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Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

507 points by ubutler 3y ago

simbolit 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
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jsnell 3y ago
Discussion earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864
- dang 3y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Google Drive files suddenly disappeared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 - Nov 2023 (281 comments)
jqpabc123 3y ago
Not your drive, not your data.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  But if I go to drive.google.com, it quite clearly says "My Drive".
  - rovr138 3y ago
    I’m going to laugh when they say that that’s the name of the feature. A “my drive”
  - issafram 3y ago
    Check mate!
  - crtasm 3y ago
    Indeed - Google refer to it as My Drive. They're making it clear it's not Your Drive!
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      Getting Smokey Bear vibes from this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX1x7pfH8fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX1x7pfH8fw
- Medox 3y ago
  Isn't this like saying "not your house, not your possessions" ? But landlords cannot just take or misplace my stuff, especially if I pay rent and have some rights.
  - kijin 3y ago
    Only because there are strong legal protections for residential tenants. Those laws don't apply to your relationship with Google.
  - halayli 3y ago
    No, it definitely doesn't sound like that and it's not about rights. Your landlord cannot go and remodel your apartment and ruin your possessions without your approval of the changes they are about to make.
  - Wolfbeta 3y ago
    What rights do you have in this case?
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      > Google Drive allows you to upload, submit, store, send and receive content. As described in the Google Terms of Service, your content remains yours. We do not claim ownership in any of your content, including any text, data, information, and files that you upload, share, or store in your Drive account. The Google Terms of Service give Google a limited purpose license to operate and improve the Google Drive services — so if you decide to share a document with someone, or want to open it on a different device, we can provide that functionality. From their terms of service, they deleted YOUR data. Thus the rights you'd have when anyone destroys your stuff apply. Hmmm, might even be criminal... I'm not a lawyer though, so I don't know shit.
      - jqpabc123 3y ago
        If Google can delete it, it's not really *your* data is it? https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
- Isthatablackgsd 3y ago
  If I pay for the storage, then it is my drive and my data. The article didn't say anything about the free or paid GDrive accounts. If it is a free account, then that is up for debate. If it impacts the paid consumers, they paid for the service and it is their data.
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    do you have a link to the legal decisions that confirm this is the case and establish what rights the customer actually has in this relationship? What rights do the contracts that a paid customer signs with Google say they have over the data? From what I see in the free terms of service: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours." which is neat. You have the rights to your data, but there doesn't seem to be any stated obligation for Google to keep that data or make it accessible to you.
    - ajross 3y ago
      > You have the rights to your data, but there doesn't seem to be any stated obligation for Google to keep that data or make it accessible to you. On a paid account, clearly that's part of the contracted service being provided. There is absolutely an obligation to provide the service you took payment for. But no, in general in our society, gratis products aren't required to carry warranties, for obvious reasons (no one would provide them if so).
      - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
        >On a paid account, clearly that's part of the contracted service being provided. There is absolutely an obligation to provide the service you took payment for. yeah, unless there is a statement sort of like "We reserve the right to terminate accounts in the case of violation of terms of service as determined by our automated systems" in which case you would need to go to court and get a determination that clearly that is wrong and they can't do that, in general in American society that's how things work.
- deleted 3y ago
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__jonas 3y ago
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.
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago
  Dropbox constantly scans your data and can easily block your whole account permanently. It's hard to recommend it unless you encrypt your data.
  - potency 3y ago
    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.
    - roody15 3y ago
      This happens with Apple iCloud as well. Staff member had their iCloud photo collection locked because of this. Was able to regain access but I would definitely caution anyone storing all family photos online without another backup option.
      - fh9302 3y ago
        According to NCMEC Apple does not do any proactive scanning of photos. > Last year, while Meta’s Facebook and Instagram submitted a combined 26 million reports, Google 2 million, and TikTok nearly 300,000, Apple submitted 234. The year before that: 160. > Apple isn’t a social media company, so this is hardly a direct comparison. That said, WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted, scans unencrypted content such as profile and group photos for CSAM. It provided over 1 million cybertips to NCMEC in 2022; Microsoft sent in 110,000; Dropbox, nearly 46,000; and Synchronoss, the cloud storage provider for Verizon, over 30,000. https://archive.is/AyuCq https://archive.is/AyuCq
deleted 3y ago
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zitterbewegung 3y ago
This is yet another reason to do backups so that you can perform restores. Testing your backups is very important to do. Relying on any service has a risk of something extremely bad occurring.
arshxyz 3y ago
This is likely very paranoid behaviour but I recommend downloading all your Google data from time to time: takeout.google.com
- taneq 3y ago
  This is absolutely not paranoid and everyone should keep local copies of any data that is important to them in any way.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  100% I do this yearly at tax time when adding a bunch of new docs.
- gst 3y ago
  This works fine for smaller accounts, but on larger accounts it seems to be regularly failing (based on my own experience and based on other postings and reports that I found online). Exporting my Google Photos sometimes fails consistently even with lots of attempts. Out of well over 10 export attempts or so this year maybe a single one succeeded. I have a few hundred GB of data stored on that account. I also currently have a support ticket with Google open on that issue, but after initial follow-ups haven't received a response in a couple of months now. That said my current approach for backing up things is to upload an "age" encrypted version of the data from Google Takeout to Wasabi. Once uploaded I run a script that shows me the diff between the data sets (so that I can ensure that no old data went missing that shouldn't have gone missing) before I delete older data. Probably not the most optimal approach though. Might be better to just set up some versioning layer on top of Wasabi and to keep deleted or modified data forever.
  - radicality 3y ago
    I was trying to set up a similar thing. I already do the google takeouts every few months (~400GB, I don’t have issues with export though), but so far have been storing all of them. How do you do the diff between the old and new encrypted versions? Do you encrypt and upload the takeout .tar.gz files, or do extract first then encrypt?
sebmellen 3y ago
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. https://www.cubebackup.com/ https://www.cubebackup.com/
- freedomben 3y ago
  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 elevated to rclone fanboy since I discovered crypt: https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/crypt/
  - sebmellen 3y ago
    Wow, Crypt is awesome. 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.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  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,
londons_explore 3y ago
Guess at root cause: 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)
- causality0 3y ago
  and some users are going to permanently lose data Why couldn't you write code to let users compare and choose which version of the data they want to keep?
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    Ideally Google will resolve it without the customer needing to do the work.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    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?
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      "let users compare" doesn't require diffing tools. Worst case put the versions next to reach other.
      - nix0n 3y ago
        > Worst case put the versions next to each other. For some files (anything encrypted, for example) this may actually be the best you could do. Dropbox had this behavior ten years ago, so it's kind of inexcusable for Google today to be just mindlessly overwriting.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
This is why its good to have Cryptomator setup and figure out how to use that rsync or rclone whatever. Still gotta figure out how to implement it but anything with the G is already on shaky grounds. You're better off with Dropbox or literally anyone else. Does this affect iCloud?
- djbusby 3y ago
  The iCloud is built by a different company than Google Drive
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    I thought Apple used GoogleCloud/GCP or whatever?
theginger 3y ago
https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ Nothing showing on service status currently
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  There is no rational basis for trusting a first-party status page.
- skullone 3y ago
  Do you look outside to get the weather from 5,000 miles away?
bloopernova 3y ago
Can anyone recommend a Google Drive backup to something like AWS S3 Glacier or other long-term storage provider? I was running BorgBase but had some financial difficulties and couldn't pay for it, plus copying 2TB of data from home at around 40Mbit/s isn't great. Ideally something that pulls from google directly without involving my home computer would be best.
- tiahura 3y ago
  Why don’t you give your friend an 8tb to keep at his house and rsync?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Google Takeout will export to Dropbox, ad hoc or on a cadence (into the /Apps/Google Download Your Data/ path). Backblaze B2 is ~$6/month per TB, so depending on your storage requirements, at some point it will be more cost effective to have a pair of Synology NAS devices; one local, one as a backup offsite, with backups shipped. These same NAS devices can backup directly to a variety of targets [1]. [1] https://kb.synology.com/en-uk/DSM/help/HyperBackup/data_backup_destination?version=7 https://kb.synology.com/en-uk/DSM/help/HyperBackup/data_back... (no affiliation with any above entity)
- noveltyaccount 3y ago
  Maybe an rclone script that runs from AWS. Package it in a Docker image and run it from a Lambda function for pennies per invocation. Schedule it to run nightly. https://rclone.org/s3/ https://rclone.org/s3/ https://rclone.org/drive/ https://rclone.org/drive/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-run-lambda-schedule.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-... My script, though I run locally rclone -v copy /source/location s3:backup.bucket.name/ --transfers 1 --copy-links --filter-from /config/syncfilter.txt --max-delete 20 --stats 5m --stats-log-level NOTICE --update --use-server-modtime --fast-list My Dockerfile includes RUN curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | bash And I've configured the S3 remote to use Glacier [s3] type = s3 provider = AWS ... storage_class = GLACIER
yeutterg 3y ago
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?
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  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.
  - mathattack 3y ago
    The only thing more painful than using OneDrive is talking to the salesperson who sold it to your company.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    God, why are the choices so bad. 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.
    - zelon88 3y ago
      > I don't think that selfhosting is a great option for corporate, but Microsoft and Google are just shit. Why? When corporations weren't capable of managing credit cards securely, PCI was created and all the lazy businesses were told to either do this correctly, or outsource it to someone who will. When corporations weren't capable of managing infrastructure, Cloud providers created an out and told all the lazy businesses that they could do this correctly. Businesses believed the hype, fired their on-prem administrators, and still can't do this thing correctly. So, if you can't be bothered to do something correctly, and you can't pay to get it done correctly, maybe you are not fit to be operating.
game_the0ry 3y ago
This is a royal fuck up. Anyone using any g cloud service better be suspect when using their services. Amazing how some folks can't get a job at google if they can't invert a binary tree. Perhaps hire folks with relevant skills rather than folks who can solve 2 leetcode mediums in under 45 mins?
- GoToRO 3y ago
  Oh, you think developers still have that kind of power... Management has made sure to not allow any developer to have any kind of power. Not even naming their own variable the way they want it. All big and small decisions are taken by managers that don't even understand coding. They are the ones that push for hard deadlines and then loose months deciding what to do next for example. The crappy software trend has been rising at the same pace with the stripping of power from developers.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  That's not actually how it works, that's an ollllld viral article. Source: worked at google for 7 years, 2.8 gpa dropout from state school economics EDIT: upvotes for reality-detached rant, upvotes for "you think you are The One" -2 for a polite concise reality.
  - game_the0ry 3y ago
    My friend, don’t take this the wrong way, but you need to hear this. It would benefit you to take the downvotes as constructive criticism. You opinions may need recalibration based on feedback.
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  This comment smells very much like you think you are The One. Or that The One is out there somewhere [1]. Bugs happen and this is a serious failure that Google needs to fix. But the idea that incompetents are doing the development or that Google hires puzzle solvers over technical talent is just not true. 1. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/21/env/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/21/env/
mrweasel 3y ago
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.
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  If it's Docs/Sheets/Slides then I'd notice. If not...I don't really store anything else on Google Drive, just files shared with me.
- vasco 3y ago
  It's really hard to make a file browser in 2023 with only about 100k employees, give them a bit of a break. Some things are just hard!
  - picadores 3y ago
    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.
  - chickenpotpie 3y ago
    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.
    - notRobot 3y ago
      If you've made it and released it to a the public (and it has paid tiers!) then you better have made it right. This is the case for both buildings and data storage systems.
tiltowait 3y ago
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.
- rattray 3y ago
  OOC, was this a google doc or a docx file uploaded?
- jacobyoder 3y ago
  "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).
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > they've always had such a good reputation for support I'm genuinely curious as to what group they have a good reputation for support with.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      People who have not yet had a problem.
RobotToaster 3y ago
Is there any word if this is actively syncing deletions to local storage? I have my google drive synced to multiple computers which I assumed was enough...
- lonestar 3y ago
  I was hit by this. It looks like my laptop had not been syncing correctly for a couple months, then GDrive overwrote my local “My Drive” folder with the old cloud copy.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    That sounds painful. Are you using the official Google drive app?
  - zerocrates 3y ago
    I was going to say, from what I've seen it looks like this kind of problem: a problem with the desktop sync, rather than Google's cloud storage itself. The sync problem at the same time feels more likely and worse, as if the files never touched Google's servers and its sync went and deleted them, there'd be nothing they could do.
- mrich 3y ago
  It's certainly not enough if you assume there can ever be an error in the backend which Google is unable to recover from.
_jal 3y ago
I've been convinced for years that Google Docs loses things. I both had files vanish and have lost edits - one time I could demonstrate it with a screenshot of part of a doc that later reverted to an earlier version. Other people at work agree with me. Google support insists we're nuts. I only use it when other internal folks start collaborative docs, otherwise I do not trust it. Files don't randomly disappear from my local filesystem (and we test our backups).
- lupire 3y ago
  Use takeout to make snapshots to compare.
edgyquant 3y ago
This is why you always maintain backups. Do not depend on data just being there
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
I've always found it sound to backup cloud storage. And this is an example why.
r3trohack3r 3y ago
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.
- shp0ngle 3y ago
  I have backup both to Google Photos and iCloud. 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.
  - pram 3y ago
    I have Photos set to download all the files locally, and those get backed up with Time Machine and Backblaze. People forget even s3 will lose files. The reliability is high sure but it’s still sub 100%
    - stefandesu 3y ago
      My concern about my own backup strategy (which, for Photos, is exactly the same as yours) is that I don't have a system in place that notifies me if files get corrupted or randomly deleted, and I'm not sure how I would go about implementing something like that. Any ideas?
      - pram 3y ago
        I use a synology for TM (raid 1) and it uses btrfs which has checksums to prevent bitrot. Either that or something running ZFS would be the obvious options: https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_enable_file_self_healing_on_DSM https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_enable_fil...
burgerquizz 3y ago
i was tracking about once a month my portfolio from various brokers in spreadsheet for years. One day that spreadsheet disappeared. I still don't know if it was miss-manipulation from me or something else. today it reinforced me in the idea of it being on the google side.
Pxtl 3y ago
I've an RPI with a big old spinning metal disk external HDD attached, anybody recommend a good workflow for automatic bidirectional sync between GD and my thing?
- zipping1549 3y ago
  [dead]
vachina 3y ago
Be me, self host my own cloud drive. No fees, no surprises, infinitely scalable, insanely fast local backups.
- timcavel 3y ago
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- shadowgovt 3y ago
  I'm sure everyone reading Hacker News can cobble something together in a weekend or two or knows someone who can. What should the rest of the world do? (Also, my hats off to you that you're seeing "no surprises." So you never discovered your backup machine has a flaky wifi card or bad Ethernet jack? Never had bit-rot or errors on your backing store, or are you just not detecting them until it's too late? You're testing your local backups regularly to make sure there isn't a script error that means none of those bits can actually be restored? And are you backing up offsite so when your residence burns down you still have your backups? Lots of us are "backing up" using ad-hoc bespoke solutions that we will discover were broken only when we need them.)
  - vachina 3y ago
    > What should the rest of the world do? Educate and help those who do not know? I helped setup my cousin’s NAS and gave it a subdomain. What i meant by no surprises is: the backend and front end stays the same forever, short of me manually updating it. My server and their apps, will not suddenly lose functionality or have cruft added because someone in Mountain View deems so. Key to making this work is keeping things simple. Meaning no container or any burying of my data under any layer of abstraction. My files are laid bare on the platter, making it very portable because any application that does file system operation can immediately operate on my files. Unlike the clusterfuck that is owncloud. Every quarter I do an incremental offline backup of all the drives in the NAS, to address all the issues you mentioned.
Dioxide2119 3y ago
"Scary cloud things" like this are why I moved off of Dropbox and Onedrive years ago and got to a new normal of "syncthing all my main devices together" for file sync, then have Backblaze backup my machine that holds the linux ISOs etc. that I'm not necessarily wanting to have redundant storage space used for them at that time. Now, the failures are my own fault, but at least I can do offline backups to HDDs and BD-Rs, and I don't have to worry about any of the cloud services (TM) messing with my data and me having little recourse. Yes, I could do separate backups of the cloud things too, but at that point, that just adds 'cloud service' as an option to the first part of the equation: cloud device storage / local device sync (on and off-site) / NAS + offline on-site backups as HDDs & BD-Rs + online off-site backups Doing syncthing with local device sync is cheaper than cloud device storage (recurring costs) and NAS (fixed costs / hardware maintenance)
Configure0251 3y ago
My partner has been experiencing emails coming and going in big chunks - months and years at a time - but if we search support forums all we can find are "support agents" blaming the individuals complaining about this phenomenon. It's gaslighting all the way down. Even when it's actively happening, checking moment to moment and having another few months vanish, and they'll still tell you "you must be deleting things, stop deleting them."
- spuz 3y ago
  When did this start happening and which time period is it affecting? Since November 21, my friend has had all her Gmail emails since May 2023 go missing. It matches the time period mentioned in the article but this is Gmail rather than Drive.
  - Configure0251 3y ago
    This began roughly 2 weeks ago. Last I saw things had vanished since 2018. It's bad. And when it started it was just back to Dec 2022. I can't prove there's a connection, but it's just been very aggravating when nobody in any forums believes people that make these claims. To be clear she's only asked once, but more than a few other posts have described situations that read similarly and not just "I can't find this one email".
    - spuz 3y ago
      That sounds very similar to the experience my friend had. Large timespans of emails were disappearing at a time. Hopefully Google figures it out.
0898 3y ago
Anyone else having issues with Google Drive in Mac OS? This week I've been noticing I've been unable to open files on my Mac that are stored in Google Drive. I can open them via the web, so I thought it was just the Mac software until I saw this post.
manmal 3y ago
I’ve been self hosting images with https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich and I‘m really happy. Decent mobile apps, even has good face recognition and H/W accelerated video transcoding. Can be served either with Tailscale or, as I did, with a reverse proxy on a cheap Hetzner box. Good backups are a must obviously, I have a backup server on a separate VLAN that syncs ZFS snapshots daily, and daily incremental encrypted backups to Google Drive w/ Duplicati. I‘ll have to reconsider Gdrive now obviously.
- darkwater 3y ago
  Dies It hace any native app? The default mobile web UI seems a bit too overcrowded by other elements rather than pictures (at least on Firefox/Android). I'm using Photoprism currently and looking for some alternative that has better face detection system and an integrated "X years ago" automatic slideshow thing (I don't care about the "splish splash", "out in the wild", "magic hour" compilations that GPhoto automatically does, just the basic X years ago thing, maybe when picture has tagged people)
  - manmal 3y ago
    Yes, native apps are available and are quite good. Sometimes I get hangs after first opening the iOS app, but only briefly. Quite handily it has an option to allow self signed certificates, to make within-LAN use easier. I‘m binding my Immich domain to a local IP with unbound and don’t need to bother with letsencrypt internally that way. Only the hetzner box needs the certificate (obviously). The quality of face tagging surprised me, it uses one of the open source algos by Microsoft.
Waterluvian 3y ago
If I wanted to indefinitely back up every image my wife's and my phones take, without me having to think about anything other than an annual bill, what services would people suggest? Currently Google does this perfectly for us... except for the part that maybe it's not actually doing that after all, and the fact that it's Google and they're seemingly less competent by the hour. Apple is the only alternative I'm aware of. Edit: Just to be very very very very clear. I don't want to have to do ANYTHING but pay a bill.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  An ssd big enough and syncthing?
BorisMelnik 3y ago
about 5 years ago I just stopped trusting the Cloud for my personal memories, it is just too valuable to lose those photos and I do not trust these companies. Running a home server is easy and cheap. 18Tb drives now are inexpensive. And every few times a year I'll make a full copy and stash it at my moms house and safety deposit box. edit - love foldersync pro for my Android. does SFTP/SMB/webDAV and all major cloud services over wifi or 5g. every night it transfers everything off my phone to my server which is also on parity
partiallypro 3y ago
This is why I always have my device backup to both GDrive and OneDrive.
InCityDreams 3y ago
Take photo. Enjoy them, they are temporary. No-one will give a fuck in 25 years.
- atulvi 3y ago
  speak for yourself.
latexr 3y ago
> MatthewSt reports that he has a fix Let’s see the instructions on that link. > 2. Install an old version of Google Drive (there's a version 82/83 floating around on the internet). This is awful advice. If you have a link, share it. Considering the number of people this is affecting, chances are increasing that the version you find “floating around on the internet” is malware.
- gruez 3y ago
  >Considering the number of people this is affecting, chances are increasing that the version you find “floating around on the internet” is malware. The windows installer at least is digitally signed to prevent this issue.
  - latexr 3y ago
    Apps and installers on macOS are also signed but there’s always a way to go around it. Simplest method is for the malware author to resign it, since effectively no one will verify the signature is from the correct source. But even then you can always convince people to disable System Integrity Protection to install crap. Despite it being a convoluted process, never underestimate what someone who is not tech savvy but is desperate can do. They will install anything and jump through any hoop the malware author walks them through with nice screenshots. I doubt there’s no way to trick people the same way on Windows. Perhaps I’m wrong, and if I am I’d welcome learning how that system works.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
JohnFen 3y ago
Yet another reminder that nobody should be storing anything only in the cloud. If you must use the cloud, always keep your own copy of all data you put there.
bobbob1921 3y ago
I suggest users look into cube backup, it’s great for local backups and versioning of G suite data. I’ve been using it for three or four years now, and couldn’t be happier. (Dev is very quick to reply and helpful.). Still just 5$ per year per user (I’m not sure if it supports Gmail free, but it definitely supports G suite users.) Additionally, it does not help that the search giants, search functionality for Drive and Gmail is so incredibly poor (more so Gmail, I have found drive search has improved,). For example, you still cannot do AND searches in Gmail properly. You also cannot do wildcard, searches of any kind. (And no regex nor partial regex)
- bobbob1921 3y ago
  One other note (and I haven’t read every reply here yet) – other than the anecdotal evidence of drive data loss, one way to 100% prove drive data loss is occurring, is if someone has an example of data, not showing up on Drive, but that same data is present in a cubeback up local back up (as cube backup Supports versioning, and it’s only source of data is directly from G suite). This would prove the data was on drive at one point, but is now gone along with the date and time it was retrieved and saved locally via cubeback up. (Additionally, one can show that it wasn’t deleted via user action by looking at the logs in Gsuite admin, or I think cubeBackup would log a delete as well, assuming you’re retaining those cubebackup logs) (to be clear I’m simply a user of cubeback up. I have no interest or affiliation with them)
agumonkey 3y ago
An important reminder, I rely on this to have quick access to official documents.. time to backoff.
jp191919 3y ago
My solution: Everything(phone,laptop,etc) syncs with Nextcloud on my homeserver, then backup encrypted snapshots to Backblaze using Restic. Also occasional manual backups to a hard drives at locations other than my house. Works great, no dependence on "free" cloud storage.
neilv 3y ago
All lights are green: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ No recent/active incident for Google Drive is shown: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/summary https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/summary https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/products/VHNA7p3Z5p3iakj5sA8V/history https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/products/VHNA7p3...
- achrono 3y ago
  What a shame. The mighty Google is after all in the same league as some random LLC providing cloud storage for $1.99/mo.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
Nacho keys, nacho cyber
davidpaulyoung 3y ago
Use an open source system. You can choose to back up to a self-hosted version, too. https://federated.computer https://federated.computer.
- x86x87 3y ago
  You can also lose your own files!
khana 3y ago
[dead]

507 points by ubutler 3y ago

simbolit 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jsnell 3y ago

Discussion earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864

dang 3y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Google Drive files suddenly disappeared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 - Nov 2023 (281 comments)

jqpabc123 3y ago

Not your drive, not your data.

Hamuko 3y ago
But if I go to drive.google.com, it quite clearly says "My Drive".
- rovr138 3y ago
  I’m going to laugh when they say that that’s the name of the feature. A “my drive”
- issafram 3y ago
  Check mate!
- crtasm 3y ago
  Indeed - Google refer to it as My Drive. They're making it clear it's not Your Drive!
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    Getting Smokey Bear vibes from this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX1x7pfH8fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX1x7pfH8fw
Medox 3y ago
Isn't this like saying "not your house, not your possessions" ? But landlords cannot just take or misplace my stuff, especially if I pay rent and have some rights.
- kijin 3y ago
  Only because there are strong legal protections for residential tenants. Those laws don't apply to your relationship with Google.
- halayli 3y ago
  No, it definitely doesn't sound like that and it's not about rights. Your landlord cannot go and remodel your apartment and ruin your possessions without your approval of the changes they are about to make.
- Wolfbeta 3y ago
  What rights do you have in this case?
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    > Google Drive allows you to upload, submit, store, send and receive content. As described in the Google Terms of Service, your content remains yours. We do not claim ownership in any of your content, including any text, data, information, and files that you upload, share, or store in your Drive account. The Google Terms of Service give Google a limited purpose license to operate and improve the Google Drive services — so if you decide to share a document with someone, or want to open it on a different device, we can provide that functionality. From their terms of service, they deleted YOUR data. Thus the rights you'd have when anyone destroys your stuff apply. Hmmm, might even be criminal... I'm not a lawyer though, so I don't know shit.
    - jqpabc123 3y ago
      If Google can delete it, it's not really *your* data is it? https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
Isthatablackgsd 3y ago
If I pay for the storage, then it is my drive and my data. The article didn't say anything about the free or paid GDrive accounts. If it is a free account, then that is up for debate. If it impacts the paid consumers, they paid for the service and it is their data.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  do you have a link to the legal decisions that confirm this is the case and establish what rights the customer actually has in this relationship? What rights do the contracts that a paid customer signs with Google say they have over the data? From what I see in the free terms of service: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours." which is neat. You have the rights to your data, but there doesn't seem to be any stated obligation for Google to keep that data or make it accessible to you.
  - ajross 3y ago
    > You have the rights to your data, but there doesn't seem to be any stated obligation for Google to keep that data or make it accessible to you. On a paid account, clearly that's part of the contracted service being provided. There is absolutely an obligation to provide the service you took payment for. But no, in general in our society, gratis products aren't required to carry warranties, for obvious reasons (no one would provide them if so).
    - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
      >On a paid account, clearly that's part of the contracted service being provided. There is absolutely an obligation to provide the service you took payment for. yeah, unless there is a statement sort of like "We reserve the right to terminate accounts in the case of violation of terms of service as determined by our automated systems" in which case you would need to go to court and get a determination that clearly that is wrong and they can't do that, in general in American society that's how things work.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

__jonas 3y ago

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.

cynicalsecurity 3y ago
Dropbox constantly scans your data and can easily block your whole account permanently. It's hard to recommend it unless you encrypt your data.
- potency 3y ago
  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.
  - roody15 3y ago
    This happens with Apple iCloud as well. Staff member had their iCloud photo collection locked because of this. Was able to regain access but I would definitely caution anyone storing all family photos online without another backup option.
    - fh9302 3y ago
      According to NCMEC Apple does not do any proactive scanning of photos. > Last year, while Meta’s Facebook and Instagram submitted a combined 26 million reports, Google 2 million, and TikTok nearly 300,000, Apple submitted 234. The year before that: 160. > Apple isn’t a social media company, so this is hardly a direct comparison. That said, WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted, scans unencrypted content such as profile and group photos for CSAM. It provided over 1 million cybertips to NCMEC in 2022; Microsoft sent in 110,000; Dropbox, nearly 46,000; and Synchronoss, the cloud storage provider for Verizon, over 30,000. https://archive.is/AyuCq https://archive.is/AyuCq

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zitterbewegung 3y ago

This is yet another reason to do backups so that you can perform restores. Testing your backups is very important to do. Relying on any service has a risk of something extremely bad occurring.

arshxyz 3y ago

This is likely very paranoid behaviour but I recommend downloading all your Google data from time to time: takeout.google.com

taneq 3y ago
This is absolutely not paranoid and everyone should keep local copies of any data that is important to them in any way.
kuchenbecker 3y ago
100% I do this yearly at tax time when adding a bunch of new docs.
gst 3y ago
This works fine for smaller accounts, but on larger accounts it seems to be regularly failing (based on my own experience and based on other postings and reports that I found online). Exporting my Google Photos sometimes fails consistently even with lots of attempts. Out of well over 10 export attempts or so this year maybe a single one succeeded. I have a few hundred GB of data stored on that account. I also currently have a support ticket with Google open on that issue, but after initial follow-ups haven't received a response in a couple of months now. That said my current approach for backing up things is to upload an "age" encrypted version of the data from Google Takeout to Wasabi. Once uploaded I run a script that shows me the diff between the data sets (so that I can ensure that no old data went missing that shouldn't have gone missing) before I delete older data. Probably not the most optimal approach though. Might be better to just set up some versioning layer on top of Wasabi and to keep deleted or modified data forever.
- radicality 3y ago
  I was trying to set up a similar thing. I already do the google takeouts every few months (~400GB, I don’t have issues with export though), but so far have been storing all of them. How do you do the diff between the old and new encrypted versions? Do you encrypt and upload the takeout .tar.gz files, or do extract first then encrypt?

sebmellen 3y ago

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. https://www.cubebackup.com/ https://www.cubebackup.com/

freedomben 3y ago
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 elevated to rclone fanboy since I discovered crypt: https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/crypt/
- sebmellen 3y ago
  Wow, Crypt is awesome. 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.
kuchenbecker 3y ago
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,

londons_explore 3y ago

Guess at root cause: 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)

causality0 3y ago
and some users are going to permanently lose data Why couldn't you write code to let users compare and choose which version of the data they want to keep?
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  Ideally Google will resolve it without the customer needing to do the work.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  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?
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    "let users compare" doesn't require diffing tools. Worst case put the versions next to reach other.
    - nix0n 3y ago
      > Worst case put the versions next to each other. For some files (anything encrypted, for example) this may actually be the best you could do. Dropbox had this behavior ten years ago, so it's kind of inexcusable for Google today to be just mindlessly overwriting.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

This is why its good to have Cryptomator setup and figure out how to use that rsync or rclone whatever. Still gotta figure out how to implement it but anything with the G is already on shaky grounds. You're better off with Dropbox or literally anyone else. Does this affect iCloud?

djbusby 3y ago
The iCloud is built by a different company than Google Drive
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  I thought Apple used GoogleCloud/GCP or whatever?

theginger 3y ago

https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ Nothing showing on service status currently

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
There is no rational basis for trusting a first-party status page.
skullone 3y ago
Do you look outside to get the weather from 5,000 miles away?

bloopernova 3y ago

Can anyone recommend a Google Drive backup to something like AWS S3 Glacier or other long-term storage provider? I was running BorgBase but had some financial difficulties and couldn't pay for it, plus copying 2TB of data from home at around 40Mbit/s isn't great. Ideally something that pulls from google directly without involving my home computer would be best.

tiahura 3y ago
Why don’t you give your friend an 8tb to keep at his house and rsync?
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Google Takeout will export to Dropbox, ad hoc or on a cadence (into the /Apps/Google Download Your Data/ path). Backblaze B2 is ~$6/month per TB, so depending on your storage requirements, at some point it will be more cost effective to have a pair of Synology NAS devices; one local, one as a backup offsite, with backups shipped. These same NAS devices can backup directly to a variety of targets [1]. [1] https://kb.synology.com/en-uk/DSM/help/HyperBackup/data_backup_destination?version=7 https://kb.synology.com/en-uk/DSM/help/HyperBackup/data_back... (no affiliation with any above entity)
noveltyaccount 3y ago
Maybe an rclone script that runs from AWS. Package it in a Docker image and run it from a Lambda function for pennies per invocation. Schedule it to run nightly. https://rclone.org/s3/ https://rclone.org/s3/ https://rclone.org/drive/ https://rclone.org/drive/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-run-lambda-schedule.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-... My script, though I run locally rclone -v copy /source/location s3:backup.bucket.name/ --transfers 1 --copy-links --filter-from /config/syncfilter.txt --max-delete 20 --stats 5m --stats-log-level NOTICE --update --use-server-modtime --fast-list My Dockerfile includes RUN curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | bash And I've configured the S3 remote to use Glacier [s3] type = s3 provider = AWS ... storage_class = GLACIER

yeutterg 3y ago

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?

droopyEyelids 3y ago
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.
- mathattack 3y ago
  The only thing more painful than using OneDrive is talking to the salesperson who sold it to your company.
- happymellon 3y ago
  God, why are the choices so bad. 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.
  - zelon88 3y ago
    > I don't think that selfhosting is a great option for corporate, but Microsoft and Google are just shit. Why? When corporations weren't capable of managing credit cards securely, PCI was created and all the lazy businesses were told to either do this correctly, or outsource it to someone who will. When corporations weren't capable of managing infrastructure, Cloud providers created an out and told all the lazy businesses that they could do this correctly. Businesses believed the hype, fired their on-prem administrators, and still can't do this thing correctly. So, if you can't be bothered to do something correctly, and you can't pay to get it done correctly, maybe you are not fit to be operating.

game_the0ry 3y ago

This is a royal fuck up. Anyone using any g cloud service better be suspect when using their services. Amazing how some folks can't get a job at google if they can't invert a binary tree. Perhaps hire folks with relevant skills rather than folks who can solve 2 leetcode mediums in under 45 mins?

GoToRO 3y ago
Oh, you think developers still have that kind of power... Management has made sure to not allow any developer to have any kind of power. Not even naming their own variable the way they want it. All big and small decisions are taken by managers that don't even understand coding. They are the ones that push for hard deadlines and then loose months deciding what to do next for example. The crappy software trend has been rising at the same pace with the stripping of power from developers.
refulgentis 3y ago
That's not actually how it works, that's an ollllld viral article. Source: worked at google for 7 years, 2.8 gpa dropout from state school economics EDIT: upvotes for reality-detached rant, upvotes for "you think you are The One" -2 for a polite concise reality.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  My friend, don’t take this the wrong way, but you need to hear this. It would benefit you to take the downvotes as constructive criticism. You opinions may need recalibration based on feedback.
compiler-guy 3y ago
This comment smells very much like you think you are The One. Or that The One is out there somewhere [1]. Bugs happen and this is a serious failure that Google needs to fix. But the idea that incompetents are doing the development or that Google hires puzzle solvers over technical talent is just not true. 1. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/21/env/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/21/env/

mrweasel 3y ago

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.

armchairhacker 3y ago
If it's Docs/Sheets/Slides then I'd notice. If not...I don't really store anything else on Google Drive, just files shared with me.
vasco 3y ago
It's really hard to make a file browser in 2023 with only about 100k employees, give them a bit of a break. Some things are just hard!
- picadores 3y ago
  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.
- chickenpotpie 3y ago
  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.
  - notRobot 3y ago
    If you've made it and released it to a the public (and it has paid tiers!) then you better have made it right. This is the case for both buildings and data storage systems.

tiltowait 3y ago

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.

rattray 3y ago
OOC, was this a google doc or a docx file uploaded?
jacobyoder 3y ago
"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).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > they've always had such a good reputation for support I'm genuinely curious as to what group they have a good reputation for support with.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    People who have not yet had a problem.

RobotToaster 3y ago

Is there any word if this is actively syncing deletions to local storage? I have my google drive synced to multiple computers which I assumed was enough...

lonestar 3y ago
I was hit by this. It looks like my laptop had not been syncing correctly for a couple months, then GDrive overwrote my local “My Drive” folder with the old cloud copy.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  That sounds painful. Are you using the official Google drive app?
- zerocrates 3y ago
  I was going to say, from what I've seen it looks like this kind of problem: a problem with the desktop sync, rather than Google's cloud storage itself. The sync problem at the same time feels more likely and worse, as if the files never touched Google's servers and its sync went and deleted them, there'd be nothing they could do.
mrich 3y ago
It's certainly not enough if you assume there can ever be an error in the backend which Google is unable to recover from.

_jal 3y ago

I've been convinced for years that Google Docs loses things. I both had files vanish and have lost edits - one time I could demonstrate it with a screenshot of part of a doc that later reverted to an earlier version. Other people at work agree with me. Google support insists we're nuts. I only use it when other internal folks start collaborative docs, otherwise I do not trust it. Files don't randomly disappear from my local filesystem (and we test our backups).

lupire 3y ago
Use takeout to make snapshots to compare.

edgyquant 3y ago

This is why you always maintain backups. Do not depend on data just being there

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

I've always found it sound to backup cloud storage. And this is an example why.

r3trohack3r 3y ago

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.

shp0ngle 3y ago
I have backup both to Google Photos and iCloud. 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.
- pram 3y ago
  I have Photos set to download all the files locally, and those get backed up with Time Machine and Backblaze. People forget even s3 will lose files. The reliability is high sure but it’s still sub 100%
  - stefandesu 3y ago
    My concern about my own backup strategy (which, for Photos, is exactly the same as yours) is that I don't have a system in place that notifies me if files get corrupted or randomly deleted, and I'm not sure how I would go about implementing something like that. Any ideas?
    - pram 3y ago
      I use a synology for TM (raid 1) and it uses btrfs which has checksums to prevent bitrot. Either that or something running ZFS would be the obvious options: https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_enable_file_self_healing_on_DSM https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_enable_fil...

burgerquizz 3y ago

i was tracking about once a month my portfolio from various brokers in spreadsheet for years. One day that spreadsheet disappeared. I still don't know if it was miss-manipulation from me or something else. today it reinforced me in the idea of it being on the google side.

Pxtl 3y ago

I've an RPI with a big old spinning metal disk external HDD attached, anybody recommend a good workflow for automatic bidirectional sync between GD and my thing?

zipping1549 3y ago
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vachina 3y ago

Be me, self host my own cloud drive. No fees, no surprises, infinitely scalable, insanely fast local backups.

timcavel 3y ago
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shadowgovt 3y ago
I'm sure everyone reading Hacker News can cobble something together in a weekend or two or knows someone who can. What should the rest of the world do? (Also, my hats off to you that you're seeing "no surprises." So you never discovered your backup machine has a flaky wifi card or bad Ethernet jack? Never had bit-rot or errors on your backing store, or are you just not detecting them until it's too late? You're testing your local backups regularly to make sure there isn't a script error that means none of those bits can actually be restored? And are you backing up offsite so when your residence burns down you still have your backups? Lots of us are "backing up" using ad-hoc bespoke solutions that we will discover were broken only when we need them.)
- vachina 3y ago
  > What should the rest of the world do? Educate and help those who do not know? I helped setup my cousin’s NAS and gave it a subdomain. What i meant by no surprises is: the backend and front end stays the same forever, short of me manually updating it. My server and their apps, will not suddenly lose functionality or have cruft added because someone in Mountain View deems so. Key to making this work is keeping things simple. Meaning no container or any burying of my data under any layer of abstraction. My files are laid bare on the platter, making it very portable because any application that does file system operation can immediately operate on my files. Unlike the clusterfuck that is owncloud. Every quarter I do an incremental offline backup of all the drives in the NAS, to address all the issues you mentioned.

Dioxide2119 3y ago

"Scary cloud things" like this are why I moved off of Dropbox and Onedrive years ago and got to a new normal of "syncthing all my main devices together" for file sync, then have Backblaze backup my machine that holds the linux ISOs etc. that I'm not necessarily wanting to have redundant storage space used for them at that time. Now, the failures are my own fault, but at least I can do offline backups to HDDs and BD-Rs, and I don't have to worry about any of the cloud services (TM) messing with my data and me having little recourse. Yes, I could do separate backups of the cloud things too, but at that point, that just adds 'cloud service' as an option to the first part of the equation: cloud device storage / local device sync (on and off-site) / NAS + offline on-site backups as HDDs & BD-Rs + online off-site backups Doing syncthing with local device sync is cheaper than cloud device storage (recurring costs) and NAS (fixed costs / hardware maintenance)

Configure0251 3y ago

My partner has been experiencing emails coming and going in big chunks - months and years at a time - but if we search support forums all we can find are "support agents" blaming the individuals complaining about this phenomenon. It's gaslighting all the way down. Even when it's actively happening, checking moment to moment and having another few months vanish, and they'll still tell you "you must be deleting things, stop deleting them."

spuz 3y ago
When did this start happening and which time period is it affecting? Since November 21, my friend has had all her Gmail emails since May 2023 go missing. It matches the time period mentioned in the article but this is Gmail rather than Drive.
- Configure0251 3y ago
  This began roughly 2 weeks ago. Last I saw things had vanished since 2018. It's bad. And when it started it was just back to Dec 2022. I can't prove there's a connection, but it's just been very aggravating when nobody in any forums believes people that make these claims. To be clear she's only asked once, but more than a few other posts have described situations that read similarly and not just "I can't find this one email".
  - spuz 3y ago
    That sounds very similar to the experience my friend had. Large timespans of emails were disappearing at a time. Hopefully Google figures it out.

0898 3y ago

Anyone else having issues with Google Drive in Mac OS? This week I've been noticing I've been unable to open files on my Mac that are stored in Google Drive. I can open them via the web, so I thought it was just the Mac software until I saw this post.

manmal 3y ago

I’ve been self hosting images with https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich and I‘m really happy. Decent mobile apps, even has good face recognition and H/W accelerated video transcoding. Can be served either with Tailscale or, as I did, with a reverse proxy on a cheap Hetzner box. Good backups are a must obviously, I have a backup server on a separate VLAN that syncs ZFS snapshots daily, and daily incremental encrypted backups to Google Drive w/ Duplicati. I‘ll have to reconsider Gdrive now obviously.

darkwater 3y ago
Dies It hace any native app? The default mobile web UI seems a bit too overcrowded by other elements rather than pictures (at least on Firefox/Android). I'm using Photoprism currently and looking for some alternative that has better face detection system and an integrated "X years ago" automatic slideshow thing (I don't care about the "splish splash", "out in the wild", "magic hour" compilations that GPhoto automatically does, just the basic X years ago thing, maybe when picture has tagged people)
- manmal 3y ago
  Yes, native apps are available and are quite good. Sometimes I get hangs after first opening the iOS app, but only briefly. Quite handily it has an option to allow self signed certificates, to make within-LAN use easier. I‘m binding my Immich domain to a local IP with unbound and don’t need to bother with letsencrypt internally that way. Only the hetzner box needs the certificate (obviously). The quality of face tagging surprised me, it uses one of the open source algos by Microsoft.

Waterluvian 3y ago

If I wanted to indefinitely back up every image my wife's and my phones take, without me having to think about anything other than an annual bill, what services would people suggest? Currently Google does this perfectly for us... except for the part that maybe it's not actually doing that after all, and the fact that it's Google and they're seemingly less competent by the hour. Apple is the only alternative I'm aware of. Edit: Just to be very very very very clear. I don't want to have to do ANYTHING but pay a bill.

InCityDreams 3y ago
An ssd big enough and syncthing?

BorisMelnik 3y ago

about 5 years ago I just stopped trusting the Cloud for my personal memories, it is just too valuable to lose those photos and I do not trust these companies. Running a home server is easy and cheap. 18Tb drives now are inexpensive. And every few times a year I'll make a full copy and stash it at my moms house and safety deposit box. edit - love foldersync pro for my Android. does SFTP/SMB/webDAV and all major cloud services over wifi or 5g. every night it transfers everything off my phone to my server which is also on parity

partiallypro 3y ago

This is why I always have my device backup to both GDrive and OneDrive.

InCityDreams 3y ago

Take photo. Enjoy them, they are temporary. No-one will give a fuck in 25 years.

atulvi 3y ago
speak for yourself.

latexr 3y ago

> MatthewSt reports that he has a fix Let’s see the instructions on that link. > 2. Install an old version of Google Drive (there's a version 82/83 floating around on the internet). This is awful advice. If you have a link, share it. Considering the number of people this is affecting, chances are increasing that the version you find “floating around on the internet” is malware.

gruez 3y ago
>Considering the number of people this is affecting, chances are increasing that the version you find “floating around on the internet” is malware. The windows installer at least is digitally signed to prevent this issue.
- latexr 3y ago
  Apps and installers on macOS are also signed but there’s always a way to go around it. Simplest method is for the malware author to resign it, since effectively no one will verify the signature is from the correct source. But even then you can always convince people to disable System Integrity Protection to install crap. Despite it being a convoluted process, never underestimate what someone who is not tech savvy but is desperate can do. They will install anything and jump through any hoop the malware author walks them through with nice screenshots. I doubt there’s no way to trick people the same way on Windows. Perhaps I’m wrong, and if I am I’d welcome learning how that system works.
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JohnFen 3y ago

Yet another reminder that nobody should be storing anything only in the cloud. If you must use the cloud, always keep your own copy of all data you put there.

bobbob1921 3y ago

I suggest users look into cube backup, it’s great for local backups and versioning of G suite data. I’ve been using it for three or four years now, and couldn’t be happier. (Dev is very quick to reply and helpful.). Still just 5$ per year per user (I’m not sure if it supports Gmail free, but it definitely supports G suite users.) Additionally, it does not help that the search giants, search functionality for Drive and Gmail is so incredibly poor (more so Gmail, I have found drive search has improved,). For example, you still cannot do AND searches in Gmail properly. You also cannot do wildcard, searches of any kind. (And no regex nor partial regex)

bobbob1921 3y ago
One other note (and I haven’t read every reply here yet) – other than the anecdotal evidence of drive data loss, one way to 100% prove drive data loss is occurring, is if someone has an example of data, not showing up on Drive, but that same data is present in a cubeback up local back up (as cube backup Supports versioning, and it’s only source of data is directly from G suite). This would prove the data was on drive at one point, but is now gone along with the date and time it was retrieved and saved locally via cubeback up. (Additionally, one can show that it wasn’t deleted via user action by looking at the logs in Gsuite admin, or I think cubeBackup would log a delete as well, assuming you’re retaining those cubebackup logs) (to be clear I’m simply a user of cubeback up. I have no interest or affiliation with them)

agumonkey 3y ago

An important reminder, I rely on this to have quick access to official documents.. time to backoff.

jp191919 3y ago

My solution: Everything(phone,laptop,etc) syncs with Nextcloud on my homeserver, then backup encrypted snapshots to Backblaze using Restic. Also occasional manual backups to a hard drives at locations other than my house. Works great, no dependence on "free" cloud storage.

neilv 3y ago

All lights are green: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ No recent/active incident for Google Drive is shown: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/summary https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/summary https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/products/VHNA7p3Z5p3iakj5sA8V/history https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/products/VHNA7p3...

achrono 3y ago
What a shame. The mighty Google is after all in the same league as some random LLC providing cloud storage for $1.99/mo.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

Nacho keys, nacho cyber

davidpaulyoung 3y ago

Use an open source system. You can choose to back up to a self-hosted version, too. https://federated.computer https://federated.computer.

x86x87 3y ago
You can also lose your own files!

khana 3y ago

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