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I was not surprised to see this article:
Google Drive users angry over losing months of stored data[^]
I have non-critical and non-personal (no financial data, etc.) in cloud services including OneDrive, but periodically save backups. I've been told I'm paranoid ... my response is that hardware failure is a "when" not an "if" ... and let's not get into human error ...
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I've seen some articles suggesting there's no "error" or "failure" here, and it's all by design, as Google has apparently been sending emails for months warning they'd be doing a massive cleanup of unused accounts. On December 1st, to be exact.
Coincidence? I wouldn't be surprised if the two events were related. Maybe they've started doing it on a small scale before pulling the trigger, and everybody's now finding out it's including stuff that should NOT be deleted (eg, data that is NOT inactive).
IMO: Cloud services claim to sell a solution for the lazy. The reality is that you shouldn't give up on the good old tried and true methods.
As per the subject line - make your own backups, because their EULAs sure don't say they're responsible for anything that happens to your data.
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I doubt that this situation is exactly by design, as the accounts affected are not ones that have been dormant for 2+ years -- it's accounts with recent activity where data was lost. I read an update on Google's plans to terminate dormant accounts just before I read the article I referenced.
Which doesn't mean the two things are not connected -- but if they are, I suspect someone screwed up very badly and did the wrong accounts.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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BryanFazekas wrote: Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Surely there's some of that here.
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BryanFazekas wrote: I doubt that this situation is exactly by design, as the accounts affected are not ones that have been dormant for 2+ years
There is an old story from the Computing Center at the University of Copenhagen, around 1970 (so, no URL reference to the event  ).
Clocks with battery backup were not common. After a power failure, the operator had to type in the current date and time of day on the system console. It happened that the operator mistyped the year without discovering that he missed by a decade. Before the mistake was discovered, they had run the cleanup program that deleted all files that hadn't been touched for six months.
There is an interesting 'Part 2' to this story: Disk space was terribly expensive in those days, so all large data sets were kept on 1/2" magnetic tape. The cleanup program didn't wipe the tapes. But ... Standard tape formats, used when exchanging data with other installations, contained complete metadata for every file. Even tape was expensive, so Univac (this happed on a Univac 1100 system) had devised a format where only the data blocks were densely packed on the tape, while all metadata was maintained on disk, for fast searching for files. All this metadata was wiped by the cleanup procedure. The 'real data' was still there on tape, but on which tape? Where on that tape? Noone could tell.
Our professor, when telling this story, said that a for a few very important projects, the viable tape wheel candidates had been dissected by hand, and the blocks put together, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Fortunately, in those days, a lot of research didn't depend completely on the computer, it was more like a calculator that you picked up for specific calculations; that was all.
Imagine the situation today, if the next pandemic doesn't infect humans, but the virus thrive on silicon and is capable of getting through the shields to eat every logical gate of all digital electronics on earth. I have difficulties finding a single (Western) human activity that could continue completely unaffected if that happened.
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trønderen wrote: but the virus thrive on silicon and is capable of getting through the shields
Shields?
Chips have a epoxy package. So silicon is not exposed there. And actually inside is Silicon Dioxide.
And Silicon Dioxide is not very reactive. So I doubt a virus could exist by itself that could do that. It would require a medium as well which means no spread.
Now plastic might be a better candidate for that scenario. I would not be surprised if there are also limitations even with that scenario.
So probably best to just stick with an EMP.
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I guess you didn't get my point.
If, one way or the other (I'm not going to suggest any alternative to a virus; I guess you would start arguing against that as well) all our digital processors stopped working, can you imagine the effect on our culture? It would be devastating. We have made ourselves, both personally and as a society/culture 100% dependent on digital technology.
That is what worries me. Not the probability of some randomly picked, specific threat. It could be something completely different.
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Looks like a book that I most certainly should pick up!
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trønderen wrote: If, one way or the other
Yes. As noted in my reply and in the other post - EMP. That is a high altitude electromagnetic pulse.
A nuclear weapon, high altitude can do this.
But a solar flare can also do it.
There are any number of fictional books that describe those scenarios. Some a bit more factual than others.
The most significant failure is not necessarily 'personal' electronics but rather that the entire electrical system, especially power station transformers, would be fried.
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The actual mechanism for knocking out our electronics is not essential to me. Some may be more sneaking in without our notice until it is too late (such as the virus alternative I suggested), others are more immediate and violent (such as an atomic bomb EMP or a devastating solar storm).
Total loss of electrical power is sufficient. Imagine trying to save yourself, e.g. in a remote mountain cabin together with a gang of teenagers, with no way of charging their smartphones ... And when they find a way to do it, using the solar panels at the cabin roof, they realize that the base station to which their phone tries to connect, has no power ...
That is when you regret that you didn't bring along that pile of adventure books from your grandparents' home, to read out to them for entertainment. (They probably have read too little to read the books by themselves, but anyway: Reading to a group of listeners is a great activity!)
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There is something else that could affect our electronic civilization that has a much higher probability, in fact more than most people think, and we will likely be ill prepared for it just like the last pandemic: Coronal Mass Ejections (CME). Put your backups in a Faraday cage! Which institutions and systems are prepared enough?
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None.
It would knock out the power supply. That alone would kill our culture within 24 hours.
Our homes would turn to ice (right now, my outdoors temperature is 12.4 Celsius below freezing, 10 F).
We couldn't charge our cars.
Our smartphones would go dead within a day or two.
We couldn't charge our portables, and even with a diesel generator to power our desktop PC, the concentrator for our fiber internet connection, or maybe the local ISP itself, is dead from lack of power.
The food in your freezer and fridge would rot - sooner in summertime than in winter, so what would you prefer: Freeze to death, or starve to death?
What about your 'social' contacts, the socalled 'social' media?`
What kind of entertainment would you have available?
Could you read a book in the winter evening? (And: Do you have a book?  )
Your local plant for filtering your drinking water probably depends on a huge amount of electricity. Expect it to close down.
Same with your waste water / sour processing plant. Expect it to close down.
If you want to look at your own electricity dependencies alone, disregarding things such as water supply and wastewater processing: Why don't you tonight, this Friday night, abruptly turn OFF your main electric switch (maybe you don't have a switch but you can unscrew the main fuses) without making any preparations at all. Leave the main switch off (or main fuses unscrewed) until Sunday night 8 days from now, and then tell how well you and your family fared. And how you did it, in which ways you compensated for the lack of electricity.
I don't think very many families would dare to take up this challenge. And I believe that at least half of those who dared to, would ask for at least one day to prepare for it - have all their batteries charged, their gas tanks filled up etc.
Very few of us are anywhere close to prepared for such an event.
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They might be related but it's just a snafu, not a conspiracy.
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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You're right, I attribute this to incompetence rather than malice.
But the main point remains...if something's important to you, you can't have the only instance of it existing only on a cloud service.
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Absolutely
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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I do.
An external CD drive on a usb cable to boot Acronis 2014 and a 2tb usb spinner disk to backup images to. I do it while were sleeping, It will be done in the morning. Yes it takes effort, but thinking BIG data has you back is just complacent and lazy.
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I have an external Sabrent drive that reads SDD and SATA drives, treating them like really big flash drives. Since I replace my primary HD every 2 years, I have a stack of old drives that are great for backups.
Critical files are backed up onto DVD and finalized. As I've stated in the past, a finalized CD or DVD is ransomware proof, and they're dirt cheap so making multiple copies is cost effective.
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I was surprised when my friends and coworkers one by one revealed that they no longer had any player for CD/DVD. I wanted to introduce them to some music or movies I had in my archive, but they couldn't make use of the disk. If I couldn't provide a URL for an online version, they shrugged and started talking about music/movies that are available online.
This started at least 5-6 years ago. Today, I don't know of anyone who has bought a PC with an optical reader for five years. One of my friends still have an old PC with one, but he boots up that machine only when he needs to run some old software that doesn't run on W11.
In earlier years, visiting friends with a disc in your hand was a social thing. We saw the movie together, or listened to the music. In those cases where I could dig up a URL for a friend, we never saw the movie or enjoyed the music together; he went home and watched / listened alone. In the very best case, he reported some reactions next time we met. Usually not.
So if my house burns down, and my computer media is melted, even if I had been keeping off-site optical backup disks, I would not know of anyone who could help me retrieve my files. I would have to go to some commercial and probably expensive service provider to have it done.
There is another problem with finalized DVD disks: The Tao of Backup[^], the Second Head:
The novice asked the backup master: "How often should I backup my files? It has been a month since my last backup."
The master replied: "Just as night follows day, and Autumn follows Summer, so should backups follow work. As you work, so should you backup that work."
The novice said: "I work each day".
The master replied: "Then you should backup each day".
The novice replied: "I agree, but right now I haven't got time to make a backup, as I have too much work to do."
Upon hearing this, the master fell silent.
Backing up to a finalized optical disc and bring the disc offsite every day, is beyond my working habits.
(For those unfamiliar with The Tao of Backup: 26 years old and still 100% true! Read and enjoy it!)
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Yep, the days of CD/DVD writers are numbered. My last laptop went even further - no Ethernet port, either! And my most recent PC doesn't even have a knockout in the front panel to install a writer if I wanted to do so.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Do you have offsite copies?
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Thanks for mentioning it.
That is the only good argument in favor of online backup: Your backup is still there even if your house burns down. Many of my friends make backups of private files, but I know of noone who regularly brings a copy offsite.
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Never trust someone else with your stuff.
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Plus one for that.
Truenas is my cloud. Turn on, do stuff, turn off.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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I hardly trust myself with my stuff.
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