3 ms·

Just thinking about Google's claims that it may [for which I read "will"] also start deleting data from inactive accounts: I would assume that, as well as thei

Just thinking about Google's claims that it may [for which I read "will"] also start deleting data from inactive accounts: I would assume that, as well as their 'live' storage of user data in their data centres full of hard drives, with whatever RAID type redundancy they use there, Google also has longer term archived backups which I again assume would probably be tape based. So, would the data from a dormant account actually be deleted? I can hardly see Google digging through their tape archives to delete cold-stored data from dead accounts. It would be so much hassle and be more costly than just leaving it as is. It could very well be the same situation with actual 'live' data in data centre, belonging to dormant accounts. Say you have a multi-TB hard drive in a data centre somewhere and, on that multi-TB drive, you have one or two users whose accounts are deemed to be now dormant. Would it really be worth Google's while to delete those one or two users' 'stuff'? OK. the data savings would add up with thousands of inactive accounts, spread across data centres. But if all that freed up space is in relatively tiny amounts, dotted around thousands of hard drives, it would be a nightmare to manage and keep track of. Unless Google has some kind of system in place which is constantly shuffling data around to effectively 'de-frag' entire data centres?

ahmedtd 6y ago
https://www.systutorials.com/colossus-successor-to-google-file-system-gfs/ https://www.systutorials.com/colossus-successor-to-google-fi... Effectively, all storage for production systems at Google goes through this layer. No service is ever interacting with individual disks, even including databases like Spanner. Google Cloud Storage is a thin-ish layer over this system.
mvgoogler 6y ago
Deleted photos, accounts, etc are definitely deleted and purged from our systems. We have teams at Google whose sole purpose is to ensure that data that should be deleted is deleted in a timely manner (as defined by TOS and the law). Basically, every piece of user data that is stored at Google has to have a documented and audited retention plan that covers how it is stored, how long it is retained, how it can be used, etc. The retention plans are reviewed by legal counsel and are audited by independent teams. From a technical standpoint, Photos doesn't deal directly with individual machines or hard drives. There are several layers of abstraction to map what we think of as a "file" and the storage system are doing something that is _effectively_ at least a defrag on a regular basis. [I work on Google Photos and used to work on storage infrastructure]

ahmedtd 6y ago

https://www.systutorials.com/colossus-successor-to-google-file-system-gfs/ https://www.systutorials.com/colossus-successor-to-google-fi... Effectively, all storage for production systems at Google goes through this layer. No service is ever interacting with individual disks, even including databases like Spanner. Google Cloud Storage is a thin-ish layer over this system.

mvgoogler 6y ago

Deleted photos, accounts, etc are definitely deleted and purged from our systems. We have teams at Google whose sole purpose is to ensure that data that should be deleted is deleted in a timely manner (as defined by TOS and the law). Basically, every piece of user data that is stored at Google has to have a documented and audited retention plan that covers how it is stored, how long it is retained, how it can be used, etc. The retention plans are reviewed by legal counsel and are audited by independent teams. From a technical standpoint, Photos doesn't deal directly with individual machines or hard drives. There are several layers of abstraction to map what we think of as a "file" and the storage system are doing something that is _effectively_ at least a defrag on a regular basis. [I work on Google Photos and used to work on storage infrastructure]