Anecdotal, but with Google Photos, I've observed data loss to the point where I no longer trust the service with anything valuable.<p>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.<p>There are also partially corrupted photos from many years back. Photos that only partially render, or render as noise.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://www.cubebackup.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cubebackup.com/</a>
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.<p>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 :)<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Would recommend rclone to anyone, it has worked pretty consistently so far.
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.<p>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?
Guess at root cause:<p>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).<p>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)
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."
I’ve been self hosting images with <a href="https://github.com/immich-app/immich">https://github.com/immich-app/immich</a> 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.<p>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.
<a href="https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/</a><p>Nothing showing on service status currently
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.<p>edit - love foldersync pro for my Android. does SFTP/SMB/webDAV and all major cloud services over wifi or 5g.<p>every night it transfers everything off my phone to my server which is also on parity
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.<p>Ideally something that pulls from google directly without involving my home computer would be best.
"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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>cloud device storage / local device sync (on and off-site) / NAS<p>+ offline on-site backups as HDDs & BD-Rs<p>+ online off-site backups<p>Doing syncthing with local device sync is cheaper than cloud device storage (recurring costs) and NAS (fixed costs / hardware maintenance)
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.
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.)<p>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)
If I wanted to indefinitely back up every image my wife's and my phones take, without me having to think about <i>anything</i> 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.<p>Apple is the only alternative I'm aware of.<p>Edit: Just to be very very very very clear. I don't want to have to do ANYTHING but pay a bill.
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.<p>Other people at work agree with me. Google support insists we're nuts.<p>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).
Is there any word if this is actively syncing deletions to local storage? I have my google drive synced to multiple computers which I <i>assumed</i> was enough...
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.<p>Does this affect iCloud?
Anyone else having issues with Google Drive in Mac OS?<p>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.
Use an open source system. You can choose to back up to a self-hosted version, too. <a href="https://federated.computer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://federated.computer</a>.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> MatthewSt reports that he has a fix<p>Let’s see the instructions on that link.<p>> 2. Install an old version of Google Drive (there's a version 82/83 floating around on the internet).<p>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.
This is a royal fuck up. Anyone using any g cloud service better be suspect when using their services.<p>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?
All lights are green: <a href="https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/</a><p>No recent/active incident for Google Drive is shown:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/summary" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/summary</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/products/VHNA7p3Z5p3iakj5sA8V/history" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/products/VHNA7p3...</a>