Google Drive users finding six months worth of data vanished!

[thewayne]

Put everything in the cloud, what could possibly go wrong?! Well, how about six months of information suddenly going missing?

Google is advising customers to DO NOTHING to try to get your data back, let their engineers investigate the situation and find a solution.

Stuff like this happens, most likely a configuration change went live and had unforeseen repercussions.

I will once again remind people that all the cloud is is Someone Else's Servers On The Other Side Of The Internet. This is what the internet has been FOREVER, it's just marketing buzz, a convenient label.

I should dig up and post an article about a large company that decided to re-home servers FROM the cloud. That is, to buy big, beefy servers and run them themselves to save cloud hosting charges. They estimated it would save them, IIRC, over a million dollars a year. And they recovered that amount of money in about 3 or 4 months.

I personally would be reluctant to run my business through the cloud if it were of any size, there are too many risks including a backhoe eating your internet connection shutting your business down for a few days.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/google_drive_files_disappearing/

https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/11/27/1333218/google-drive-misplaces-months-worth-of-customer-files

Comments

[elayna]

Ugh, I have not looked at my Google Docs and now I'm not sure if I should or just wait a bit.

I have often thought I should back up my Google Docs to my hard drive, because I do not trust other people's servers, I only use Google Docs so I can write on both my desktop and my phone, but have I? No, I have not.

[thewayne]

I use Apple's iCloud and Microsoft's OneDrive for similar purposes.  If either of them wipes out my data, I'll be unhappy but can rebuild.  I don't put anything up there that is critical and the only copy.

[disneydream06]

I think our work email system is Cloud connected or whatever you wanna call it.

I have never understood the whole thing.
You brief explanation makes more sense then I have ever heard/read before. :o
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

I try not to leave anything mission-critical out in the cloud without another copy somewhere, so that if things go down, I'll have something local to work off of until synchronization comes back, but I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting and will be rudely reminded of at some point.

Still, I would hope that at least some entities are recognizing now the maxim you pointed out about how the cloud is other people's computers, and they are taking steps not to be caught in this situation again.