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One thing I've learned: Never (ever) make yourself reliant/dependent on Google products. If you do get banned / locked out, it is the most AI-Kafkaesque process

One thing I've learned: Never (ever) make yourself reliant/dependent on Google products. If you do get banned / locked out, it is the most AI-Kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access. And you could stay locked out for years. I use Google sheets myself from time to time, but I regularly do backups of the sheets I'm working on, or anything important I have access to. I've been in the hole before, for reasons I still do not understand, and it was one of the most frustrating "customer support" processes I've ever experienced, and it took years.

PunchTornado 1y ago
try being banned by msft. I am still banned for 6 years without doing anything wrong. still lost access to all of my accounts.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  My dad got a Trojan and they took over his msft account to buy some Xbox cards. They banned him as well but he took them to small claims in the EU. As usual they didn't show up and he got a ruling to reinstate his account. Was under 100 bucks and he got his account back. If the account is really important I would do the same. There is a 90% chance they won't show.
  - fsckboy 1y ago
    just as a point of interest, in US small claims courts, the judge can award monetary damages, but cannot order somebody to do something (like turn your account on) i'm not sure if this varies by state.
- AJ007 1y ago
  A good reason why no one should ever have their Windows install linked to a Microsoft account, same for MacOS.
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    Who ever lost apple account by being banned? with no recourse? I don't remember a story like that
    - hn-ifs 1y ago
      Can't of happened then if you don't remember a story like it...
      - throwaway290 1y ago
        I asked a question) Did I miss a story like that?
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      I've never heard a rant about people being banned, but i can think of a half dozen people who have lost their icloud accounts due to the combo of inexplicably not remembering or writing down their passwords and selling or losing a phone.
      - IAmBroom 1y ago
        How is that different from losing access to, say, your own computer by the same route? That's entirely different from another entity denying you access to your data.
        Spooky23 1y ago
        People have investments in things like itunes, apps, etc.
        throwaway290 1y ago
        are you trying to say if you forget your password it is the same as you getting blocked for no reason?
      - 1y ago
Aachen 1y ago
I keep telling people to make backups of "cloud" services ever since Grooveshark died from one day to the next Maybe Spotify won't be taken down overnight, but they can lock me out for various reasons such as misdetecting an IP address (Google wouldn't let me log in at all when they thought I was in Russia, when I was at 31C3 in Hamburg, Germany, a conference where they afaik use some temporary IP space — I don't know what consequences that would have nowadays) Hacker News also: if there are things here you want to keep, store them yourself Facebook chats, Signal, etc.: download the data in a format you can decode if there's anything you want to keep. Make sure you can decode this Signal backup format if your phone dies
- raybb 1y ago
  Yes and don't forget signal is rolling out free cloud backup for texts so it should be making the process of backups even easier for non techy users.
  - Aachen 1y ago
    How do I get it out of their cloud? It works as a backup to my phone, but I'd still want another copy that I can access regardless of whether I've got access to that phone number right now. Sorting that out with the carrier can take a while What's (to me) much more exciting to me is the incremental local backups they're working on. I've iirc looked into how to decode these big backup files, and copy them off my phone semi-regularly, but this being rsyncable will make the process much faster
    - raybb 1y ago
      I assume the process is basically to restore from cloud on device and then export a local backup. But I don't recall them saying anything specific about that. The incremental backups do sound really nice.
      - Aachen 1y ago
        That sounds like it'll require access to the phone number to set it up on a new device, and that's assuming the user promptly has the funds for a new device Even if it works for desktop clients also, that still needs to be set up using a data matrix scanned by the mobile device (or if that's already done before you lost the origin device, you can "simply" extract the faux-encrypted sqlite format that the desktop client uses, albeit with having to recompile this encryption extension for Sqlite manually — ask me how I know..)
sjw987 1y ago
I can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've just removed all of my data from them. I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave, but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than using search engines. I still run a skeleton Pixel, but the storage is almost exclusively just a very limited range of apps I use. I managed to get Google One storage from about 700GB to about 700Mb over the course of the last month or so.
- coffeefirst 1y ago
  What’s your Docs and Sheets alternative? I’ve looked, I’ve never found anything that seems to both cover all the bases and not feel like a bad Microsoft clone.
  - sjw987 1y ago
    I just developed a webapp for it. I only used Docs for personal reasons, so my own version is basically just a really stripped down rich text editor. A lot of things I just save to .txt files. It saves (both locally and to self-hosting) to JSON and, exports to PDF and HTML. And then I wrote a script to convert docx files over when I migrated from Google.
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel?
    - lemonlearnings 1y ago
      .xlsx is the key. Can use it with sheets, M$ or libre office. Or unzip it and take a look at XML.
    - tcfhgj 1y ago
      same problem?
  - 1y ago
lemonlearnings 1y ago
Google takeout is key. Why struggle backing up individual Google things.
crazygringo 1y ago
I assume you're talking about the free consumer tier? Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works. Google shuts down free accounts when it believes they're being used for fraud/spam. And because scammers and spammers create them at virtually zero cost, and will fake activity to build account credibility until using them for nefarious purposes, that does mean legitimate free accounts occasionally get caught. Regular backups are important no matter what though. Obviously Takeout exists, but there are lots of third-party automated backup solutions as well that will automatically convert Sheets files to .xlsx as part of the backup process. I use one that backs up nightly to my NAS.
- throwuxiytayq 1y ago
  Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts. Google even occasionally burns developers they have deals and working relationships with. Just don't use any Google services. Not free, not paid (why would you send them money???!?!). Not for personal stuff, not for work projects. Not for throwaway data, not for important data.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    The Google rage on HN is immature. That's a feature of any SaaS. Adobe frequently shuts down ETLA customers due their own invoice processing failures. I can think of three significant government subdivisions that were unable to access any M365 service for 1-10 days as a result of a reseller change. The real lesson here is that you need to understand the failure domains of the technology your business depends on. Your business is as good as the contracts you rely on. We're relatively good at preparing for IT failure, but not so much the other stuff. For small businesses, key revenue generation could be stopped by an employee doing something dumb with a corporate card.
    - praestigiare 1y ago
      The real lesson here is that almost all modern SaaS applications have massively under invested in customer support in order to appear more profitable or sustainable than they really are. One of the major factors behind LLM development is trying to solve this problem before the house of cards falls down. Companies were enticed by the recurring revenue of SaaS, but don't want to pay for the level of support required when you are responsible for all your customers data as well as their access to the service.
CGMthrowaway 1y ago
You're right about google's track record but at heart yours is a comment about third-party cloud dependency, not google. As you mention, offline storage solves this and another commenter mentioned msft will ban you also (but you dont hear about it because...offline storage)
- bluGill 1y ago
  Track record is a factor that you should consider. When companies buy services from others they often ensure that the contract has protection from things like this. They have clauses that the data belongs to them. They have clauses about what happens if the company is sold. They have clauses about abandoning the product. They have a number of other things added that I'm not aware of. You as a single individual (and often as a small business) don't have the power to get that into a contract. However you still should read the fine print - you should go elsewhere if it the fine print is against you.
scythe 1y ago
This comment prompted me to go look at the various spreadsheet software available, since I was only familiar with the usual Excel / GS / Libre. There is also GNOME's Gnumeric, KDE's Calligra, Apple's Numbers, an online variant of LibreOffice called Collabora, an Excel clone made by a German company called PlanMaker, a Latvian effort called OnlyOffice, and then probably the most unusual variant, but somehow it isn't surprising that somebody made a spreadsheet based on Python: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyspread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyspread
jd3 1y ago
We bought a Google Workspace subscription for a building I help manage and I was shocked when I found out that you can't archive emails for discovery/legal purposes unless you buy a more expensive subscription that has access to the "vault." We already pay nearly $90/mo for 6 seats!
hosteur 1y ago
Do you have a good automated way to back up Sheets, etc?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

PunchTornado 1y ago

try being banned by msft. I am still banned for 6 years without doing anything wrong. still lost access to all of my accounts.

BoredPositron 1y ago
My dad got a Trojan and they took over his msft account to buy some Xbox cards. They banned him as well but he took them to small claims in the EU. As usual they didn't show up and he got a ruling to reinstate his account. Was under 100 bucks and he got his account back. If the account is really important I would do the same. There is a 90% chance they won't show.
- fsckboy 1y ago
  just as a point of interest, in US small claims courts, the judge can award monetary damages, but cannot order somebody to do something (like turn your account on) i'm not sure if this varies by state.
AJ007 1y ago
A good reason why no one should ever have their Windows install linked to a Microsoft account, same for MacOS.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  Who ever lost apple account by being banned? with no recourse? I don't remember a story like that
  - hn-ifs 1y ago
    Can't of happened then if you don't remember a story like it...
    - throwaway290 1y ago
      I asked a question) Did I miss a story like that?
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    I've never heard a rant about people being banned, but i can think of a half dozen people who have lost their icloud accounts due to the combo of inexplicably not remembering or writing down their passwords and selling or losing a phone.
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      How is that different from losing access to, say, your own computer by the same route? That's entirely different from another entity denying you access to your data.
      - Spooky23 1y ago
        People have investments in things like itunes, apps, etc.
        throwaway290 1y ago
        are you trying to say if you forget your password it is the same as you getting blocked for no reason?
    - 1y ago

Aachen 1y ago

I keep telling people to make backups of "cloud" services ever since Grooveshark died from one day to the next Maybe Spotify won't be taken down overnight, but they can lock me out for various reasons such as misdetecting an IP address (Google wouldn't let me log in at all when they thought I was in Russia, when I was at 31C3 in Hamburg, Germany, a conference where they afaik use some temporary IP space — I don't know what consequences that would have nowadays) Hacker News also: if there are things here you want to keep, store them yourself Facebook chats, Signal, etc.: download the data in a format you can decode if there's anything you want to keep. Make sure you can decode this Signal backup format if your phone dies

raybb 1y ago
Yes and don't forget signal is rolling out free cloud backup for texts so it should be making the process of backups even easier for non techy users.
- Aachen 1y ago
  How do I get it out of their cloud? It works as a backup to my phone, but I'd still want another copy that I can access regardless of whether I've got access to that phone number right now. Sorting that out with the carrier can take a while What's (to me) much more exciting to me is the incremental local backups they're working on. I've iirc looked into how to decode these big backup files, and copy them off my phone semi-regularly, but this being rsyncable will make the process much faster
  - raybb 1y ago
    I assume the process is basically to restore from cloud on device and then export a local backup. But I don't recall them saying anything specific about that. The incremental backups do sound really nice.
    - Aachen 1y ago
      That sounds like it'll require access to the phone number to set it up on a new device, and that's assuming the user promptly has the funds for a new device Even if it works for desktop clients also, that still needs to be set up using a data matrix scanned by the mobile device (or if that's already done before you lost the origin device, you can "simply" extract the faux-encrypted sqlite format that the desktop client uses, albeit with having to recompile this encryption extension for Sqlite manually — ask me how I know..)

sjw987 1y ago

I can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've just removed all of my data from them. I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave, but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than using search engines. I still run a skeleton Pixel, but the storage is almost exclusively just a very limited range of apps I use. I managed to get Google One storage from about 700GB to about 700Mb over the course of the last month or so.

coffeefirst 1y ago
What’s your Docs and Sheets alternative? I’ve looked, I’ve never found anything that seems to both cover all the bases and not feel like a bad Microsoft clone.
- sjw987 1y ago
  I just developed a webapp for it. I only used Docs for personal reasons, so my own version is basically just a really stripped down rich text editor. A lot of things I just save to .txt files. It saves (both locally and to self-hosting) to JSON and, exports to PDF and HTML. And then I wrote a script to convert docx files over when I migrated from Google.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel?
  - lemonlearnings 1y ago
    .xlsx is the key. Can use it with sheets, M$ or libre office. Or unzip it and take a look at XML.
  - tcfhgj 1y ago
    same problem?
- 1y ago

lemonlearnings 1y ago

Google takeout is key. Why struggle backing up individual Google things.

crazygringo 1y ago

I assume you're talking about the free consumer tier? Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works. Google shuts down free accounts when it believes they're being used for fraud/spam. And because scammers and spammers create them at virtually zero cost, and will fake activity to build account credibility until using them for nefarious purposes, that does mean legitimate free accounts occasionally get caught. Regular backups are important no matter what though. Obviously Takeout exists, but there are lots of third-party automated backup solutions as well that will automatically convert Sheets files to .xlsx as part of the backup process. I use one that backs up nightly to my NAS.

throwuxiytayq 1y ago
Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts. Google even occasionally burns developers they have deals and working relationships with. Just don't use any Google services. Not free, not paid (why would you send them money???!?!). Not for personal stuff, not for work projects. Not for throwaway data, not for important data.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  The Google rage on HN is immature. That's a feature of any SaaS. Adobe frequently shuts down ETLA customers due their own invoice processing failures. I can think of three significant government subdivisions that were unable to access any M365 service for 1-10 days as a result of a reseller change. The real lesson here is that you need to understand the failure domains of the technology your business depends on. Your business is as good as the contracts you rely on. We're relatively good at preparing for IT failure, but not so much the other stuff. For small businesses, key revenue generation could be stopped by an employee doing something dumb with a corporate card.
  - praestigiare 1y ago
    The real lesson here is that almost all modern SaaS applications have massively under invested in customer support in order to appear more profitable or sustainable than they really are. One of the major factors behind LLM development is trying to solve this problem before the house of cards falls down. Companies were enticed by the recurring revenue of SaaS, but don't want to pay for the level of support required when you are responsible for all your customers data as well as their access to the service.

CGMthrowaway 1y ago

You're right about google's track record but at heart yours is a comment about third-party cloud dependency, not google. As you mention, offline storage solves this and another commenter mentioned msft will ban you also (but you dont hear about it because...offline storage)

bluGill 1y ago
Track record is a factor that you should consider. When companies buy services from others they often ensure that the contract has protection from things like this. They have clauses that the data belongs to them. They have clauses about what happens if the company is sold. They have clauses about abandoning the product. They have a number of other things added that I'm not aware of. You as a single individual (and often as a small business) don't have the power to get that into a contract. However you still should read the fine print - you should go elsewhere if it the fine print is against you.

scythe 1y ago

This comment prompted me to go look at the various spreadsheet software available, since I was only familiar with the usual Excel / GS / Libre. There is also GNOME's Gnumeric, KDE's Calligra, Apple's Numbers, an online variant of LibreOffice called Collabora, an Excel clone made by a German company called PlanMaker, a Latvian effort called OnlyOffice, and then probably the most unusual variant, but somehow it isn't surprising that somebody made a spreadsheet based on Python: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyspread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyspread

jd3 1y ago

We bought a Google Workspace subscription for a building I help manage and I was shocked when I found out that you can't archive emails for discovery/legal purposes unless you buy a more expensive subscription that has access to the "vault." We already pay nearly $90/mo for 6 seats!

hosteur 1y ago

Do you have a good automated way to back up Sheets, etc?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]