We need to stop pretending that software, including free-as-in-beer SaaS, doesn’t have an implied warranty. It does. The implied warranty in Google Drive is that “we’ll host your files for you”. Google screwed-up (an “honest” mistake, it pains me to say) but a consumer advocate (the FTC in the US?) should be going after Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty.
The lack of support, however, is not - and is part of Google’s business model.
Doing this will screw Google’s ability to optimize storage for identical files, which may drive up costs, but it’s the best way to ensure your data stays private.
Host locally and RENT backup servers in couple of places. Those cost peanuts and are highly reliable.
Is there any "grandparent friendly" way to do this today?
No one who works for a powerful entity likes admitting they are more or less powerless to daily statments they see on here.
It's like how anyone with tech awareness watches the goal posts keep moving.. Yes, I know alternatives and mitigation and ECT.
Power is a fickle mistress.
Additionally, making them accountable for these mistakes is a way to actually have them resolve them, so honest or not, it's likely to stop of decrease in occurrence then.
For paying private customers yes I'd day fine but in most of these cases in ruling to bet the "free" 1GB was more than enough
No, but give them a punitive fine (on the order of a percentage of their daily average profits) for failing to live-up to their own expectations set in their own advertising.
Legitimate companies will have no problem with that. Scum that wants to lure users in (to capture their personal data) but doesn't even have the decency to hold up their end of the bargain will have to reconsider whether they still want to provide such a service.
Google Drive is not a "cloud storage service". You're not a paying customer of Google and you have no leverage with them at all. Putting your only copy of any data that you can't afford to lose on Google Drive is just asking for trouble.
> Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty
There is no implied warranty for a service that's being given to you for free and for which you have no customer agreement or contract with Google. If you want a warranty, express or implied, you need to be a paying customer.
If a service is free, you're the commodity that is being bundled and sold.
If a service is paid for, you're a Premium Commodity with Money that is being bundled and sold.
(I also don't recommend exposing your NAS directly to the internet. They frequently make doing so attractive with the ability to run addons like file sharing or "private cloud" services. If you must, run them in a VM on the NAS and isolate the VM from everything else on your network. And keep up with patches.)
A few months ago, I decided to migrate to my new laptop by restoring a backup from the old one , just as a way to test the DS216j backups. I found:
a) I was on an old backup solution of them, and they had migrated to something new. I had a hard time to find the old backup software's installer to do the restore.
b) The old backup was good enough to restore individual files, but had no real way to do a full restore. It seems they thought I'd click on each individual file, even if there are hundreds of thousands in my home folder. I believe there was an option for zipping a folder, but it just timed out.
c) Their site had great documentation for telling me about how to do backups, but I could not find anything for the I-urgently-need-a-full-restore use case. Maybe I overlooked it, or their new software is better documented.
Now all the data was safely on the NAS, and I think I could scrape it out with a few days work, but none of the above would be fun to find out in the middle of an emergency. I've since thrown their backup software out and replaced it with a custom rsync to the NAS. At least I know how to deal with that when the full cow farm production hits the turbofan.
You spend less on a used computer with Ubuntu or FreeNAS or some other distro, have way more flexibility, but a lot more to maintain.
Symnology supports rsync, ssh, scp, custom docker images, etc. you can probably run Borg server on it, although I have not looked into that.
So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I own one. Do you?
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/synology-warn...
Would periodically swap out drives and store the backup ones at a relatives house.
Would keep it disconnected from the external internet other than for pulling in updates.
But this makes me nervous.
Synology is a good compromise for ease of use and being able to actually set it up the way you want and need it. I have been using them for a few years and I'm happy with them. You actually get a good range of options for setting it up securely. I'm much more concerned about my router being taken over in some way as it doesn't get security updates and there is not much you can do with it.
And yes, I use it amongst other things for local backups. But then still back up to Dropbox and Google Drive from the NAS and other devices. And to external hard drives to swap around. It doesn't make me use cloud storage less, but I'm a lot less concerned about losing access with having everything local as well.
> f you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data
In many jurisdictions, absolutely not.
A moral or ethical responsibility, maybe. A legal or financial one? Not under our current system, unfortunately. And corporations are not ethical actors.
Just to be clear, I'm not victim-blaming here. It is abhorrent what has happened to this person and to many like them. This is why education about avoiding snake oil I believe is essential in the school system. Economics courses should devote a full module to identifying snake-oil claims and inherent risks of "something for nothing" swindles, which Google Drive is a classic modern example of.
I'm honestly thinking I'm going to have to backup my entire G-Drive externally and wipe it (for the security of my Google account). I mean, who knows what will trigger the deletion of your Google account these days... I guess the storage I pay for is just for e-mails.
It’s enough to make me anxious between backups: at least with spinning rust-drives we can transplant the platters and controllers (separately, even!) while SSD hardware recovery is almost unheard of.
I've never had even the cheapest mwave or microcenter special ssd die. Sata or nvme m.2, nothing.
I also haven't had a spindle die in 15 years, ever since I started letting them sleep and using UPS to smooth out power.
That noise you hear is me knocking on wood pretty frantically.
though the ssds i use are for backup and arent used very often for writing... i wonder if that makes a difference?
Two or more external-DDs, copied regularly per how much they are willing to spend time and lose data. One stored in some other place if possible.
RAID is not a substitute for rotating backups.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/synology-warn...
You really want offline backups. Never recommend “not having to back it up regularly”.
uhmm... there is no article. It's a link to a google support forum thread. And the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader.
Fine, then s/article/post/ in what I said.
> the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader
I agree; I'm simply pointing out that if you are going to try to execute a project that requires a lot of digital storage of important data, you should be tech savvy, or collaborate with someone who is. You certainly should not expect a free service like Google Drive to be a secure, reliable data store for your only copies of important data.
I think multiply redundant back-ups get expensive, but one external hard drive with scads of space is cheap (at least from the perspective of someone who grew up when you measured space in MB). It won't provide you the security against data failure, but it will provide some recourse for when the cloud provider yanks your data.
But it's definitely fundamentally more expensive because there are tons of fixed costs that would be much better amortized across more parties. The hardware could handle far more than I throw at it, and importantly the incremental cost of expanding the setup is much much lower then the setup cost. My NAS could easily have nearly triple the storage space at "only" the cost of the drives themselves and maybe a bit more memory (which is dirt cheap). It's not processor or bandwidth limited. I don't need that much space, but if there were another few folks joining me on using it and we split the cost between us we'd each pay less for more. And the whole thing as-is leans heavily on my own personal amortization and professional knowledge, I can justify some of it as a business expense and I actually already knew tons of the basics before doing anything for the first time. A larger group could have someone devoting even more time to it.
That's the simple relentless logic behind "cloud services" really behind whatever layers of fancy marketing or conversely outrage. It really is cheaper at a basic level, but unfortunately the way it's often been implemented lends to centralization and perverse incentives.
Efforts to address it have to tackle those head-on. Ideally at a minimum there'd be legally mandated offering of standard "cloud APIs" for every platform so that iCloud or whatever could be slotted right out for something else compatible. It does seem like there is potential for more decentralized sharing and discovery, but the UI and reliability challenges are quite significant. We'll probably see a lot of gyrations back and forth as everyone searches for the right balances depending on their own situations along with whatever semi-ignorant semi-opportunistic bumbling responses governments come up with. Unfortunately even on HN lots of people tend to reach for sledgehammers over scalpels when it comes to the law.
Drive alternative is simple enough with "cp -r" and your own bucket. For something like, Gmail and other services, it gets complicated.
I mean, how many times does this need to come up for people to learn the lesson? If you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data, including locking you out of it. We certainly don't like this state of affairs, but that is the world many of us have created.