The mystery of the disappearing Google Drive files
www.theregister.com
The horror of logging in only to find everything since May has vanished

UPDATED Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some netizens on the goliath’s support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished.

The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023.

  • _number8_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    664·
    10 months ago

    i distinctly remember 10 years ago being so excited about the cloud stuff, it seemed so futuristic, tech had so many wonderful potentials, having it autosave and automatically be accessible anywhere seemed so amazing…

    then the enshittification started. i would never dream of letting google or apple touch my files, let alone be the sole backup and arbiter of them. nothing gold can stay…

    • Salamendacious@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      Do you not have anything in the cloud or do you use another service? I was using carbonite but I gave them up years ago.

      • d3lta19@lemmy.caEnglish
        13·
        10 months ago

        I have a local backup of everything in my NAS and then I create a nighty backup to backblaze B2. Costs like 1-2$ a month for 400ish GB. Never rely on one solution.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      And I distinctly remember being asked the first time if I wanted to back up my phone photos to the cloud and thinking fuck no, some photos are private and I don’t want them leaving my device automatically. And was soon validated by all the stories of screensavers using those photos and embarrassing ones popping up, which was fucking wild to me because just making your photos randomly your screen saver also sounded like an immediate bad idea that could easily go wrong.

  • FiveMacs@lemmy.caEnglish
    325·
    10 months ago

    Perfect example of why letting some company that doesn’t give two shits about you, hold your important documents or whatever is a stupid idea…cloud storage is inherently bad and no company can be trusted more then storing your own data at home on a secure drive or two.

    • kpw@kbin.social
      231·
      10 months ago

      I don’t use any any Google services for good reasons, but I wouldn’t trust myself more not to lose my data than Google.

    • designatedhacker@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      You need an encrypted cloud copy. 3-2-1 backup with duply to wasabi (AWS bucket-like). Otherwise you’re hosed if you have a fire/tornado/theft/etc.

    • LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      26·
      10 months ago

      Lololol every neckbeard nerd a few minutes before they lose years of family pictures.

      I definitely wouldn’t have ever lost that data 🤣🤦‍♂️

  • GonzoVeritas@lemmy.worldEnglish
    211·
    10 months ago

    Google is fine for most people, but it shouldn’t be the sole backup. If you don’t have (at least) 3 separate instances of a backup, you don’t really have a reliable backup strategy. Preferably an onsite hard backup, an offsite hard backup, and a cloud backup.

    • Salamendacious@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      I know quite a few tech oriented people and I don’t know anyone who actually has the holy trinity of backups. I know quite a few who have physical backups at home and cloud though.

      • cybersandwich@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        I do.*

        • I have never restored from my off-site because who the fuck as a spare nas with decent storage or bandwidth to do that??
    • theherk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      10 months ago

      Considering data durability for some data services are providing 11 9’s, just two of those leads to extremely high durability. So to say that is unreliable is just not reasonable. I have no problem with being risk averse but that is a bit extreme.

  • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    10 months ago

    I switched to Sync because Google Drive reports that all my files are synced when they are not. There is no way to correct it or force Drive to upload the missing files and there’s no way to know when it is lying. I had to constantly check manually, which was a pain in the ass. They lied constantly.

    Sync.com has been excellent. They are cheaper, easier to use and do everything Google Drive did, including sharing folders for uploads and downloads with non-subscribers (which even Dropbox can’t do). Oh, and they don’t fucking lie. Fuck Google.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    15·
    10 months ago

    What do people use to have backups of their google drive content?

    • Getting6409@lemm.eeEnglish
      31·
      10 months ago

      Backblaze B2, which I’m pretty sure is a repackaged S3 provider, or you can just skip them and go directly to AWS S3; though, both aren’t drag and drop user friendly like onedrive or gdrive. But both work well if you invest a little time with something like rclone.

      • Chobbes@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        Backblaze B2 is S3 compatible but not built on S3. B2 is also considerably cheaper than S3, so it probably wouldn’t make sense if it was built on S3.

        • Getting6409@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Thanks, I was wondering why the s3 prefixes were used. If my memory serves, b2 is especially better on the billing rates for retrieval, so a better choice if large disaster recovery is on your mind.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I use rclone and a backup script to periodically download my Google drive contents to a portable external hard drive

  • archchan@lemmy.mlEnglish
    142·
    10 months ago

    Self-hosting my files with Nextcloud and couldn’t be happier

  • Radioactive Radio@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    10 months ago

    Imagine losing your beloved dog’s last photos just cuz you decided to back them up onto someone else’s computer.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    6·
    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some posters on the company’s support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished.

    There is little information regarding what has happened; some users reported that synchronization had simply stopped working, so the cloud storage was out of date.

    Others could get some of their information back by fiddling with cached files, although the limited advice on offer for the affected was to leave things well alone until engineers come up with a solution.

    A message purporting to be from Google support also advised not to make changes to the root/data folder while engineers investigat the issue.

    European cloud hosting provider OVH suffered a disastrous fire in 2021 that left some customers scrambling for backups and disaster recovery plans.

    Earlier in 2023, the company’s europe-west9 region took a shower after water made its presence felt inside a Parisian Google Cloud datacenter.

    The original article contains 342 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • krigo666@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1627·
    10 months ago

    Have you read the Terms of Service of Google Drive for regular users?? You will give Google irrevocable and total rights on everything that is placed there for them to use as they see fit. It bewilders me how people still use that ‘service’…

      • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        44·
        10 months ago

        That talks about ownership, not access. So they won’t claim they wrote the short story you uploaded. But take a look at this, “We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our Program Policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law. But that does not necessarily mean that we review content, so please don’t assume that we do.”

        Are you good with Google literally telling you that they look at your content, but “please, don’t assume that they do?” If you feel they have your privacy and best interests in mind with a statement like this and they aren’t algorithmically sniffing every thing you upload, I have some extended warranty coverage I would like to sell you.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
          82·
          10 months ago

          I know for a fact that Google scans everything, including zip files, and WILL delete things they deem a problem.

          I tried to store my own, paid for, copies of software, like office. Google deleted it. OK, I’ll zip and password protect. Nope, scanned, deleted. Never bothered trying to encrypt first, just moved on from Google.

          Now with tools like Resilio, Syncthing, and Tailscale, cloud holds little value other than backup.

            • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
              11·
              10 months ago

              I like Resilio, especially the selective sync feature. Unfortunately because it keeps the file index in ram, it kills my phone with my media share. It also uses a lot of resources on my Windows machine.

              Syncthing doesn’t have this performance hit, but… It doesn’t have selective sync.

              Sigh.

              So I use both for different purposes, with Resilio not running by default.

        • kae@lemmy.caEnglish
          42·
          10 months ago

          Yes, it talks about ownership, because the original poster talked about ownership.

          Google hosts files, and thus needs to have some semblance of control over what actually is hosted on it, or they become liable for the same content.

          Pirated material? Child pornography? etc. It all needs to be scanned and determined if it violates rights/laws and be dealt with.

          Google has always done this automatically, because the sheer scale of content they host is overwhelming.

          I totally understand the ‘own everything’ mentality that some hold. That’s fair – then host it yourself, encrypt it, and you can hold the key to your little kingdom. For most people, that isn’t a factor.

          To get back to the original claim – they don’t claim rights over what you post. It is yours. You just can’t host other people’s stuff. The definition of that is incredibly broad and largely commercial. 99% of people will never, ever run into the issue. 99% of the remaining 1% will discover it innocently (such as another poster trying to back up office). The remaining will already be versed enough to encrypt their data locally before uploading.