Submitted 11 months ago by Salamendacious@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/google_drive_files_disappearing/
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.
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…
I too, distinctly remember being excited about butt stuff.
I see what you did there.
No butt stuff
Self hosted clouds are superior.
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.
I have a local backup of everything in my NAS and then I create a nighty backup to backblaze B2. Costs like 1-2$ a month for 400ish GB. Never rely on one solution.
And I distinctly remember being asked the first time if I wanted to back up my phone photos to the cloud and thinking fuck no, some photos are private and I don’t want them leaving my device automatically. And was soon validated by all the stories of screensavers using those photos and embarrassing ones popping up, which was fucking wild to me because just making your photos randomly your screen saver also sounded like an immediate bad idea that could easily go wrong.
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.
You need an encrypted cloud copy. 3-2-1 backup with duply to wasabi (AWS bucket-like). Otherwise you’re hosed if you have a fire/tornado/theft/etc.
Lololol every neckbeard nerd a few minutes before they lose years of family pictures.
I’ve used MEGA for about 6 years now, previously Dropbox. I switched after Dropbox lost over 2TB of my data.
MEGA hasn’t lost my data but something glitched on their side and duplicated every file, and with the amount of data I had in there it wasn’t feasible to manually fix. So I had to delete everything and start again.
I have all my cloud data stored on a NAS at home, that is backed up to a second NAS decice, a MEGA sync client running on home server keeps it all in sync to the cloud. I selectively sync folders from MEGA on different devices, or access files directly from the MEGA app when remote, or work with the local copy of my data when connected to home LAN. At least MEGA works cross platform, and MEGAcmd for Linux allows easy scripting and other automation possibilities.
All commercial cloud storage has one major problem, your files are hostage to their increasing subscription fees (which will always increase because capitalism). e.g. I was paying $60 a year with Dropbox, if I were still using it, it would be $140 a year now - and I’d have no choice but to keep paying.
I switched after Dropbox lost over 2TB of my data.
How? Randomly gone? Hard to believe that.
I mean the OP is talking about the same thing happening with Google so what makes it so hard to believe?
This was in 2016. I accepted an invite to join a Dropbox Business account from my employer. This was linked to my personal account. It was early days for this at Dropbox, and there was a bug. When the accounts got linked it completely wiped my personal account.
It’s not hard to believe. My experience with Dropbox was fucking terrible. The company engages in bait and switch sales tactics, so there is really no reason to trust the technical portion of their service to be reliable.
Google is fine for most people, but it shouldn’t be the sole backup. If you don’t have (at least) 3 separate means of backup, you don’t really have a backup. 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.
I do.*
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.
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
Best call out in history lol
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.
Jokes on them, all the files I put on there are encrypted.
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.
I use an external hard drive
Dumb question,
If you have an external hard drive for your cloud backup data, why use a cloud service?
Do you have it plugged in all the time or do you periodically do a full transfer?
A regular portable hard drive?
I use rclone and a backup script to periodically download my Google drive contents to a portable external hard drive
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.
OneDrive
I switched to Sync because Google Drive reports that all my files are synced when they are not. There is no way to correct it or force Drive to upload the missing files and there’s no way to know when it is lying. I had to constantly check manually, which was a pain in the ass. They lied constantly.
Sync.com has been excellent. They are cheaper, easier to use and do everything Google Drive did, including sharing folders for uploads and downloads with non-subscribers (which Dropbox can’t do). Oh, and they don’t fucking lie. Fuck Google.
Imagine losing your beloved dog’s last photos just cuz you decided to back them up onto someone else’s computer.
Glad I took all my stuff out of Google Drive
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!
I just exported all my data from it a few months ago. Looks like I made a wise decision
Netizens.
Yes? We’re here and listening.
If it wasn’t for the expensive drives, I would.
DECtapes all the way
No! Not my porn!
lwuy9v5@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ha. Amateurs. I disappeared YEARS of my files by self-hosting.
NumbersCanBeFun@kbin.social 11 months ago
I drunkenly formatted a backup drive once. Not a fun realization to make the next morning.
iAmTheTot@kbin.social 11 months ago
... Why were you doing anything remotely like formatting a drive while drunk?
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 11 months ago
Never flash disks/pendrives on evening or if you want things quickly done. Always unplug everything else first.