Reminder not to keep anything important stored on the cloud. Over on one of Google’s support sites, Google Drive users are complaining about how they’ve lost months of data on the cloud service, with some going so far as to claiming that they’re missing files that go back all the way to May 2023.
Here’s a complaint from one user, who said Google tried to recover their lost files and failed:
SAME THING HAPPENED to me! Via chat, I spoke to someone at Google Support and they ran a FILE RECOVERY program that they said could take a couple of hours. Nothing has re appeared yet! I am going to try and get some sleep and check in the morning. Please write back here if you find a solution and I will do the same.
While another says they’ve lost three months of files and is “devastated” over the loss:
Same thing happened to me too. I’m devastated right now because the missing files dated back 3 months ago. Our IT team try to contact google support but no solution yet. Hopefully the files can be restored.
And here’s a response from Google support that one user supposedly received after they “decided to not show up to the call THEY scheduled this morning”:
…there are other admins now that have reported the same behavior we encounter where after the update there are files that went missing. This is now being investigated by our Product Engineers and we are also waiting for a root cause analysis as well on how we can fix it. Due to the ongoing investigation we are unable to provide an ETA yet.
We don’t recommend as well to make changes on the root/data folder while we wait for instructions from our Engieers. I will continue to monitor the behavior of reported issue from other admins and schedule a callback tommorow same time hoping there are progress within the day that I can deliver before our Google Meet session.
“Your memories, stored securely in the cloud,” reads Google’s advertising for Google One, whose paid options start at $1.99/month for 100 GB of storage.
Discussion (11 replies)
Join Discussion →ALLLLLL the way back to May 2023.
Man that's a long time ago. I can barely remember it.
Whoever relies on Google to keep stuff around, well, ...
What's a Google Drive? :) /s
To be fair, chances of data loss are probably orders of magnitude higher on the typical users own media than in a internet giants cloud, but still I don't like it and don't trust it, which is why I run my own "cloud".
Data loss from Google? How is that possible? I am not being sarcastic. They are a trillion dollar company that does data for a living. Yes , I would have never thought my data wasn't safe from loss with Google.
It's a pay service as well. They should have backups. Have to think it's not just individuals using that service, but businesses as well. That's going to amount to some lawsuits if businesses can show a tangible loss.
I'm pretty sure this is with the announcement they sent out MONTHS ago advising their free users that their data older that X was set to be purged if they don't show activity (read event) in their google drive before X date.
People ignored it.. google did it... NOW people cry.
Know what I lost... nothing. Not a damn thing. Why... because I did the simple thing of LOGGING INTO my google drive.
I actually think cloud services are more likely to have data loss than your private servers. Only not due to HW failure but companies going under, data breeches, whims of the host, expiry dates, auto purges, etc. I'd trust a 10 year old Seagate HDD more than any cloud. They call it a cloud, but it is a puff of smoke.
Google will lock users out of their accounts if they haven't logged in for a while, citing "suspicious activity" as the reason for doing so. To safeguard the user's account from unauthorized access, Google requires a mobile phone number, to which they'll send a verification code. It doesn't matter that the phone number has never been provided to Google and has zero association to the account. I've been locked out of a Gmail account twice this year because of "suspicious" login attempts with the correct password, and on both occasions I've had to cough up a phone number to regain access. Of course, I never gave them my number, and I used a different number each time. It almost seems as though the security of my account isn't their primary concern.
From a hardware / availability standpoint - Nah, after seeing these data centers - they have so many 9's in redundancy ...
They can only do that because they are storing that much data at scale. You could never come close to it at your own home affordably.
What you say about corporate/legal action is a valid point though. Megaupload comes to mind, although in practice I don't think any of the major, more legitamte companies are going away even if they hit financial trouble. Someone always seems to come in and buy it out for pennies on the dollar and put it on life support for whatever ad revenue they can milk from it. Yahoo is still kicking, for example (although I'd say it's been dead for quite some time, if you have an account there it's still valid). Hotmail, Digg, Juno, Myspace, etc.... more examples.
There's also the potential of user error. Some engineer hits the wrong button and deletes something and corrupts all the backups. This may be a case of that, but it's more likely what Grim and Tempest say. I can think of engineering errors where it's brought sites offline for a while, but I can't think of any large scale ones recently where it's resulted in permanent data loss.
I'd say, if you want to ensure your data isn't lost, your best bet is to post it to Facebook. It will never go away.
Does anyone take the time to read the service agreement? It clearly states that any loss of data is NOT the responsability of Google, same goes for MS and Amazon. You want backup? they all have backup services at extra cost of course.
Cloud IS NOT backup.
As long as you keep local and cloud it effectively is a backup service... Yea yea they don't guarantee the consistency of data... but really neither does eternal storage. The mantra is 1 local, 1 remote, 1 offline for data sustainability. But really.. most I do for personal data is 1 local 1 remote. The remote being the cloud.