4 ms·

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)

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.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      We’re perfectly willing to pay for it. An employee seat costs about $200pm of various licenses and subscriptions, there’s a lot of money to make.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > still can't do this thing correctly > and you can't pay to get it done correctly Am I reading this right? You're blaming the business that is purchasing a service, for the provider's inability to provide it?
    - happymellon 3y ago
      > 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. The amount spent on Microsoft suggests a willingness to blow money on the problem. But with Google having no real support, always shutting down projects, and now losing a lot of people's Drive data and refusing to acknowledge it makes me reluctant to use them. Teams is janky in other ways, such as Microsoft forcing Sharepoint everywhere, and now we have a chat program that attempts to silo data as much as possible so we a lot of project documentation that isn't always accessible or discoverable. If you have alternative suggestions, I am open to them.
  - eyegor 3y ago
    Dropbox seems to still work fine in my experience.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    Because Microsoft has a document monopoly via their shitty proprietary format that they make sure no competitor can effectively import/edit. And Google is just shitty as usual, but they're a giant free default. I wonder if with all this antitrust stuff going on we'll ever see regulation in the form of required interoperability and/or data portability? Instead of trying to break up companies, block mergers, etc, I feel like simple technical solutions would be faster and more effective.
  - dcow 3y ago
    We did the Notion + Discord thing for years and it worked well and felt modern.
  - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    > why are the choices so bad I've seen a couple reasons: One, often these products are made by companies where the products are not their primary revenue source. The products are often managed as independent business cases. That means they have a budget, timelines, expected revenue figures/costs. It's common for a product to get a low level of investment that only meets the needs of adding new features [to meet sales figures] without ensuring quality. If it were a startup flush with VC money, they could invest all they have into the product, but at an enterprise, it's often the opposite. Two, often these products are actually acquisitions of startups. You may not know this, but startups tend to churn out some horrifying, janky code just to get themselves off the ground. Buying one of these often leaves you with a huge mess on your hands. Combine that with a lack of investment or cost-cutting, or some of the lead product people leaving, and the product gets worse. Then try to integrate different products, and you're really integrating different messes. Three, it's genuinely hard to create groupware products that are both high-quality and useful. They're often complex and need to interoperate with one another, yet are built by separate teams. And because they're complex, they each suffer from the standard problems that happen to software products (many books written about them). But the people managing and creating them fall into the same old pitfalls, because software product development is not required to avoid them. Bad management and bad engineering are common, and these products in particular are no exception. Four, they're actually difficult things to build and sell. If they were easy, there'd be more competition. There tends to be "alternatives", but not with the same features.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    [dead]
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    Feels like a good opportunity for someone to build the “do one thing and do it well” file storage on top of B2. Backblaze has a simple approach that stores 30% recovery data next to the files (and self-heals) while also storing customer data in multiple offsite locations. Build the ability for integrations (with customer-visible audit logs), inter-user sharing, and proper permissions and you have the modern equivalent of the shared drive from the old days. And don’t worry about quoting XKCD #927 at me. I know the realities of a project like this.
    - pretext-1 3y ago
      I have a friend who lost data with Backblaze’s backup product. It can always happen. Don't trust a single provider or software. Backups should not be “integrated”, they should be as much apart as possible.
      - joshspankit 3y ago
        I’m very interested in the “receipts” (meaning: the story and the paper trail to verify the story) if you’re able to share
    - atYevP 3y ago
      Yev here -> we work pretty well with Movebot (https://community.movebot.io/hc/en-us/articles/360001557095-Backblaze-B2-Migration https://community.movebot.io/hc/en-us/articles/360001557095-...) where you can set up a Gdrive to B2 sync/backup. And Rclone can do that as well (https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-integrate-rclone-with-backblaze-b2 https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-integrate-rclon...) so there's a few ways to do this.
- yeutterg 3y ago
  That’s very fair. I totally recognize that Microsoft has a lot of half-baked me-too products to round out the suite. We are going to do a full evaluation before switching (if Loop ever gets enabled) to see if, despite the limitations, this improves collaboration, or if it just creates as many headaches.
- rvba 3y ago
  Sharepoint is killing productivity. It's so sad that Microsoft does not see how they ruin productivity of big orgs. Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily. They even broke the windows taskbar, which automatically combines things together. They assume that people working in an office have only 1 email open and 1 spreadsheet open, while most have 20 and dont know how to turn off this shitty UI.
  - tyfon 3y ago
    > Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily. I actually found a way where I work now, I made a shortcut to the sharepoint folder from teams that appear in the file explorer, I can then link the document. Of course this only works for me and not if I share the file. Can't wait for the merge of the desktop and web excel to finally break it all... I also overwrote an important document today because the idiotic auto save was turned on, I used the document as a template for a new one without checking. Luckily I had a copy of the important one in my Documents folder on the local computer which they recommend you not to do since you might have data loss! Yes, I hate office 365...
    - rvba 3y ago
      The thing is that the documents are shared out by default and it simply craps out when you have flows like: Source1 + source2 -> summary report -> consolidated report (With like 20 source files)
  - scohesc 3y ago
    They've finally conceded and re-implemented the original task bar method of "let's actually label the icons in your taskbar so you have some idea of what you're actually clicking on before you click it". You have to re-enable it in taskbar settings, but it's FINALLY there to be enabled again. I use a program called StartIsBack to try and return to a more "classic" shell experience, but Windows has done such a good job at tying so much to their shell that from what I hear it's close to impossible to do certain things anymore.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

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.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    We’re perfectly willing to pay for it. An employee seat costs about $200pm of various licenses and subscriptions, there’s a lot of money to make.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > still can't do this thing correctly > and you can't pay to get it done correctly Am I reading this right? You're blaming the business that is purchasing a service, for the provider's inability to provide it?
  - happymellon 3y ago
    > 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. The amount spent on Microsoft suggests a willingness to blow money on the problem. But with Google having no real support, always shutting down projects, and now losing a lot of people's Drive data and refusing to acknowledge it makes me reluctant to use them. Teams is janky in other ways, such as Microsoft forcing Sharepoint everywhere, and now we have a chat program that attempts to silo data as much as possible so we a lot of project documentation that isn't always accessible or discoverable. If you have alternative suggestions, I am open to them.
- eyegor 3y ago
  Dropbox seems to still work fine in my experience.
- bogwog 3y ago
  Because Microsoft has a document monopoly via their shitty proprietary format that they make sure no competitor can effectively import/edit. And Google is just shitty as usual, but they're a giant free default. I wonder if with all this antitrust stuff going on we'll ever see regulation in the form of required interoperability and/or data portability? Instead of trying to break up companies, block mergers, etc, I feel like simple technical solutions would be faster and more effective.
- dcow 3y ago
  We did the Notion + Discord thing for years and it worked well and felt modern.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  > why are the choices so bad I've seen a couple reasons: One, often these products are made by companies where the products are not their primary revenue source. The products are often managed as independent business cases. That means they have a budget, timelines, expected revenue figures/costs. It's common for a product to get a low level of investment that only meets the needs of adding new features [to meet sales figures] without ensuring quality. If it were a startup flush with VC money, they could invest all they have into the product, but at an enterprise, it's often the opposite. Two, often these products are actually acquisitions of startups. You may not know this, but startups tend to churn out some horrifying, janky code just to get themselves off the ground. Buying one of these often leaves you with a huge mess on your hands. Combine that with a lack of investment or cost-cutting, or some of the lead product people leaving, and the product gets worse. Then try to integrate different products, and you're really integrating different messes. Three, it's genuinely hard to create groupware products that are both high-quality and useful. They're often complex and need to interoperate with one another, yet are built by separate teams. And because they're complex, they each suffer from the standard problems that happen to software products (many books written about them). But the people managing and creating them fall into the same old pitfalls, because software product development is not required to avoid them. Bad management and bad engineering are common, and these products in particular are no exception. Four, they're actually difficult things to build and sell. If they were easy, there'd be more competition. There tends to be "alternatives", but not with the same features.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  [dead]
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Feels like a good opportunity for someone to build the “do one thing and do it well” file storage on top of B2. Backblaze has a simple approach that stores 30% recovery data next to the files (and self-heals) while also storing customer data in multiple offsite locations. Build the ability for integrations (with customer-visible audit logs), inter-user sharing, and proper permissions and you have the modern equivalent of the shared drive from the old days. And don’t worry about quoting XKCD #927 at me. I know the realities of a project like this.
  - pretext-1 3y ago
    I have a friend who lost data with Backblaze’s backup product. It can always happen. Don't trust a single provider or software. Backups should not be “integrated”, they should be as much apart as possible.
    - joshspankit 3y ago
      I’m very interested in the “receipts” (meaning: the story and the paper trail to verify the story) if you’re able to share
  - atYevP 3y ago
    Yev here -> we work pretty well with Movebot (https://community.movebot.io/hc/en-us/articles/360001557095-Backblaze-B2-Migration https://community.movebot.io/hc/en-us/articles/360001557095-...) where you can set up a Gdrive to B2 sync/backup. And Rclone can do that as well (https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-integrate-rclone-with-backblaze-b2 https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-integrate-rclon...) so there's a few ways to do this.
yeutterg 3y ago
That’s very fair. I totally recognize that Microsoft has a lot of half-baked me-too products to round out the suite. We are going to do a full evaluation before switching (if Loop ever gets enabled) to see if, despite the limitations, this improves collaboration, or if it just creates as many headaches.
rvba 3y ago
Sharepoint is killing productivity. It's so sad that Microsoft does not see how they ruin productivity of big orgs. Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily. They even broke the windows taskbar, which automatically combines things together. They assume that people working in an office have only 1 email open and 1 spreadsheet open, while most have 20 and dont know how to turn off this shitty UI.
- tyfon 3y ago
  > Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily. I actually found a way where I work now, I made a shortcut to the sharepoint folder from teams that appear in the file explorer, I can then link the document. Of course this only works for me and not if I share the file. Can't wait for the merge of the desktop and web excel to finally break it all... I also overwrote an important document today because the idiotic auto save was turned on, I used the document as a template for a new one without checking. Luckily I had a copy of the important one in my Documents folder on the local computer which they recommend you not to do since you might have data loss! Yes, I hate office 365...
  - rvba 3y ago
    The thing is that the documents are shared out by default and it simply craps out when you have flows like: Source1 + source2 -> summary report -> consolidated report (With like 20 source files)
- scohesc 3y ago
  They've finally conceded and re-implemented the original task bar method of "let's actually label the icons in your taskbar so you have some idea of what you're actually clicking on before you click it". You have to re-enable it in taskbar settings, but it's FINALLY there to be enabled again. I use a program called StartIsBack to try and return to a more "classic" shell experience, but Windows has done such a good job at tying so much to their shell that from what I hear it's close to impossible to do certain things anymore.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]