UPDATED Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some netizens on the goliath’s support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished.
The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023.
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DECtapes all the way
If it wasn’t for the expensive drives, I would.
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Perfect example of why letting some company that doesn’t give two shits about you, hold your important documents or whatever is a stupid idea…cloud storage is inherently bad and no company can be trusted more then storing your own data at home on a secure drive or two.
I don’t use any any Google services for good reasons, but I wouldn’t trust myself more not to lose my data than Google.
What do people use to have backups of their google drive content?
My devices 🤣
Unfortunately I’ve read reports it’s actively syncing deletions to devices.
Huh. A google service that keeps working, even after it’s supposed to. That’s new.
Backblaze B2, which I’m pretty sure is a repackaged S3 provider, or you can just skip them and go directly to AWS S3; though, both aren’t drag and drop user friendly like onedrive or gdrive. But both work well if you invest a little time with something like rclone.
Backblaze B2 is S3 compatible but not built on S3. B2 is also considerably cheaper than S3, so it probably wouldn’t make sense if it was built on S3.
Correct, Backblaze is their own host and post on their blog often about their tech and processes. They’ve got a lot of good info on how they designed their server storage racks and stats on drive failures by brand etc
OneDrive
A regular portable hard drive?
I use an external hard drive for all of my cloud backups
Do you have it plugged in all the time or do you periodically do a full transfer?
I do weekly backups. However, if I modify or add something really important I create a backup right at that time
Dumb question,
If you have an external hard drive for your cloud backup data, why use a cloud service?
Accessible from anywhere and any device. Non-local backups in case of a fire at your house and such.
Makes sense, thank you
For any really important data, you should always have at least 3 copies. 1) Your working copy on your computer. 2) A local backup which could be an external hard drive, a NAS, another computer, or whatever. 3) An off-site backup. That could be a cloud service, a computer at a friend’s or family member’s house, an external hard drive in a safety deposit box, etc. The off-site backup is in case your house burns down or is robbed.
If it’s REALLY important, you may have even more than that. There’s also the issue of how often do you update the backups. A hard drive in a safety deposit box is hard to update compared to uploading to Google Drive which can be automatic, but the hard drive in the safety deposit box is more secure. So you have to weigh your pros and cons.
Can you give me an example of what really important data could look like?
Genuine question, I don’t work in IT or work with computers very often. I’m tech literate, but the most important thing I really have is my resume and even then I can redo it if I lost it.
For most people it will be things like tax documents, medical receipts (assuming you are in a country where that’s important), photos of kids’ life milestones, photos of family members who have passed away, copies of leases, receipts for large purchases for insurance purposes if your house burns down. Things like that. Also, if you do freelance work like web design, photography, video editing, writing, music production, game design, research, etc, you want to make sure that stuff is backed up.
Offsite is always a good idea in case of a disaster like fire.
Offsite? When I googled that it showed a team retreat planning website. How does that work?
it means somewhere else
I think they mean “off-site”, meaning that it’s not at the same location. That way if something happens at one location, such as burglary, fire, etc., your data is still safe.
Netizens.
Yes? We’re here and listening.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some posters on the company’s support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished.
There is little information regarding what has happened; some users reported that synchronization had simply stopped working, so the cloud storage was out of date.
Others could get some of their information back by fiddling with cached files, although the limited advice on offer for the affected was to leave things well alone until engineers come up with a solution.
A message purporting to be from Google support also advised not to make changes to the root/data folder while engineers investigat the issue.
European cloud hosting provider OVH suffered a disastrous fire in 2021 that left some customers scrambling for backups and disaster recovery plans.
Earlier in 2023, the company’s europe-west9 region took a shower after water made its presence felt inside a Parisian Google Cloud datacenter.
The original article contains 342 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No! Not my porn!
i distinctly remember 10 years ago being so excited about the cloud stuff, it seemed so futuristic, tech had so many wonderful potentials, having it autosave and automatically be accessible anywhere seemed so amazing…
then the enshittification started. i would never dream of letting google or apple touch my files, let alone be the sole backup and arbiter of them. nothing gold can stay…
Do you not have anything in the cloud or do you use another service? I was using carbonite but I gave them up years ago.
Have you read the Terms of Service of Google Drive for regular users?? You will give Google irrevocable and total rights on everything that is placed there for them to use as they see fit. It bewilders me how people still use that ‘service’…
Citation needed?
Google explicitly stated the exact opposite of what you’ve said here: Google Drive Terms of Service
That talks about ownership, not access. So they won’t claim they wrote the short story you uploaded. But take a look at this, “We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our Program Policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law. But that does not necessarily mean that we review content, so please don’t assume that we do.”
Are you good with Google literally telling you that they look at your content, but “please, don’t assume that they do?” If you feel they have your privacy and best interests in mind with a statement like this and they aren’t algorithmically sniffing every thing you upload, I have some extended warranty coverage I would like to sell you.
I know for a fact that Google scans everything, including zip files, and WILL delete things they deem a problem.
I tried to store my own, paid for, copies of software, like office. Google deleted it. OK, I’ll zip and password protect. Nope, scanned, deleted. Never bothered trying to encrypt first, just moved on from Google.
Now with tools like Resilio, Syncthing, and Tailscale, cloud holds little value other than backup.
I know for a fact that Google scans everything, including zip files, and WILL delete things they deem a problem.
I tried to store my own, paid for, copies of software, like office. Google deleted it. OK, I’ll zip and password protect. Nope, scanned, deleted. Never bothered trying to encrypt first, just moved on from Google.
I know for a fact that Google scans everything, including zip files, and WILL delete things they deem a problem.
I tried to store my own, paid for, copies of software, like office. Google deleted it. OK, I’ll zip and password protect. Nope, scanned, deleted. Never bothered trying to encrypt first, just moved on from Google.
Now with tools like Resilio, Syncthing, and Tailscale, cloud holds little value other than backup.
I really like Resilio a lot, after lots of issues with other sync software, it’s made for an excellent personal cloud.
I like Resilio, especially the selective sync feature. Unfortunately because it keeps the file index in ram, it kills my phone with my media share. It also uses a lot of resources on my Windows machine.
Syncthing doesn’t have this performance hit, but… It doesn’t have selective sync.
Sigh.
So I use both for different purposes, with Resilio not running by default.
Best call out in history lol
Ha. Amateurs. I disappeared YEARS of my files by self-hosting.
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… Why were you doing anything remotely like formatting a drive while drunk?
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If you just did a format and didn’t overwrite the whole disk you could use DMDE, ddrescue, photorec, or testdisk to restore the files.
Or even something nonfree like recuva.
But this is why you’re supposed to do backups in 3s!
Nothing bad happened last time??
I mean, you think it’s more enjoyable doing that sober?
Google is fine for most people, but it shouldn’t be the sole backup. If you don’t have (at least) 3 separate instances of a backup, you don’t really have a reliable backup strategy. Preferably an onsite hard backup, an offsite hard backup, and a cloud backup.
I know quite a few tech oriented people and I don’t know anyone who actually has the holy trinity of backups. I know quite a few who have physical backups at home and cloud though.
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Considering data durability for some data services are providing 11 9’s, just two of those leads to extremely high durability. So to say that is unreliable is just not reasonable. I have no problem with being risk averse but that is a bit extreme.
