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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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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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Do you have offsite copies?
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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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Although fire/flood can spoil that.
Even theft. Some guys (plural) stole cases a talcum powder off a truck so who knows they might run off with something critical which would not otherwise seem to have value.
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IMHO, it's important to also back up the top three or five things in the mind, so that whatever's lost can be recovered with just self effort, even if it takes time. Am just talking of code backups here.
modified 4hrs 10mins ago.
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If anyone actually expects ANY cloud service to respect their stuff then they deserve the rude awakening.
The Cloud is nothing but another tool/option. Treat it as the be-all-end-all thing the Cloud Sales people market it as then you're just waiting for a rude awakening. Treat for what it really is and you'll avoid these headaches.
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Keep in mind of course that one should consider carefully what 'backup' actually means.
Specifically even though it is seems to be working, is it being verified on a regular basis? So can one actually get to that old data?
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jschell wrote: Specifically even though it is seems to be working, is it being verified on a regular basis? So can one actually get to that old data?
Even though that's common knowledge, I have little reason to believe even someone as big as Google actually does verify its backups.
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jschell wrote: Specifically even though it is seems to be working, is it being verified on a regular basis? So can one actually get to that old data?
A former employer had a rigorous backup schedule for the office file server. Incremental backup Monday through Thursday, Friday was a complete backup that was saved for 12 weeks (tape cartridges were recycled every 12 weeks) and the last full backup of the month was saved for 12 months. We had a collection of 30-40 tapes that were all well-labeled and cycled through the process consistently.
This system had been in place for 5 years and ran flawlessly.
Then my team had to recover a file from a backup. We spent 8 hours trying to pull that file. Then any file. Then from other backups.
We had a box of tapes and not one of 'em was readable. Completely worthless. We reported this to management.
They replaced the system a year later ...
It gets better ... this was in the time when 386 was the main PC architecture. The backup system was a board that only ran in a 286, so the office used an ancient (well, ancient in computer years) PC that we could not update because the software that came with the board didn't run on newer OS. The office was on Win 3.11, can't remember what the 286 box required.
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I'm still reading that those who need to perform massive backups still prefer tapes. I've always been a skeptic.
Isn't everything about a tape backup solution proprietary?
If you have a specific type of tape, you have to have the matching drive. The reverse is also true, if you have a specific drive, you can't just use any tape in it. I suppose there might be compatible makes/models (of both drives and tapes), but things are still not as interchangeable as "hard drive A vs hard drive B".
And then the software tends to be proprietary, and not every OS can just read any random file from a given tape. If you've done a backup with software XYZ, you have to do software XYZ to do the restore. Imagine finding a bug in the restore portion of the software, and the manufacturer has gone out of business years prior.
That would worry me, unless I had an unlimited budget and could purchase all the redundancy I'd need to be comfortable. How many tape drives is that? I have no idea. Imagine having stocked up with 5 spare tapes drives...with a SCSI interface.
Obviously big business has different needs than I do. I'm perfectly happy doing "xcopy backups" to multiple hard disks. No proprietary software, you can access any file in any folder instantaneously, no matter what OS you mount the drive with (within reason), hardware interfaces will remain standard for years if not decades before being deprecated, you can buy them in various capacities from different manufacturers, and they're relatively cheap.
I tend to buy them in sets of 3 - one live, a disconnected backup, and an off-site backup. When I outgrow a set, it becomes more or less a permanent archive of "things as they existed at that point in time".
When SATA became the standard, I had plenty of time to migrate the data from IDE drives to SATA drives. Whenever SATA gets replaced, I'll just do the same.
The non-starter is when you have massive amounts of data. I try to keep my entire backup set on a single drive, and I currently have a trio of 16TB drives. If my archive suddenly grew to double that, I wouldn't have a "single-drive solution", as 32TB drives are still a long way off. I'd hate to have to maintain a RAID, and multiple backups of it...
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We ran a computer and network service company in a resort town and had various customers with a variety of backup software from Windows Server backup to Acronis and while we showed them how to daily check the backup logs they all opted for up to do it remotely for 25.00 a week. It's incredible but I have always contended after babysitting "normals" who have computers is that they shouldn't have em. Primarily because if they don't make image backups they could loose everything when the drive goes kaput. Todays SSD give no warning but just leave town with your deftly arranged bytes that look like what you care about.
Now not only is Microsoft taking your libraries and putting it on there "One Drive" computers re-pointing paths to that so it;s "transparent to the user", Now they are bitlocking it too. Try to have a conversation with your Dad about how MS encrypted your data, they have it and without the 48 bit key to unlock it...... They look at you like you are from another planet.
I'm done.
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To this day, I maintain that I had stuff on One Drive that simply disappeared ... while the folders remained. So, no, I don't rely on the cloud for "backups".
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I never trusted online backups. I do not trust them to keep my data safe. Nor to keep them private. Nor to allow me to store arbitrary files. Nor to be able to present my photo album to my grandchildren 50 years from now. Nor to not show them my very personal notes that were meant for noone but myself.
I could use an online backup to save an extra backup, in case my primary backup is lost. A lot of files in that extra backup would be encrypted before sending them down in the crypt. I am not currently doing that.
Does the online bakcup have an offsite bakcup? (Thanks to fgs1963 for reminding us about offsite copies!) This story seems to suggest that the answer is 'No'.
There are a couple other points that are often overlooked: I have some old files backed up on both DC100 and DC300 quarter inch tape cassette. (Actually, I even have some files on 1/2" open reel 7-track tape, but I made that tape mostly to learn how to handle the tape station, not really for bakup purposes). I have files on two different Travan tape cassettes. I have at least one hundred 8" floppies (they were really flopping!). The first digital camera I used saved the photos on 2" floppies - I still got the floppies, but the camera belonged to my workplace, 30+ years ago. I never had my own Travan station; it belonged to my workplace, too. Obviously, I didn't have a 7-track tape station at home. I could have had a DC300 (the format changed name to QIC); they weren't that expensive, but I rather brought my private files to work and saved them to tape there.
I guess that if my life depended on it, it would be possible to have the files on QIC tape recovered. It probably would take too much time to save my life. It probably would be terribly expensive. But there were a whole crowd of variants, in track layout, packing density etc., so don't expect just any old QIC station to be able to read my first-generation DC300 tapes (before the QIC standard arrived). The open reel and Travan tapes, and the 2" floppy, are nice computer museum artifacts. Even if my life depended on it, I guess I would have crossed the river before anyone could get hold of a reader for them.
I actually have both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy units, but I am about to ditch the PC that can handle them; I haven't booted it for years. Most likely, some of my friends still have 3.5" units, Maybe even 5.25", I wouldn't be sure of that.
Then comes the second major problem:
I have migrated 'the most important' files from one medium to another. Over 40 years, I have created documents in more than a dozen different formats. Note that some filename extensions (such as .doc) hide several generations of formats which may be quite different, but new software versions handle all the old formats too. For photos, the number of formats exceed two dozen. Sound: Somewhere between one and two dozen. Video: A handful of different raw formats. At least four 'final' formats. I've got analog tapes with no noise reduction, with Dolby B, Dolby C and open-reel tapes with dBX noise reduction.
Some of my amateur photographer friends insist on saving all their photos in '.raw' format, seriously believing that there is One Unique and Never Changing Raw Format. That 'raw' is a totally unambiguous concept. It isn't.
I am quite sure that in basements, attics and safe deposit boxes, there are millions of diskettes, tapes and other storage media for which the owner no longer has a reader. If he gets hold of one, there is a great risk that he won't have the software to read the media (there are other file systems than FAT, NTFS and the 42 different *nix file systems!), or if he can copy the files to his current PC, that he has no software to display or play the files.
So, a great deal of the backups made are useless. Cannot be retrieved, or retrieval will be tremendously expensive. So maybe it is a good thing that 'Social' Media teaches us to treat anything that is more than a week old as outdated and irrelevant. No modern grandpa or grandma digs up an photo album from their childhood, to show and tell the grandchildren how it was back then. The old ones never even suggest it, and the kids would find it boring. So it doesn't really matter if the files are lost.
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"How did one idiot find another before social media?"
...asked the lady in a face-to-face conversation.
I think there's the answer right there.
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We had the Lounge long before that!
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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