this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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UPDATED Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some netizens on the goliath's support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished.

The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023.

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[–] [email protected] 248 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Ha. Amateurs. I disappeared YEARS of my files by self-hosting.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 8 months ago (4 children)

i distinctly remember 10 years ago being so excited about the cloud stuff, it seemed so futuristic, tech had so many wonderful potentials, having it autosave and automatically be accessible anywhere seemed so amazing....

then the enshittification started. i would never dream of letting google or apple touch my files, let alone be the sole backup and arbiter of them. nothing gold can stay...

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I too, distinctly remember being excited about butt stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Self hosted clouds are superior.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do you not have anything in the cloud or do you use another service? I was using carbonite but I gave them up years ago.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I have a local backup of everything in my NAS and then I create a nighty backup to backblaze B2. Costs like 1-2$ a month for 400ish GB. Never rely on one solution.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Perfect example of why letting some company that doesn't give two shits about you, hold your important documents or whatever is a stupid idea...cloud storage is inherently bad and no company can be trusted more then storing your own data at home on a secure drive or two.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago

I don't use any any Google services for good reasons, but I wouldn't trust myself more not to lose my data than Google.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (8 children)

I've used MEGA for about 6 years now, previously Dropbox. I switched after Dropbox lost over 2TB of my data.

MEGA hasn't lost my data but something glitched on their side and duplicated every file, and with the amount of data I had in there it wasn't feasible to manually fix. So I had to delete everything and start again.

I have all my cloud data stored on a NAS at home, that is backed up to a second NAS decice, a MEGA sync client running on home server keeps it all in sync to the cloud. I selectively sync folders from MEGA on different devices, or access files directly from the MEGA app when remote, or work with the local copy of my data when connected to home LAN. At least MEGA works cross platform, and MEGAcmd for Linux allows easy scripting and other automation possibilities.

All commercial cloud storage has one major problem, your files are hostage to their increasing subscription fees (which will always increase because capitalism). e.g. I was paying $60 a year with Dropbox, if I were still using it, it would be $140 a year now - and I'd have no choice but to keep paying.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Google is fine for most people, but it shouldn't be the sole backup. If you don't have (at least) 3 separate instances of a backup, you don't really have a reliable backup strategy. Preferably an onsite hard backup, an offsite hard backup, and a cloud backup.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I know quite a few tech oriented people and I don't know anyone who actually has the holy trinity of backups. I know quite a few who have physical backups at home and cloud though.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Considering data durability for some data services are providing 11 9’s, just two of those leads to extremely high durability. So to say that is unreliable is just not reasonable. I have no problem with being risk averse but that is a bit extreme.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I switched to Sync because Google Drive reports that all my files are synced when they are not. There is no way to correct it or force Drive to upload the missing files and there's no way to know when it is lying. I had to constantly check manually, which was a pain in the ass. They lied constantly.

Sync.com has been excellent. They are cheaper, easier to use and do everything Google Drive did, including sharing folders for uploads and downloads with non-subscribers (which even Dropbox can't do). Oh, and they don't fucking lie. Fuck Google.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (9 children)

What do people use to have backups of their google drive content?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately I've read reports it's actively syncing deletions to devices.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

Huh. A google service that keeps working, even after it's supposed to. That's new.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (15 children)

I use an external hard drive for all of my cloud backups

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Self-hosting my files with Nextcloud and couldn't be happier

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

I've been migrating away from Google, little by little. Drive is my next step, I think.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

Imagine losing your beloved dog's last photos just cuz you decided to back them up onto someone else's computer.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Glad I took all my stuff out of Google Drive

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some posters on the company's support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished.

There is little information regarding what has happened; some users reported that synchronization had simply stopped working, so the cloud storage was out of date.

Others could get some of their information back by fiddling with cached files, although the limited advice on offer for the affected was to leave things well alone until engineers come up with a solution.

A message purporting to be from Google support also advised not to make changes to the root/data folder while engineers investigat the issue.

European cloud hosting provider OVH suffered a disastrous fire in 2021 that left some customers scrambling for backups and disaster recovery plans.

Earlier in 2023, the company's europe-west9 region took a shower after water made its presence felt inside a Parisian Google Cloud datacenter.


The original article contains 342 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 54%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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