sounds like a major issue, but I’m sure they (Google) have backups… right?
Yes, Google backs up to tape. I've seen it done and helped design the training for the process. As of 2019 it was a robust backup process with a pain in the butt restore process. It can and will be done, but it's not fast or easy.
How frequently do they back up to tape? (if this is something you can share)
Varies by product. In general, it is a continuous process, and backups may not be 'point in time'.
This is out of date; Google avoids tape exactly because the restore process sucks.
As of 2019 it was a robust backup process with a pain in the butt restore process.
Would love some more insight on this! Anything or any article you can share on how this is implemented at such scale?
Fair point, but so should the user.
This is a good reminder to everyone: Your cloud data still needs backing up.
Google’s desktop sync doesn’t actually download googles own files, just files in other formats like pdf. Do you launch a Google takeout request from a from job?
Well, that’s an argument against using file formats that are locked in to a cloud service.
Yep. Cloud storage gives you too many ways out if you make a mistake (recycle bin, revision history) that it kind of hides the fact that it's not a replacement for backups. Plus, you can always get hacked.
3-2-1 guys!
they had, in May. hahah. But really, why May is a cutoff date? Will we ever get a bug explanation, I wonder.
Don't worry, they backed it up to Google Drive
They can always ask NSA.
Does anyone have recommendations on how to protect against this kind of thing?
I have a full sync of my cloud storage on my media PC, which rsync's nightly to an external drive. I have another external drive that lives at work, which I bring home and sync every month or so. In theory I think that covers most scenarios I care about (cloud provider failure, HDD failure, house fire etc).
It has been a long time since I used Drive, so I can't remember if has a Dropbox-like desktop sync app, so this may not apply.
Does rsync replicate or ignore file deletion?
It depends on what flags you call it with - it can do either.
Surely, but in your setup?
There is a service called Google Takeout which lets you do a full data dump of Drive and any other google product.
But allegedly can’t export google slides of any significant size.
It's also highly manual (at least for local backups). One can only set up backups for six months at a time, plus downloading the files involves waiting for an email notification and using download links in that email.
If anyone has figured out a way to automate all this, I'd _love_ to hear about it.
Use local synology NAS + Synology C2 cloud. By doing this you will have a solid system.
I back up my gdrive to a synology, which is in turn backed up to rsync.net. The notifications get fed into checkcentral. This arrangement is pretty capable and I feel good about it.
I've been thinking of going full archivist and burning all the family photos onto blurays though.
As another user suggested, backing up your cloud storage to another provider is important. with S3-like object lock ideally.
rclone is awesome :)
The most you can do is backup the files and save them on a physical drive or another online cloud service.
I too have lost 6 months of files on Thursday last week. Absolutely devastated. Google Drive is meant to be my backup. I spoke to support and they told me that the files are not recoverable. I think this might be a forced update to remote clients that has corrupted the client FS where files are stored. Software should not be written in a manner where files can just disappear off a client's machine. This is unacceptable.
Google Drive is meant to be my backup.
No no no, that's not a backup!
A backup has to be at least offline (a snapshot/clone of your "live"-data), off-site (not in the same place as your "live-data"), search for 3-2-1 backups.
Google Drive is live, that's why your files are away and you cant do anything against it, again THAT'S NOT A BACKUP but your files on someone else's computer.
The most important thing with backups, test your restore periodically, my rule is: No successful restore = no backup. Sound's logical, but it happened many time to customers, always a mail with "Backup ok" but when checking the data there was nothing written since half a year.
The line between backups and live data has become somewhat blurred since file versioning was intruduced to protect against overwrites and deleted files can be recovered. Why were these features introduced in the first place if not to provide some of the features that backups have traditionally been used for?
Clearly, what happened here should not have happened. It doesn't matter whether you call it backup or cloud storage. Google promised to store that data. They failed to do so.
My backups are supposed to protect me against my own mistakes, not against Google's mistakes. Protection against Google's mistakes should be Google's job. They should have redundancy. They should have backups.
If they provide a storage system that does not reliably store data, they should put a big fat warning label on every single one of their products that uses this storage system:
Do not ever trust us to store your data! It could be gone any second. Always make offsite backups!
At the end of the day you are right of course. But the users's mistake is not actually to have mistaken live data for a backup. The mistake is to think that Google reliably stores data when in fact there is absolutely no contractual obligation for them to do so.
Why were these features introduced in the first place if not to provide some of the features that backups have traditionally been used for?
The key word being "some", not "all".
Yes, file versioning means you don't have to go back to clunky backups to restore an older version.
But it does absolutely nothing for data loss, which has always been the primary purpose of a backup. Accessing older file versions has only ever been a secondary purpose.
The primary purpose of backup systems has always been to protect against data loss caused by failing/lost hardware or by accidentally deleting/overwriting data.
Overwrites and deletes should largely be covered by versioning and soft deletes.
Data loss caused by failing or lost hardware should be covered by a business relationship with a data storage service provider.
This service provider role is what's new and different when we're talking about cloud storage. And this is why I reject a direct comparison with traditional backup systems.
Yes you're right, the data should have been backed up to protect against data loss. But why is it the user's job to do that rather than Google's?
I think users should be able to have a reasonable expectation that their backup needs are covered by using a cloud storage service with versioning and soft deletes.
The fact that this expectation isn't met borders on false advertising.
I think users should be able to have a reasonable expectation
Sure, of course they should. But nothing in this life is perfect. Google engineers will roll out a configuration change that has unintended consequences that results in data loss. Or your account gets falsely flagged for abuse and you get locked out. Or your computer gets infected with ransomware that accesses your cloud sync, creating duplicate encrypted files, deleting the originals, and emptying the trash -- so much for your version history.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket, create your own backup. It's "the user's job to do that rather than Google's" because at the end of the day, other people mess up, and it's your personal responsibility to safeguard against that if you want to protect against losing your data. It's always been this way and always will be.
I'm not denying that it's a good idea to make independent, offsite backups of cloud data for many reasons (even though some cloud services have protections against your ransomware scenario).
But I think it's a bit unfair to blame users for using something like Google Drive as a backup system, because it does in fact have all the main features of a rather mediocre backup system.
Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers, such as making proper backups, copying files to multiple devices, keeping it all up-to-date and in sync.
These things are hard to get right. Most people's backups are utterly chaotic, unreliable, insecure, incomplete and vulnerable to some of the same attacks you describe.
Same (no real backup) is pretty much true about non-rooted Android phones?
Not sure what you mean, downloading and backup your take-out-data from google maybe?
The average consumer never backed anything up. They don’t have time nor willingness to test restorations.
In that respect, cloud storage was supposed to be a major step up for the average person.
The main idea of a backup is to have a >COPY< of your data backed up somewhere... if the only copy is on google drive, you have no backup at all.
I always wondered why people store information on 3rd party computers, specifically big tech companies that sell their info to advertisers, go figure...
Convenience and reliability. This is the first major data loss story I've heard related to drive in, what, a decade? 5 years?
On average, I lose two or three local media devices every decade. I will happily outsource that problem to somebody with full-time concerns of backup and restoration. Especially at the price point of free.
Sharing personal and business documents with a third party provides no real "convenience" despite any initial perception. If you haven't yet comprehended this, rest assured that you will soon. It's essential to recognize that convenience and privacy typically stand in opposite realms, offering divergent outcomes.
I have a relative with complicated medical needs whom I provide a lot of medical liaison labor for. Along with the rest of the family.
The ability to consolidate his medical history into a Google Doc and have it synchronized across devices, history-stamped, and accessible by the family members who are helping him is life-changing. It has kept him in his own home for years longer than of we lacked these technologies because it allows us to seamlessly coordinate his care among visits and specialists better than the local hospital network does.
When people say "provides no real convenience," I have to conclude they don't have the challenges we face.
This tech has quietly changed the world for the better.
convenience and privacy typically stand in opposite realms
And thank God the trade-off can be made. We damaged the efficacy of medical care in the name of privacy in this country; were can use Google Docs to counterweight that in our family. If Google gets to know intimate details of my relative's cascading dementia as a consequence, fine.
The real convenience is to be able to collaborate on a document in real time with pretty much any of my clients anywhere in the world. If you can tell me how I can do this reliably myself for less than $100 a month using a frictionless browser based interface that is acceptable to my corporate clients I’m all ears.
True, but it's always good to have a backup of Google Drive through something like Syncdocs or Duplicati.
Yes, you just can't have data in one copy if you care about it. It's a cliche at this point: There are two kinds of people... those who do backups and those who will. I upgraded involuntarily long time ago.
In a world where almost no individual has good backup discipline, cloud storage has helped them stave off the data reaper much longer than they would have alone.
Two or more copies is still the inescapable rule, but having a cloud store is preferable to no cloud store.
This is the first major data loss story I've heard related to drive in, what, a decade? 5 years?
Not bad, but still... no copy, no data.
Yea I've always wondered why people take their cars to the mechanic, and go off to the Dr themselves. Everyone should be an expert in everything, why offload something you don't fully understand to a 3rd party? Just spend all your spare time becoming an expert in the domain with which you currently struggle, and you'll never need to rely on anyone again.
PS: This was written by power generated by a generator I built myself, it's super relia
Are there any reports of data loss from Gmail? My friend has lost all her Gmail emails since May 2023 until Tuesday 21 November.
Now that you mention it, I did have gmail fail to deliver a bunch of email from Thursday - Friday. Didn’t notice until Saturday when a bunch of email came in. I’m a 0 unread kind of guy so getting 15 emails in one morning was abnormal.
My friend has lost all her Gmail emails since May 2023 until Tuesday 21 November.
I did have gmail fail to deliver a bunch of email from Thursday - Friday.
I'm honestly just stunned to be reading stuff like this. I'm only just now realizing this that I'd always implicitly assumed that Google would not make mistakes like this. I guess it's time to go frantically run Takeout on all of my Google accounts... and figure out somewhere to save the ZIP files other than Google Drive.
Just curious, how do you know that Gmail failed to deliver the email? Is it possible that you just genuinely got no email for a couple days, and then got a spike of email on Saturday? Poisson processes do be like that sometimes...
I'm only just now realizing this that I'd always implicitly assumed that Google would not make mistakes like this.
I kind of agree, but I noticed a little while ago that there some quirk in my Google Drive where a directory was empty but the directory was also appearing in two separate parent directories. I'm moving off Google Drive for different reasons but I'm sure I had a file in there that has disappeared.
Any file/directory in Google Drive could have multiple parents by design (this behavior was discontinued a few years ago), so a directory appearing in two separate parent directories doesn’t necessarily indicate a quirk.
Another counterintuitive thing about Google Drive is items with the same name can coexist in the same directory.
It looks like I've "lost" all of my paid gsuite account emails prior to Oct 13rd if I look at "all mail" and Oct 5th if I look at "important" mail. My free account appears to be missing emails prior to May 10th if I look at "all mail" and Apr 2nd if I look at "important" mail. Searching for terms I know are included in tons of emails going back years returns even older results.
Given that I can see older emails when filtering or searching, I'm hopeful none of the messages are actually gone, just unreferenced.
All gmail views are searches (ie. a view of "Inbox" is simply a search for mail tagged Inbox). My guess is that someone is trying to save money on search indexing and limiting the number of results that can be returned.
I had something similar happen to my paid, enterprise tier Google Workspace account. One day, the entire drive was as if I went in a time machine back quite literally ~six years (I've had the account for a looong time). Dozens of gigabytes of files gone, and dozens of gigabytes of old files I've 100% deleted in their place (though, I don't linger too much on the "is google actually deleting things" theory, because it is a Workspace account and maybe I have some kind of "never actually delete data" setting enabled, I don't know and haven't looked, the Workspace admin UI requires a PhD to figure out).
I wasn't too worried, as I sync everything to a local NAS. It was actually quite an interesting trip down memory lane. The next day, it was back to normal.
They really ought to coordinate with users in circumstances like these. What if you'd already begun to fix it - would your efforts have been rolled back? Or if you just happened to use the opportunity to undertake a big cleanup / organizational overhaul on your folder structure?
In the support forum they were pretty clear to "don't touch the root folder while our engineers investigate".
Yeah I'm really not sure, except that I definitely did not receive any communication about what happened (this was back in ~May this year). I also did not proactively reach out to Support (busy that day, had backups, and it was fixed by the next day so).
Also to clarify; while its technically possible that the Cloud Sync application on my Synology NAS could have done it; it can be configured with bi-directional sync and is fully authenticated to commit files back to Google Drive and delete existing ones. I have it set to "Download Remote Changes Only" and always have; and while a software bug there could have caused it, the files that re-appeared were long, long deleted to me, everywhere, and I didn't have copies of them on the NAS. Very nice to have them re-appear for a day and get pulled down for actual long-term backup locally though!
and maybe I have some kind of "never actually delete data" setting enabled, I don't know and haven't looked
Almost certainly. This is a feature, so that when users accidentally delete everything, the sysadmin can fix it.
the Workspace admin UI requires a PhD to figure out
It's designed for trained sysadmins, not end users. Still, it's pretty easy to figure out with some google searches.
I think its bold to assert that its "designed" for anyone; but certainly, it "requires" a trained sysadmin to fully understand what is going on.
Ha. Touché. You actually made me laugh out loud. Thanks!
while we wait for instructions from our Engieers (sic)
This, combined with the fact that Google has said nothing officially about this, leads me to believe this is a hoax.
Wouldn’t be the first time something like this happened. If I recall correctly, there was also a gmail data loss issue a few years back?
Edit: ok, it was in 2011, which is a bit more than just a few years. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/03/01/gmail.lost.found/...
Yes, it has happened before. BTW, they guarantee nothing. So don't expect any other help than "Sorry we'll try to do better."
Looks like I got hit, nothing showing after Jun 1.
Another hoaxer...
There are enough cases, including one of a Google Workspace administrator, that I don't think it's a hoax - but if it were widespread enough, we would've heard about it as soon as it happened.
Stupid question maybe. Do one’s gmail attachments live on your Google Drive? This would be a separate system no? (Eg I don’t normally attach things via Google drive nor put attachments there when gmail tries to encourage me to do so..)
It's an entirely separate system.
Aren't large attachments transparently put in Google Drive and linked to the email instead of being added as direct attachments?
Only on the sending side.
Logically separate, physically living in the same boxes.
I recently purchased a Synology with 2 disks in raid 1 to backup all my Google Drive, all my Google Photos files continuously.
I feel much better since doing this (apart, of course, for the fact I now need to back up my Synology too to really feel good!)
And for those who think Google Takeout is there to save you, just bear in mind it can be very erratic with large volumes (I had the biggest pain to get my Google Photo despite taking out less than 200 gb, it took several tries to have all the files)
No one is safe against account issue, or as it seems to be the case in the help thread, pure data loss. Just back things up and rely on cloud for flexibility rather than storage.
why raid 1 for backup machine?
What other raid could he have on a two drive NAS? I have the same setup at home with some push to the cloud and have the peace of mind that if one drive fails I can recover from it with a rebuild of the other drive
Sorry. missed the 2bay part.
I've been doing Google Takeout backups to Synology for a while. Curious is you or any other users have an automated way to do this instead? So an automated way to backup Google Photos to Synology.
At my former employer we successfully used Google vault to recover our HR files which vanished due to a Google bug (there were no audit logs of anyone moving or deleting them). I think vault is only available on higher business tiers. The files were actually still there (if you had the direct URL you could still access them) but just missing from the directory. I don't know if that's true for the present bug but if you're files have gone missing it's worth trying.
One strange effect of vault export is that it converts all docs to word format. This seems odd in an evidentiary process, but I guess lawyers only use word anyway. It also doesn't export them is the same layout (I guess that's probably somewhere in the metadata though)
Google doesn't have a native file format (at least not one visible to users) - so they have to convert it if you want to be able to take the files away and use them elsewhere.
I'd guess their lack of format is deliberate - by never letting their own format leave their own machines, they have no need for backwards compatibility and can do data format changes easily and update all the data too.
They must have something, what happens to Google docs in drive when you sync them to your hd?
Open one... It's a JSON file just pointing to the web URL.
Thanks - I'm on linux, there's no client.
I guess it must actually download it if you select 'work offline' but probably still obfuscates it somehow.
Might not be data loss. Could be a UI or API issue but the underlying data is still there. Or just a stale file index point to an old directory tree or something. Who knows.
To users, this is data loss until they can provide a way around it.
I know that internally this is different, but until there’s anything a user can do, this is data loss for users.
I think you knew my point though. Data unavailability maybe? Things which are lost are not available later.
The problem is that the users are unable to figure out if it's data loss or not(unavailability). The fact that my data is just one of many other problem to them and that to figure out if it's something I can count on them to get them back or not I either have to be really important to them or, you know, nothing to do but to just wait. That's horrible.
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.
Are you using your own domain for email etc. in your Workspace account? Or still using a Gmail address?
I use my own domain, forwarded to by my old Gmail account for any legacy emails :)
Isn’t Google Drive supposed to be a mirror, duplicate, of your data for ease of access? Their desktop app seems designed around this idea from the very beginning.
Sounds like very risky to do as some users have reported and running their company off Google Drive with no local drive counterpart! Why in heavens name not. Drives are cheap.
Even many years ago, I had some issues uploading a few thousand files at once and never really relied on it as a critical infrastructure service but always saw it more like an automated cloud backup or convenience service geared for consumer use at best.
You need to be in good charge of your own data first and foremost. Then it can be nice if a recovery scenario helped you in that Google had some files too of course.
Drives are cheap, but creating a system and process to ensure you always have a local copy of everything on the Google Drive is not cheap. It requires ongoing monitoring and maintenance like all other infrastructure.
No; Google Drive is designed to act like a separate, well, drive that you can store data on.
In earlier times, their desktop app would synchronize the files in Google Drive with a folder you designate on your computer, because that was what was supported; these days, it mounts as if it's a network drive (at least on macOS; I don't believe I've actually seen the desktop app in operation on Windows recently).
Lots of posters in that thread are mentioning “DriveFS”, something I think is related to the google drive app (maybe only on windows?). Does this issue potentially affect everyone using Google Drive, even if only through the web interface, or just those who have used the desktop app?
That thread mentioned that the web interface users also were loosing data. The driveFS seems to be a last chance to save some data that was cached on the local drive by the desktop app. Some files appear to still have a local cache
I've got a feeling driveFS is deleting data, and users are also seeing it deleted on the web version.
It's an official google product, and now seems to be called "Google Drive for Desktop".
Over-reliance on cloud service is a critical mistake. We tend to forget that these technologies are just as prone to errors as your day to day devices. Do not save your sensitive files on the cloud.
You probably mean that it shouldn't be your only copy. Of course. But day to day devices are definitely less reliable than the redundant storage managed by a bunch of expert storage engineers.
You need to be an expert storage engineer to set up a simple, globally distributed ZFS pool feat. rsync nowadays?
“I trust everyone, including Google, and I use their services; I just don’t trust the devil inside them.”
I have been a customer of Insync[1] since its early buggy days and have been grandfathered into quite a few licenses. I set it to sync offline of many of my Google drives (which are mostly work-related), and then I asked it to convert my local copy to OpenDocument Format[2]. I sync that local copy to a backup.
I had had enough crashes and data loss in my life to conclude that I needed backups of the backup of the backups. Have backups. Have Time Machine[3] or similar setups for regularly used documents. My daughter thinks I’m a magician when I make her documents fly out and choose the version she lost or wants to recover.
I’ve no affiliations with InSync; I’m just another happy customer.
Have Time Machine[3] or similar setups for regularly used documents.
I have been very happy with Arq [1], have been using it since 2014. Incremental encrypted backups, many targets (SSH, S3, B2, etc.), etc. I restored files from backups many times. I also use Arq with object lock, so that my backups are immutable for a while.
The developer also really listens to users. In Arq 6, the Mac and Windows UI were done in Electron. Users didn't like it and they switched the UI back to native in Arq 7.
another insync happy customer here. Set it up once, and forgot about it.
No way. My mom called me today and we spent an hour trying to figure out where her Google Drive files went. I was unable to figure out how this was happening and I'm convinced this must be the cause.
I'm now doubly grateful I decided to keep my parents on their current provider instead of merging it all into GDrive!
Slightly off topic, What is the biggest backup data server we can build using rpi ? 16TB ? May be with multiple disk for redundancy ?
At least 1.2PB...
That's the problem with Google Drive or any synced state clouds. People think about them as "I have it on my local computer and in the cloud, so I'm much safer".
A lot of bad things can happen that are even invisible to the user until they find out data is missing.
You save a file on a disk, something goes wrong with the cloud client, especially on bad connection and your file is either never synced (you will lose it on OS reinstall) or even deleted on your side.
Cloud provider has some issues, they restore the backup and things are synced back on your computer to their restored state.
Cloud provider started to dislike a file (their antivirus marked it), so they remove it from their side and it syncs to your computer. But that was a false positive (well, you could have your reasons to keep the infected file as well).
Ok, I know, at least for Google Drive their official client is pretty well written (I was using it for a long time), but bugs happen.
Conclusion? Make your own backup.
You’re making the wrong comparison, though. The average consumer never made a backup. Having your stuff on a cloud service is a major improvement to that MO.
How can this happen?
I wonder whether it's a client-side sync bug that's reporting old state as new, causing newer data to get overwritten. In that case, the data should be recoverable by rolling back history.
I use only the web interface, so I don't know what clients are available these days.
For cloud backup of anything, even moderate quantities of documents, i've never trusted Google in the least despite its size, even aside from its grotesquely parasitic "privacy" policies (a complete joke of a word for anything to do with that company). Now there's crap like this event, affecting who knows how many customers.
Basically, a 3-2-1 strategy is also a good idea. A physical HD/SSD in a safe place for one, along with synced working copies of documents in a machine you're using, and then in case of deep catastrophe, some sort of cloud solution, preferably one that's zero knowledge, either because it has it baked in or from using something like cryptomator.
So far I've tried several online backup services and maybe unexpectedly, the most easy to work with and simply functional across multiple machines and several external drives has been SpiderOak. Its desktop interface is shit, but the overall service is easy to use and has never failed me one so far, and it constantly, incrementally conducts deduplicated backups of even minor file/folder changes as long as it's running. As a second option, Arq has been nice too, though its UI is also rather clumsy.
It’s gotten to the point of I have a problem with “site.com”, when I’m searching for a solution I have to omit “site.com” from my results. If I don’t I usually end up in some technical content marketing BS, a useless forum post (bonus points if it is just a wrapper for Discourse), or completely out of date documentation.
I have resisted that move for a long time, but this year I moved to using a hosted and managed nextcloud instance for all my file syncing needs.
It is run by a small local webhosting company, at which I've been a customer for my whole adult life (~20 years)
"Store stuff in our cloud" they say.
My Pixel 5 bricked recently after the latest android update.
Waited weeks to upgrade so that upgrade issues could be resolved by Google.
Lesson learned.
I can't imagine having any data in someone else's so-called "cloud" like this, let alone important data.
These days I use Google Drive for exactly one spreadsheet so mercifully I wasn't affected. It's just a data entry app for my job which figures out the value of my time in dollars per hour but losing this file would still have been devastating to me because it's got years of irreplaceable data in it.
I should probably switch to Microsoft already. Excel has dynamic tables support even on mobile. Or better yet, make a proper Android app to replace this thing.
I've done my best to move away from Google the last few years but Drive is the one that I can't kick as so many clients share documents/files with it.
People always looked at me as if I was wasting my time for taking a monthly takeout backup and storing it on a local disk.
At times I thought I might be too, but now I'm glad I did it.
Equally supported conclusion based on this thread: half a dozen Windows users have the same virus.
I will always remember the automatic removal of the Christchurch shooting video from users' personal Google Drive and Dropbox accounts, with no prior warnings or explanations provided.
This is awful.
This is awful. I can feel the pain and uncertainty in these forum posts. Just recently Pixel users with multiple user profiles lost access to their files as well.[0] In that case the data was not actually lost and the issue was fixed in a later update.
[0]https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/239104039/can-n...
Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
Learn to backup and don’t blindly trust a single company. Depending on the data, a single external USB drive might be enough, but if you have important files you’d better have a backup strategy in place (like the 3-2-1 backup rule).
There are other support requests indicating missing data:
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245534268/a-spreadsh...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245524854/data-in-go...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245596891/5-months-o...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245661673/disappeari...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245407620/i-can-t-fi...
Has anyone with a Workspace contract had this issue?
As an aside, I am curious the motivation for customers to staff huge company support forums. In some ways, it’s nice for there to be a responsive community, but in other ways, I think a trillion dollar company should pay for excellent customer service.
E.g. in this case their volunteer customer service is left with this and there is no way to even know if Google sees this:
“Sorry Yeonjoong,
As a group of volunteers, we do not have access to user accounts and can only help by sharing our experiences. In this case there is nothing we can do. “