4 ms·
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
by 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 agoand 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 agoIdeally Google will resolve it without the customer needing to do the work.
- londons_explore 3y agoYou 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.
- Kalium 3y agoThat's an excellent description of a basic diffing tool.
- Dylan16807 3y agoA tool that cannot parse the files is not a diffing tool.
- guestbest 3y agoI guess there may be a bevy of different file formats and a diff for a spreadsheet an an image would require building tooling, just from those examples. I was thinking of creating an application where the front end is more than just a file browser to stored file types but the interface to read/edit the content as well.
- ascagnel_ 3y agoYou don't even need to go that deep -- just give me a filetype-based icon, file name, and last modified date, and that should be enough for me to choose. And if they want to be simple, include the option to always keep the most recent version of the file (which is going to be the right answer in many cases).
- jeffbee 3y agoThat seems like one of the more unlikely causes, among the almost infinite variety of causes that are consistent with "several people said they can't find some files". To me the most likely one by far is the deletion was actually commanded, for example by a flaw in the program they use to sync, or by malware.
- londons_explore 3y agoA few users have reported that documents they deleted months ago have reappeared too. And files they moved long ago have unmoved.
- jeffbee 3y agoI am still skeptical that users are correctly describing the behavior of a multi-party synced filesystem, or that Drive for Windows is bug-free. You seem to think it's a flaw on the backend but I think there are many other possible causes.
- lupire 3y agoOr some backend data storage system experienced transient errors and occasionally returned a corrupt pointer to a storage location. Low frequency data loss until it reaches alerting threshold of 0.1%
- datagram 3y agoWasn't Google starting to delete old files? My guess would be that something screwed up in that process.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]