Anecdotal, but with Google Photos, I've observed data loss to the point where I no longer trust the service with anything valuable.
Photos I know I've taken are missing. There are periods of time when I walked around a city 10+ years ago taking a large volume of photos, like when I first moved to Seattle. Going back to that window of time in Google Photos, I only have a handful of photos from that walk.
There are also partially corrupted photos from many years back. Photos that only partially render, or render as noise.
Luckily, all of these are random low-value photos from my youth. They aren't core memories of my kiddos growing up or anything. I'm glad I discovered the data loss in that window of time, and not by losing photos of my kiddos' birthdays.
Tangentially related, if you've ever had the pleasure of migrating away from Google Photos/Drive with Google Takeout, prepare to spend some time fixing photo metadata in your library and re-embedding exif data with exiftool. Takeout strips out the exif data into a non-standard JSON sidecar, as opposed to something more standard/well supported like XMP.
It's unfortunately hostile for non-technical users that care about their photo metadata, which I assume is most people since it includes data such as creation timestamps and location. It's not too bad to script this if you're savvy (and careful), but otherwise you'll have to pay for a third-party tool[1]
> Tangentially related, if you've ever had the pleasure of migrating away from Google Photos/Drive with Google Takeout, prepare to spend some time fixing photo metadata in your library and re-embedding exif data with exiftool. Takeout strips out the exif data into a non-standard JSON sidecar, as opposed to something more standard/well supported like XMP.
I heard this claim before but I was never able to reproduce it. Does this only happen with the "Storage Saver" option enabled and/or when metadata has been manually changed? At least with the "Original Quality" option my takeout data seems to exactly match the files that were originally uploaded.
Worse than that videos shared with you are reencoded to 1080p with crap bitrate. IIRC the JSON sidecar is also missing for these. Doesn't matter if you save them to your library. You can watch them in original quality and see all of the metadata on photos.google.com but they don't get taken out.
The probability of both failing and/or both deciding to just delete my account because I look "suspicious" is very small. But I _have_ had iCloud mysteriously not being able to retreive old photos.
Worth noting that archived photos don't show up in most places, including the timeline. Not saying it's not buggy, but if you haven't already specifically checked the archived photos section, it's worth checking.
I do a takeout quarterly and stash the data someplace safe. I've been burning the data to M-DISC blu-rays for a while now as a deep archive copy, they seem pretty reliable.
I also now have multiple apps syncing all the photos from my phone so they're stored in a couple different cloud photo locations on top of that.
I did not notice direct data loss yet, but I noticed other behavior that made me reconsider how much I trust it.
For example in the past I had several occurrences of duplicate photos where each of the two instances has exactly the same bytes as the other one. Usually that should have gotten deduplicated, but it hasn't. What's even stranger is that deleting one of the two pictures also deleted the other one. Re-uploading the original photo usually made both duplicates show up again. The way how I was able to get rid of those duplicates was to wait a day or so until I re-upload the data and to attempt that process several times. At some point only a single photo showed up.
Also those duplicates only showed up in the regular photo view. Even if both of the duplicate instances were added to an album viewing the album would only show the photo once.
There really isn't any single service you can move to, to be "safe". This is why 3-2-1 backup schemes exist for important data, although they have morphed a bit with cloud usage. The basic idea is to be robust to any single point of failure (at minimum, but extra redundancy costs). So if your laptop or your google photos blows up, you still have everything.
If you have things you really care about not losing, you need a backup strategy.
The solution isn't to move. Every storage mechanism is going to have some amount of failures. The solution is redundancy. Store your valuable files on multiple medium. I know a lot of people that have both google photo and icloud - that works okay. You can also schedule backups to a NAS or some other cloud storage.
The quality of their software is vastly superior to Google Drive. They have mobile, desktop, and CLI apps on Windows/Apple/Linux. Been using them for a year without issues.
You want to pursue uncorrelated redundancy more than you want a signular alternative.
People who came up in the cloud era were promised the false (impossible) idea that large conpanies could and would eradicate your risk of data loss if you just paid them a few dollars a month.
That's not a thing. If you really can't tolerate some loss, you need to coordinate something more robust across a few different and dissimilar options. And even then you'll still have risk.
That said, even just making sure you keep local copies of your archive or print your treasured favorites can go a long way towards greater reliability that without a lot of extra effort.
This is not for everyone, but I host my family photos myself, most recently with this: https://piwigo.org/. I have been doing this since 2007 (started on a different software, called "gallery". Was able to migrate from gallery2 to gallery3 and now piwigo), and so far no major issues. Advantage: I can easily share photos with family, no need for iCloud, Facebook, or indeed any service- they just need a web browser on their desktop computer or phone.
Personally I have turned off google photos and had turned off apple photos when I had an iphone for a couple of years.
Instead I use sync.com (yes, UI is horrible and it's slow, but it works) and my synology NAS that is mirroring to a synology NAS at my fathers house (we mirror each others photos).
Basic rule of thumb, if it's free they don't care.
Everything in my family dropbox - I make sure all of them can fit on both my and my wife's laptops. With backblaze backup. And a backup to a local external hard drive. I also keep a checksum of each file that I regularly... check.
This has been happening to me across all google products. Emails - random emails are just gone. Sometimes I can see evidence of them from body of replies. Maps - I am a HUGE user of maps, starring thousands of places as I planned travel over the years. Randomly 1-50% of my stars just won't be there. Sometimes they come back. Photos - same issue as OP in this thread, random clusters of photos (mostly 10+ year old ones) just gone. There are a lot of support threads out there of people reporting the exact problem with no real fixes too.
I noticed a while ago the UI would just show some photos for a day, and I'd have to click the down-arrow at the top right of the group of pictures for a date to get all the pictures of that date.
Anecdotally, I know a handful of my photos that were posted via Google+ are gone after that was turned down. I have been able to find all my other photos that were uploaded through Google Photos.
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.
> I highly recommend it (and a personal Google Workspace account)
I can't recommend against this enough, and I work at Google. Workspace accounts don't work with so many services. At least YouTube TV, Nest cameras, Google Home sharing, Google Play family accounts, Android parental controls, and Opinion Rewards are broken in my experience, probably a lot more.
It's a shame, especially for people who've had a Workspace account for many years, and have a bunch of email, documents, and media tied up in it.
It works great for me. I recommend it. I’m not sure what working at Google has to do with recommending or not.
I don’t use any of the non-core services because I expect them to be killed off soon anyway. For contacts, email, docs, and drive it works great. YouTube as well.
I have a “regular” Gmail account in case I need to use any niche services that don’t work with my Workspace account.
With cost of storage pretty low and AI being so good, I wonder if having a home based thing for everyday use, especially photos (Sort, tag, Memory creation, junk detection etc.) will become easy enough that cloud usage declines.
There are still tech hurdles yes, but NAS + a decent GPU for photos, email organization, assistant is going to be a killer business.
I use Synology which has its own Photos app. Honestly, it’s there right now. I prefer doing my own tagging but it’s able to automatically group things just fine.
I got a second Synology for Hyperbackup and send one to the other for backups. Seems to work well.
Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out, curious on maintenance cost though as I don't really want a project.
1 - How much time was setup?
2 - How many times did it break in the last year?
3 - How many of the summaries were actionable?
My main concern with active auto backup is maintenance time; my expectation is I'm busy and my personal backup would take me weeks to fix if and only if I notice there is an issue, and the summaries are alert fatigue.
I feel while this situation is avoidable, you will still lose data from your last successful backup and anything less than "just works" isn't viable for anything important vs manual duplication.
I have two copies of some files (local and Drive) and probably a few Drive-only despite having local sync. If my computer died in the same time as Google list the data, I would expect some data loss, but the cost of categorical prevention is very high.
That being said, if it is only $5 and is actually touchless,
Setup was about 15 minutes getting the Docker image to run on my VPS, and it’s broken zero times in two years. The summaries are very basic and just let you know how much was backed up and if there were any errors.
I was going to say, if Google is silently losing and corrupting files then backing up from there is just duplicating the failure. But perhaps his backup scheme accounts for this unreliability.
Yes, probably once every 2-3 months. There’s a great interface for restoring specific files.
I keep the version history to infinite, so even if files are corrupted or lost on newer backups I can always reference the old ones, back to day 0. Backblaze is great for this as the storage price is negligible.
I think it works in a similar way to Tarsnap or something like Duplicati, but it’s a lot easier to manage and plugs in nicely to all of the Workspace account (not just Drive).
Synology NAS can already do this without any third-party products via the ActiveBackup application. Supports Google Workspace and MS 365. It’s free, assuming you already own the Synology NAS. It replicates data from Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Drive within seconds or minutes, keeps a history of all changes and offers a nice timeline view to show and export data at any point in time.
CubeBackup is a nice alternative for me as it runs on a VPS. I’m often away from home for long periods due to business travel, and I like being able to remotely keep the backups working even if the NAS goes down or is turned off.
I do the same thing for Drive, but with rclone (which is free as in speech and beer). rclone makes it trivial to keep a mirror on backblaze and locally, which has come in quite handy a few times.
I’ve never looked into rclone although I’ve heard much about it. Looks very cool. I didn’t know it supported Google Drive.
One nice thing about CubeBackup is that it handles all of the Workspace account, not just the Drive file storage, but also the contacts, emails, etc. all of which is equally important to me.
For Google Drive files, you don't need a special account or service to back up to Synology and B2, which I also do. I use the Synology Cloud Sync service to automatically sync all Google Drive files to the synology, then another Cloud Sync task to backup the Synology to B2. Works great.
Synology is indeed great, but CubeBackup is a nice alternative for me as it runs on a VPS. I’m often away from home for long periods due to business travel, and I like being able to remotely keep the backups working even if the NAS goes down or is turned off.
Yes I host on a very cheap Hetzner VPS (which I use for other self-hosted Docker images as well) so it’s always up. The storage location is not on the VPS itself, it’s S3 and B2 compatible, so you can use AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, whatever.
Is there something similar for Google Accounts (not Google Workspace)? I do it manually: I have the every 3 months automatic backup and I upload it manually to S3, but I'd totally pay for a service that does this automatically providing my S3 keys (or similar).
I experienced different and in some ways more pernicious data loss with Google Drive several years ago: I was writing a novel, and Drive simply erased random paragraphs of text. Just poof, gone. I could find neither rhyme nor reason for it, either. Some had been edited in after the fact, while others were present in the original draft. All told, it equated to around 8K words over the course of the novel.
Granted, you usually want to pare down your words during the editing process, but I'd rather do it manually rather than have some malfunctioning computer system prune random blocks :)
I sent a support email, but it will surprise no one to learn I never heard anything back. Needless to say, I haven't trusted Google Drive since.
"but it will surprise no one to learn I never heard anything back"
(surprisingly?) ... I have colleagues that, even in 2023, will express genuine (not sarcastic shock) when a megacorp doesn't reply or provide decent support. I've only got a few, but the refrain will be something like "wow, I'm kinda surprised google's cloud support doesn't get back to us - sometimes for days. they've always had such a good reputation for support... i hope this is a blip".
It's as if they've only ever read marketing/sales leaflets, then really are genuinely surprised when things are 'normal' (meaning poor performance, non-responsive support, bad/wrong documentation, broken SDKs, data loss, etc).
A trick I've used a few times, in similar situations: Suggest that they look back in their notes / emails / whatever, find the specific MegaCorp support rep. who was so helpful the prior time, and ask that person to help.
That’s not a fair statement at all. A writer isn’t a computer expert, and shouldn’t have to be. Google Docs specifically positions itself as a product that takes care of all the data handling for you, and they market that fact quite heavily.
On the face of it, I can definitely see the upside: "the cloud" is typically synonymized with safety ("your data is backed up on our secure servers", etc.), not to mention the fact that you can edit your data from any of your devices logged into Google. Heck, you don't even need to install Office anymore: you just go to https://docs.google.com and it's all there.
I do agree with you, though: one of the most important rules for computing in general is to keep multiple backups of everything. A while back, a friend of mine made a habit of emailing herself drafts of her work, and kept multiple copies on her computer. It did save her once or twice.
Out of the interest of brevity, I didn't want to go into my full setup. However:
1. I write locally and have both manual and automatic backups (local and remote)
2. I upload drafts online for beta and alpha readers to leave comments
3. My group used to use Google Docs for this but stopped once I discovered the data loss
Happily, because local is the source of truth, I didn't lose any of my writing. I did, however, lose some feedback, and reconciling things was a pain.
How does people even notice that their data has gone missing? I can barely find my own documents in the train wreck that is the Google Drive UI. Any document written by anyone else in the organization can generally be considered lost unless you have a direct link sitting in an email or bookmark.
Cant have a pro in motion without a promotion point for it.. and it looks so good in the presentations. Useability? Function? Screw it.. it must look good in adds. Make all the things screenshot useable only.
I'm not defending google or saying they haven't done anything wrong here, but it is insanely hard to make Google drive. I very much doubt Google drive has a staff of any where near 100k employees and it's probably the largest file browser ever made. It's an engineering marvel. Can Google do better? Absolutely. But, it's objectively wrong to say there's nothing hard about building something like Google drive.
I think this is like looking at the Burj Khalifa and asking how hard it can be to make a building. It's not just a building, it's the tallest building ever built.
> How does people even notice that their data has gone missing?
They need the data and look for it and it's not there, but they remember they put it there?
At my job if a log file or data recording is too big for jira, but need to be attached to a bug report we sometimes store them on google drive. And then we link it from the ticket. If much later we get back to it and the link is 404 that would make us suspicious. If someone remembers the link working before that would make it clear it is not just a copy paste error with the url.
> How does people even notice that their data has gone missing?
That’s what I want to know too. Try to reconcile the cloud sync systems to make sure you aren’t missing anything. It’s basically impossible.
I also go crazy when I see MS touting OneDrive as a backup. I’m pretty sure moving (because of files-on-demand) my data to OneDrive where I can’t verify they aren’t losing stuff is not a backup. Add the risk of being banned and it becomes unconscionable IMO.
I mount it using their desktop client and use voidtools' everything to search for files.
Works reasonably well, though Google seems intent on breaking stuff every so often. Also Google hasn't figured out how to make it stop creating desktop.ini files everywhere yet. I'd say it makes them look like amateurs, but amateurs tend to be better at making software.
You can blame a different megacorp for the desktop.ini files: those are artifacts from windows explorer (I’m assuming you’re using a windows machine with the google drive mounted)
For non-images I suffer the same poblem. But for images I have yet to find a service that lets me search the heap better than Google Photos. It was amazing and was pre-AI craze. "My driveway in the summer." "<Child A> and <Child 1> on a dock" etc. I don't have to catalogue anything anymore. Apple has the same concept but it never works right.
I recently set up rclone to do nightly backups of my entire OneDrive to Dropbox, I feel pretty safe with this in terms of reliability, I find it unlikely that both services will catastrophically fail like this at the same time.
Would recommend rclone to anyone, it has worked pretty consistently so far.
I remember OneDrive doing this too, where photos of parents' children taking a bath etc. were flagged as child porn. Unfortunately unless you encrypt your data locally, privacy is one of the tradeoffs in using these services.
It wasn't really a conscious choice on my part, I had to get the subscription since I needed to collaborate on some files with people who were using it, and it forces you to add shared folders to your own Dropbox if you want to use them for collaboration, causing them to count towards your quota which is very annoying.
So I thought I might as well use it as a backup location if I have to get this subscription. I don't really expect privacy from these services, I guess it's a tradeoff.
yeah, cryptomator is the way to go for dropbox for windows in my experience at least for a FOSS solution (all the others I've tried were comparatively flakey though less memory intensive...)
rclone is a fantastic tool. I’ve done a few data migrations the other way, from NAS to M365 (for reasons) and it’s been mostly straightforward every time, even coping quite adeptly with request rate limiting by OneDrive.
It does diff, and can be configured to use various diff methods (checksum, modified datetime). I use it with S3 and to diff with checksum it needs to do an expensive, slow metadata read - so I use `--use-server-modtime` which only copies files newer than the remote S3 file time. https://rclone.org/s3/
This happened to our business about a year ago. Many random files went missing from GDrive. Eventually many turned back up (usually after a few weeks or months), but in the root folder instead of the folder the files were actually organized in. Google support told us we were crazy.
As an aside, we are looking from moving to a Google + Slack + Notion to OneDrive + Teams + Loop. What is appealing is the ability to collaborate more directly on files and “Loop Components” directly in Teams. But we’ve been waiting for 2 weeks now for support to help us enable Loop, because the instructions in the Microsoft docs aren’t working. They are working on it, which makes them better than Google in our experience, but it has been too slow. Maybe we have to upgrade to premium support?
I wish I could go back to google drive even with the file loss issues. OneDrive appears to be a sort of different view into Sharepoint's file management system, and boy is it painful to use.
That’s very fair. I totally recognize that Microsoft has a lot of half-baked me-too products to round out the suite. We are going to do a full evaluation before switching (if Loop ever gets enabled) to see if, despite the limitations, this improves collaboration, or if it just creates as many headaches.
It's so sad that Microsoft does not see how they ruin productivity of big orgs.
Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily.
They even broke the windows taskbar, which automatically combines things together. They assume that people working in an office have only 1 email open and 1 spreadsheet open, while most have 20 and dont know how to turn off this shitty UI.
Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data).
Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the data, and some users are going to permanently lose data (where they edited an old version of a document for example, and those edits cannot be automatically rebased onto the new version)
You could... But writing and deploying a diffing tool for every different gsuite application is probably 6 months of work for a whole team... There are so many corner cases.
What will the users do for 6 months waiting for their data to return?
I guess there may be a bevy of different file formats and a diff for a spreadsheet an an image would require building tooling, just from those examples. I was thinking of creating an application where the front end is more than just a file browser to stored file types but the interface to read/edit the content as well.
That seems like one of the more unlikely causes, among the almost infinite variety of causes that are consistent with "several people said they can't find some files".
To me the most likely one by far is the deletion was actually commanded, for example by a flaw in the program they use to sync, or by malware.
Readit News
Google Drive files suddenly disappeared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 - Nov 2023 (281 comments)
Photos I know I've taken are missing. There are periods of time when I walked around a city 10+ years ago taking a large volume of photos, like when I first moved to Seattle. Going back to that window of time in Google Photos, I only have a handful of photos from that walk.
There are also partially corrupted photos from many years back. Photos that only partially render, or render as noise.
Luckily, all of these are random low-value photos from my youth. They aren't core memories of my kiddos growing up or anything. I'm glad I discovered the data loss in that window of time, and not by losing photos of my kiddos' birthdays.
It's unfortunately hostile for non-technical users that care about their photo metadata, which I assume is most people since it includes data such as creation timestamps and location. It's not too bad to script this if you're savvy (and careful), but otherwise you'll have to pay for a third-party tool[1]
[1]: https://metadatafixer.com/
I heard this claim before but I was never able to reproduce it. Does this only happen with the "Storage Saver" option enabled and/or when metadata has been manually changed? At least with the "Original Quality" option my takeout data seems to exactly match the files that were originally uploaded.
The probability of both failing and/or both deciding to just delete my account because I look "suspicious" is very small. But I _have_ had iCloud mysteriously not being able to retreive old photos.
People forget even s3 will lose files. The reliability is high sure but it’s still sub 100%
With photos I do keep them all local to my MacBook, but not documents. Maybe I should.
I also now have multiple apps syncing all the photos from my phone so they're stored in a couple different cloud photo locations on top of that.
For example in the past I had several occurrences of duplicate photos where each of the two instances has exactly the same bytes as the other one. Usually that should have gotten deduplicated, but it hasn't. What's even stranger is that deleting one of the two pictures also deleted the other one. Re-uploading the original photo usually made both duplicates show up again. The way how I was able to get rid of those duplicates was to wait a day or so until I re-upload the data and to attempt that process several times. At some point only a single photo showed up.
Also those duplicates only showed up in the regular photo view. Even if both of the duplicate instances were added to an album viewing the album would only show the photo once.
Google photos only has the low quality photos.
If you have things you really care about not losing, you need a backup strategy.
The quality of their software is vastly superior to Google Drive. They have mobile, desktop, and CLI apps on Windows/Apple/Linux. Been using them for a year without issues.
People who came up in the cloud era were promised the false (impossible) idea that large conpanies could and would eradicate your risk of data loss if you just paid them a few dollars a month.
That's not a thing. If you really can't tolerate some loss, you need to coordinate something more robust across a few different and dissimilar options. And even then you'll still have risk.
That said, even just making sure you keep local copies of your archive or print your treasured favorites can go a long way towards greater reliability that without a lot of extra effort.
Instead I use sync.com (yes, UI is horrible and it's slow, but it works) and my synology NAS that is mirroring to a synology NAS at my fathers house (we mirror each others photos).
Basic rule of thumb, if it's free they don't care.
they are both supposed to have all
dangerous
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.
https://www.cubebackup.com/
I can't recommend against this enough, and I work at Google. Workspace accounts don't work with so many services. At least YouTube TV, Nest cameras, Google Home sharing, Google Play family accounts, Android parental controls, and Opinion Rewards are broken in my experience, probably a lot more.
It's a shame, especially for people who've had a Workspace account for many years, and have a bunch of email, documents, and media tied up in it.
I don’t use any of the non-core services because I expect them to be killed off soon anyway. For contacts, email, docs, and drive it works great. YouTube as well.
I have a “regular” Gmail account in case I need to use any niche services that don’t work with my Workspace account.
Overall the trade off is well worth it.
There are still tech hurdles yes, but NAS + a decent GPU for photos, email organization, assistant is going to be a killer business.
I got a second Synology for Hyperbackup and send one to the other for backups. Seems to work well.
1 - How much time was setup? 2 - How many times did it break in the last year? 3 - How many of the summaries were actionable?
My main concern with active auto backup is maintenance time; my expectation is I'm busy and my personal backup would take me weeks to fix if and only if I notice there is an issue, and the summaries are alert fatigue.
I feel while this situation is avoidable, you will still lose data from your last successful backup and anything less than "just works" isn't viable for anything important vs manual duplication.
I have two copies of some files (local and Drive) and probably a few Drive-only despite having local sync. If my computer died in the same time as Google list the data, I would expect some data loss, but the cost of categorical prevention is very high.
That being said, if it is only $5 and is actually touchless,
I keep the version history to infinite, so even if files are corrupted or lost on newer backups I can always reference the old ones, back to day 0. Backblaze is great for this as the storage price is negligible.
I think it works in a similar way to Tarsnap or something like Duplicati, but it’s a lot easier to manage and plugs in nicely to all of the Workspace account (not just Drive).
I've elevated to rclone fanboy since I discovered crypt: https://rclone.org/crypt/
I’ve never looked into rclone although I’ve heard much about it. Looks very cool. I didn’t know it supported Google Drive.
One nice thing about CubeBackup is that it handles all of the Workspace account, not just the Drive file storage, but also the contacts, emails, etc. all of which is equally important to me.
I use Backblaze which is quite cheap and reliable: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037814594-B2....
So I pay for dropbox. The dropbox app backs up the photos and the synology fetches them from dropbox.
Granted, you usually want to pare down your words during the editing process, but I'd rather do it manually rather than have some malfunctioning computer system prune random blocks :)
I sent a support email, but it will surprise no one to learn I never heard anything back. Needless to say, I haven't trusted Google Drive since.
(surprisingly?) ... I have colleagues that, even in 2023, will express genuine (not sarcastic shock) when a megacorp doesn't reply or provide decent support. I've only got a few, but the refrain will be something like "wow, I'm kinda surprised google's cloud support doesn't get back to us - sometimes for days. they've always had such a good reputation for support... i hope this is a blip".
It's as if they've only ever read marketing/sales leaflets, then really are genuinely surprised when things are 'normal' (meaning poor performance, non-responsive support, bad/wrong documentation, broken SDKs, data loss, etc).
I'm genuinely curious as to what group they have a good reputation for support with.
It will literally delete a sentence immediately after you write it
Infuriating and absolutely no fixes - this is a core issue with write priority and where “canonical” data lives.
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I do agree with you, though: one of the most important rules for computing in general is to keep multiple backups of everything. A while back, a friend of mine made a habit of emailing herself drafts of her work, and kept multiple copies on her computer. It did save her once or twice.
1. I write locally and have both manual and automatic backups (local and remote) 2. I upload drafts online for beta and alpha readers to leave comments 3. My group used to use Google Docs for this but stopped once I discovered the data loss
Happily, because local is the source of truth, I didn't lose any of my writing. I did, however, lose some feedback, and reconciling things was a pain.
I think this is like looking at the Burj Khalifa and asking how hard it can be to make a building. It's not just a building, it's the tallest building ever built.
They need the data and look for it and it's not there, but they remember they put it there?
At my job if a log file or data recording is too big for jira, but need to be attached to a bug report we sometimes store them on google drive. And then we link it from the ticket. If much later we get back to it and the link is 404 that would make us suspicious. If someone remembers the link working before that would make it clear it is not just a copy paste error with the url.
That’s what I want to know too. Try to reconcile the cloud sync systems to make sure you aren’t missing anything. It’s basically impossible.
I also go crazy when I see MS touting OneDrive as a backup. I’m pretty sure moving (because of files-on-demand) my data to OneDrive where I can’t verify they aren’t losing stuff is not a backup. Add the risk of being banned and it becomes unconscionable IMO.
Works reasonably well, though Google seems intent on breaking stuff every so often. Also Google hasn't figured out how to make it stop creating desktop.ini files everywhere yet. I'd say it makes them look like amateurs, but amateurs tend to be better at making software.
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Would recommend rclone to anyone, it has worked pretty consistently so far.
So I thought I might as well use it as a backup location if I have to get this subscription. I don't really expect privacy from these services, I guess it's a tradeoff.
I hope it is interesting / useful for you to learn that you can maintain a workflow like this without ever installing rclone.
rclone is already built into the rsync.net platform so you can use it to orchestrate transfers like the one you describe:
... using only ssh.I'm interested in doing something similar for our GD into DB or Backblaze but not if it's a full copy each day - we have 400GB in GD
As an aside, we are looking from moving to a Google + Slack + Notion to OneDrive + Teams + Loop. What is appealing is the ability to collaborate more directly on files and “Loop Components” directly in Teams. But we’ve been waiting for 2 weeks now for support to help us enable Loop, because the instructions in the Microsoft docs aren’t working. They are working on it, which makes them better than Google in our experience, but it has been too slow. Maybe we have to upgrade to premium support?
I wouldn't trust Google with anything important these days. But Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive is so bad.
I don't think that selfhosting is a great option for corporate, but Microsoft and Google are just shit.
It's so sad that Microsoft does not see how they ruin productivity of big orgs.
Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily.
They even broke the windows taskbar, which automatically combines things together. They assume that people working in an office have only 1 email open and 1 spreadsheet open, while most have 20 and dont know how to turn off this shitty UI.
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Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data).
Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the data, and some users are going to permanently lose data (where they edited an old version of a document for example, and those edits cannot be automatically rebased onto the new version)
Why couldn't you write code to let users compare and choose which version of the data they want to keep?
What will the users do for 6 months waiting for their data to return?
To me the most likely one by far is the deletion was actually commanded, for example by a flaw in the program they use to sync, or by malware.
Low frequency data loss until it reaches alerting threshold of 0.1%
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