10 ms·
Why no company that values their data should ever "Go Google"
- joe_the_user 16y agoNo person or organization should put itself in a position where it depends only on an external source for either security or backups. Whatever else might or might not be "mission critical", I think this inherent is. Come back and tell me that relying on using Google docs while keeping local backups is problematic or awkward. That would be a fair complaint. Toshiba isn't going to help me if my drive goes down either. Whether they send a nice or not nice email isn't the point.
- gregable 16y agoThis sounds great, but in practice is impossible. Are you personally as an individual going to take care of 100% of your own backups? Are you going to drive the tape over to the other facility that you own, make regular checks that you can restore, etc? No. Ultimately you are going to rely on someone else and something else. Be it your IT guy, the company that hosts your backups, the power company, the company that makes the machines you keep your backups on, etc. You can distribute this so that you rely on lots of someone else's and any one or more of them can fail, but often you'll still have one point of failure somewhere (the guy who monitors the distributed backups for example).
- joe_the_user 16y agoNo, I mean each organization needs to have in-organization backups and each individual needs to back-up their machine. Yes, my IT guy. I need to have an institutional relation with my backup guy, not just a paying relation. The IT guy could send the data to three different online backup services but me having a personal and institutional relation with him makes sure that whatever scheme he uses will remain reliable as other things change. The point is that every organization has at least one mission, one task that it is worth doing within the organization rather than offloading to another entity. And backup is always going to be close to that mission.
- res0nat0r 16y agoWhat type of SLA's did you agree to when you signed up for Google Apps?
- e1ven 16y agoThat's sort of the point. It's a big deal to us, not a big deal to them. We'd pay extra for a tighter SLA if that option were available, but as it is, on outage hurts us a LOT, and them not very much. That would seem to be prescription for bringing it in-house, despite how little I want to do that.
- 16s 16y agoFind a small local IT company to use. It's been my experience that they are very responsive and do really care and many of them are very high-quality (old Unix guys). Google are just so large and so far away. They can't be everything to everybody (try as they might).
- minalecs 16y agoI might of missed it, but are you using Google Apps (free) or Google Apps for business ? http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html
- e1ven 16y agoBusiness. We pay them $50/user, for quite a few users. Thanks for the clarification, I've edited the top paragraph to make that clearer.
- ttyS0 16y agoYes, because we all know that when we run these systems outselves, they never go down.
- e1ven 16y agoI've done this quite a bit myself, and I know it can certainly go down. But at least then I can do something about it.. As it is, it feels like my requests are going into a blackhole. This is very important to us, but to Google, we're just another tiny startup.
- chaosmachine 16y agoWhen Google breaks, you're basically stuck waiting for them. If your own system breaks, at least you can attempt to fix it.
- jrockway 16y agoWhen your hosting company goes down, you're basically stuck waiting for them. The only way to ensure that you never have downtime is to not use the Internet, and keep all your servers connected to a nuclear reactor, all inside a mountain. That covers power and not being flooded or hit by a tornado, anyway. Even then you'd better be careful not to trip over any of the power cables or type "rm -rf /" as root.
- e1ven 16y agoFor mission critical things, you want to reduce the points of failure, and ensure that when things DO go wrong, you have a reasonable escalation path. It's now been over 8 hours since it went down, and no fix from Google yet. 4+ days on the missing file. If I was running in house, I could have entirely restored the mail server from tape by now. I could have swapped over to a hot-spare in a few minutes. I could have failed over to our backup internet service. I have a lot of options. With Google, my option is to wait.. And hope my business doesn't lose too much money while Google gets around to fixing it.
- 16y ago
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- yesbabyyes 16y agoDropbox has an advantage here, in that all files are stored local (mirrored, really) in user's computers, and they are backed up. It doesn't scale to shared editing, though. I'm turning more and more to plaintext/markdown on Dropbox.
- e1ven 16y agoThat's where we've moved all our Shared files. I don't love the pricing models, or the privacy issues, or the security model, so we're looking for something else. AeroFS is the best off-site solution so far, but it's still very beta.
- benjaminfox 16y agoFor backing up files that need to be on Google Docs, I use GDocBackup (http://gs.fhtino.it/gdocbackup http://gs.fhtino.it/gdocbackup) and have it download my Google Docs to a Dropbox folder.
- roc 16y agoDropbox-style mirroring is still susceptible to the hypothetical "service problem killed/corrupted a file, the mistake was happily sync'd down to all mirrors." In short: if you're reliant on the cloud service for your backups (as distinct from your sync'ing), you're at risk.
- sdizdar 16y agoOf course, simplistic mirroring solutions will have these problems. However, the right mirroring solution for syncing information (documents, presentations, etc.), should provide auditing, providence of created documents, and rewind for all actions.
- kkowalczyk 16y agoAt which point you're using technology even more complicate than dropbox and you have to trust that it works just as you have to trust that dropbox works. Not to mention that anything that can write to primary store (i.e. the "rewind for all actions" in your hypothetical solution) is just as likely to corrupt that store as dropbox is.
- steevdave 16y agoWhy don't people make backups anymore? I know that using Google Apps is much easier than running your own stuff in-house. It requires much less time and resources, but at the same time there are still best practices and disaster recovery plans that should always have something about backups in them. And just having them isn't good enough. They also need to be followed. Having worked at a place without these ( and attempting to get them implemented ) versus where I currently work that has them and follows them, I have to say, there are a lot fewer times where I feel like screaming here. Do it, and stop expecting 100% uptime and availability of all docs/important information from any service, internal or external. Nothing is 100% but there are many ways to make it less stressful.
- e1ven 16y agoThat's what we're doing now. We have backups of all our servers, and user backups for all the laptops.. But Google Apps is a pain in the butt to backup, since we don't have direct file access to things. The best strategy I can see, if you want to stick with it, is to email yourself every file, every edit. That's pretty insanely tedious.
- ChuckMcM 16y agoAren't the Google Docs GDATA enabled? [1] If so then it should be pretty straightforward to write a script which would pull down copies of any file that had changed for local backup. [1] http://code.google.com/googleapps/appsscript/service_docslist.html http://code.google.com/googleapps/appsscript/service_docslis...
- geekam 16y agoAgain, the idea is that a 'paying' customer should not have to deal with this.
- ChuckMcM 16y agoI understood that, he's going through the 'standard' Google escalation process for paying customers. Someone from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in the docs group is no doubt working on a ticket to track down broken GFS cell or maybe a PCR (that was code for changes that might take out a whole cluster or data center for periods of time). Its probably one of a few dozen they are looking at and given the layering the actual fix could take a couple of days to take hold, especially if the data in question is actually only available on tape at this point. But he's an operations guy like me, and he probably wears both a belt and suspenders just in case the belt breaks. So in response to the complaint that emailing yourself files to insure you have copies is a pain, I suggested he script the moral equivalent using Google's provided APIs to the docs service.
- Vvector 16y agohttp://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html Support and reliability 24/7 phone and email support for critical issues 99.9% uptime guarantee SLA
- e1ven 16y agoWe have that ;) I called them, emailed them, and asked for updates in as plain of terms as possible. 4+ days on the missing file, 8+ hours on broken email.
- VengefulCynic 16y agoQuite simply, Google appears to be in material breach of your SLA. Where is your lawyer?
- pyre 16y ago99.99% over what time period?
- lopatamd 16y agogreat. another troll article
- nolite 16y agoPlease stop paying them.. companies seem to only learn through the wallet
- slewis 16y agoSo are you actually switching off Google?
- e1ven 16y agoWe've moved from Google Docs to Dropbox, at least as a placeholder; We're still trying to find a better long-term solution. AeroFS is leading the pack, once it is out of beta. For Email, we plan to, but it's a bit more complicated. I'll need to imapsync each account, so it's going to be messy, so I'll need a week or two to plan it out, and build/test a new Zimbra server.
- eduardo_f 16y agoTry http://www.MigrationBox.com http://www.MigrationBox.com if you want to save the messy.
- msy 16y agoThis is precisely why I think it's insane that people trust their email - the nexus of their online presence, normally the key to every account and their primary communication tool for everything from conversations to account statements to a free service. It's not 1996 anymore, this stuff matters. I pay for Rackspace email. When I have a problem I can call a human and get an answer. As far as I'm concerned it's a bargain. Google doesn't do human, it doesn't matter if it's a free gmail account, a serious-money adwords account or your entire business on apps, you're just a number if something goes wrong you're on your own, shouting at the unmoving monolith.
- calloc 16y agoI've got Google Apps for Business, and when all of our mailboxes were unavailable I contacted Google at the number listed on their website, talked to a human, got it resolved in about 30 minutes.
- wewyor 16y agoI'm not sure that they followed the support instructions, the email excerpt said to reply if that wasn't the right solution but it just says they sent another support email. It probably would have been better to call, I mean you are paying for 24/7 phone and email support. I haven't had any problems with getting support through Google Apps for Business, I might be an exception though.
- e1ven 16y agoNot that it matters much, but I called them several times, and replied to the original email. But I think you're focusing too much on the specifics. The problem is that your mail is crucially important to you, but rather less important to Google. In such a scenario, it makes sense to change your plan to something under your control, even if it's painful.
- m0nty 16y agoThat's my experience too. Hardly ever goes wrong, telephone support was friendly and on-the-money, problem quickly solved.
- slewis 16y agoJust Googled around and found http://www.backupify.com/ http://www.backupify.com/ or maybe something like http://www.ltech.com/google-apps/products/google-docs-backup http://www.ltech.com/google-apps/products/google-docs-backup Has anyone tried those products?
- Erwin 16y agoMixed reviews on the Google Apps marketplace for backupify: https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewReviews?productListingId=5941+16825965296321823984 https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewReviews?pr... -- 27 users take 21 days to backup? Might well be the Google Apps infrastructure that's not up to the task. Looking at my company's Google apps domain, we probably have several million threads and are close to a terabyte of data. I imagine backing that up via IMAP could take a while.
- jgarmon 16y agoThose are fair criticisms of Backupify to date. We've recently totally reworked our throttling mechanisms, to our initial backup times are decreasing rather rapidly. But, to your point, we are at the mercy of how fast Google can give us the data through their API. That said, given Google's general uptime, the likelihood of Google losing a file before we can back it up is pretty remote. Not zero chance, but really unlikely.
- simonhamp 16y agoThis is precisely the reason why I don't use Google Docs for any mission-critical documents. Store them in Dropbox or some other shared, automatically-backed-up system where you can easily retrieve a copy from somewhere. Always have redundancy too. We keep most of our files in Dropbox. But we all use Time Machine too. We also use version control for a lot of our work. This might seem like overkill, but each has a specific use and purpose with the added bonus of providing us with backup redundancy.
- lwhi 16y agoI think this is the problem with all cloud services. The liability costs involved in dealing with worst case scenarios are potentially so huge, the majority of providers have terms and conditions which relinquish all responsibility when bad things happen. The only real solution is backup, and the only backup that can truly be relied upon is one you make yourself; in which case the point in making use of a cloud service in the first place is pretty much reduced.
- VladRussian 16y ago>We’ve been running flawlessly for 6 months, paying them $50/user to avoid handling it ourselves. if you open Excel and put some typical numbers into it (like commodity hardware cost, networks, electricity, data center mortgage, basic maintenance employees, 40% margin, etc...) you'd see that $50/user/month is just basic usage - timeslice to run provided software on provided hardware. There is no room in that number for a real person dealing with your specific issue. An elephant can't squeeze into a needle eye, even if he promised it to you in writing and accepted the money - just look at the elephant and at the needle with your own eyes.
- jsnell 16y agoYou might already know this already and that's just a typo, but the actual price is $50/user/year, not per month.
- VladRussian 16y agoif it is per year then it is a real miracle of mass scale production at Google.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- schwit 16y agoI would be afraid that in a dispute Google could do a PayPal and lock you out of your data. I would also be concerned that Google would provide law enforcement access to your data without your knowledge, consent or a warrant.
- mark_l_watson 16y agoPersonally, I use Google Docs every day, and I back up all of my docs on a regular basis (easy to do). Same with my GMail: use POP3 to keep a backup copy locally. I would not consider running my own services and not back up my data. If you use GMail and/or Docs for free or as a paid customer, still, why would you not make local backups?
- eitally 16y agoIn case anyone cares to hear a counterpoint, I run a nearly 20,000 seat Apps domain and the service and transparency we receive from Google is leaps & bounds better than from any vendor of similar size. Perhaps my happiness makes sense given how much we're paying them compared to, say, e1ven's company.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gregable 16y agoI think a lot of this is not about security or service level. It's psychological, it's about control/trust. When it's under your control and you can fix things yourself, you psychologically feel more safe. If you rely on someone else and they say "we're working on it" but don't give you an estimate, you feel a lack of control. It may be that doing things yourself has worse uptime/performance/etc than relying on someone else, but the psychological effect of that loss of control when something bad happens is huge.
- mariusmg 16y agoIn another news scientists discovered that water is wet...
- atacrawl 16y agoI worked for a company that switched to Google Business a few years ago. The one thing I'll say about the experience is that administering the back end totally sucks. The UI in a lot of places makes no sense. For instance, there are settings for when you set up an email list that are labeled so obtusely that you're not really sure of what you're selecting. Another thing that totally bit us once was when dealing with document ownership in Google Docs -- a lady in marketing had created a bunch of documents, then later left the company. After scouring the back end for about an hour (literally), I concluded that there was NO WAY for the admin user to reassign the owner of the document to a different person. I ended up having to log in as that person (luckily we kept people's accounts active for 6-12 months after they left) and switching the owner that way. Totally absurd. (If I'm wrong about that, please do tell.) As far as customer service goes, it's definitely a minus. They don't make it easy to tell you who to call or email when you do have a problem, and once you get there, the time before your problem is resolved can vary wildly (from hours to days). That really sucks when you have a salesman breathing down your neck because he can't use his email.
- powertower 16y agoIt gets much worse than this. A lot of businesses are completely dependent on Google via organic search and AdWords for 90%+ percent of their revenues (without even realizing it). What happens when you log into your AdWords account and you’re greeted by this cryptic message: http://www.devside.net/images/adwords-account-suspended.png http://www.devside.net/images/adwords-account-suspended.png Except that you've done nothing wrong, have never been warned, are not a spammer, and are completely legitimate. What happens is that after contacting Google you soon realize that a monopoly with no customer support is the most dangerous one.