don't trust cloud services with creative work
10mon 24d ago by lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/not_IO in microblogmemes from lemmy.blahaj.zone
Am I too old? I only trust hard saving to offline storage. Be that an external hdd or a flash drive.
people just never learn that companies cannot be trusted...time and time again, they work to steal and claim ownership of your intelligence.
people don't need to learn that. these things need to be regulated. also Google needs to be broken up to like 12 pieces or nationalized. what needs to happen is companies not have this much power ever.
Circumcision it's no joke sir.
Famously Americans did the splitting thing once before with Standard Oil and it was immensely beneficial to the economy in general. Just checked the wiki and it was more than 100 years ago. Unlikely the same laws are still on the books.
There are several companies currently active that deserve the same treatment.
The same laws are still on the books, actually! We just never use them anymore.
The big one is the Sherman Anti-trust Act.
Hey we did the same thing with AT&T! Split them into a bunch of smaller companies which then merged back together after a few years...shit...
We also nationalized several enormous companies with arguably excellent results (ConEd, Amtrak, the post-WWI FRA).
There's nothing wrong with putting everything in OneDrive... as long as you also have it somewhere else.
At work we're told to put everything into OneDrive and we're blocked from using USB drives, or using any other online storage. Fortunately all of the data I use and create on my work computer belongs to my employer, so if they only trust MS with their data then who am I to argue?
Businesses are classic chumps for the Microsoft scam. It's why Microsoft will stop producing new products and just live off the Office suite for another 100 years, easy.
Oddly, I used to work for Microsoft and can't remember using OneDrive for our projects lol
They knew better than to get high off their own supply
Several years ago we had a Microsoft consultant come out to draw up plans to get us to start using SCCM and using OneDrive was included. We spent several weeks working on this project and we had a meeting scheduled with the CIO on a Friday afternoon after a full week of working on the presentation with the consultant. We went out to lunch and the consultant left his computer bag in the backseat of my car... and someone busted out my window and stole his computer. Which also included his external hard drive where he backs up all of his data. He lost everything. I asked him if he had it backed up to OneDrive and he sheepishly admitted that he doesn't use OneDrive.
Leaving computer equipment or bags visible in an unattended car is a big no no. What's the boot for?
It was a hatchback, and the back seat had tinted windows, so he thought it was safe... Unfortunately I didn't realize he had his bag with him or I would have had him bring it into the restaurant. I'm a lot more careful now.
I’m in university (as an old) (...) I know better, but young people
wait, are you saying that twenty-something is old? 😂
Where did you get twenty-something from?
that's usual age when people are at the university. your "as an old" might probably be worded more clearly if you meant something different.
You can go back to college at any age as long as you’ve got the money for classes.
i see you must be from the freedom country. in civilized world, you can do that without the money 😜 it is just that the wording wasn't very clear.
I see you must be from the Star Fleet academy where they no longer use currency for anything. There’s more to the cost of college classes than tuition.
There’s more to the cost of college classes than tuition.
yeah, no. that is literally it. once you pay the tuition (where applicable), you can visit the classes. you specifically used the phrase "money for classes", so don't try to bullshit your way around what you said. i know you need to eat and house yourself. these are not money for classes.
You have such nice ways of getting your points across to people. I'm sure you make friends super easy. Yeah, I'm aware I live in a shithole country. You don't have to be an elitist dick about it.
You don't need to trust to use cloud services, I copy encrypted backups into the cloud. The only risk is that they don't give it back but that's why you have multiple backups.
Yeah this is the answer.
This old school idea of "keep it on a drive" misses the fact that you can lose it, forget it, it can break, hardware can fail, etc.
If you have your book on a flash drive and it breaks, good luck. I have my stuff on 3 different services encrypted. I can literally get my info from anywhere at any time.
Especially trusting cloud storage without a local backup for psyche-critical work - absolutely bonkers
I always get told that they would never take your stuff away, even though there are lots of examples.
Yes we're too experienced and sceptical.
Yeah, for me cloud storage is one of many backups, but it's just that, a backup. It should never be the original or only. It's there in case your PC shits the bed, not as your prime storage.
Actually many people use cloud as the original. I don't get why we are pretending this isn't normal.
No one's pretending otherwise, they're saying it's dumb to do so.
Because it's wrong. If you don't have physical access to your files, you don't have a backup. Someone else does, but you do not. It's like saying "I own a Lamborghini" when it's parked in a garage across the country that you're not allowed to enter and the only way you can see it is by them sending a picture. Sure, your name is on the title, but is it really yours if you can only access it at the behest of someone else?
Nevermind the fact that a backup isn't just for data loss. It's also for network loss. No Internet means no cloud. What good is a PC if it can only do work while online?
But hey, nothing has ever disappeared from the internet, right? Hold that thought while I pull up my old photos from MySpace....
Yes. No one ever listened except the other nerds from our generation. Everyone else was to old to understand at the time and the rest just jumped in because they learned it in preschool.
No, you aren’t. I only use it because my work makes me to be able to share with everyone in the district.
i use ms word to save certain things, offline, an older version of office not the new ms office that forces AI. i do that to save certain things, like resumes,,,etc.
Lemmy taught me that if you try to cancel, they'll offer you ms sans-ai. Save 3 whole bucks too.
we dont have that new bs with Microsoft, we have a cracked version or one that works just fine. our work started to use the newest ms version, it was pretty crappy UI.
You are not too old. I feel the exact same way. Anything worth keeping should be saved locally. Plus storage today is so cheap, there really is no excuse to save exclusively on the cloud.
I don't trust having only local files. Ideally you should have multiple local copies with at least one cloud storage and encrypt everything before you upload, so unless your house catches on fire and your cloud storage also fucks you over at the same time, then you are protected against both risks if they happen as separate incidents.
Also maybe go somewhere in the woods and hide a box of encrypted hard drives there, just to be extra safe. So three backups. Your house, A box buried in the woods, and cloud storage.
What are you referring to? What is "ZK" here?
So something like MEGA or Proton Drive?
Thanks for the explanation. I always knew that concept just as E2EE.
“Zero Knowledge Encryption” is the reference but I’m not sure how it applies here.
Zero-knowledge...? Maybe? But you can encrypt your stuff locally before sending it up
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust companies.
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust.
And there are people who think you're joking, reductio ad absurdum.
You can't trust your own computer, because the hard drive might go bad at any moment, so you backup up a USB drive. But you can't trust that backup, because your house could burn down, or get flooded, or get caught in a tornado; so you back up to cloud, too. But you can't trust that because, well, cloud.
At some point, you just have to accept that there will always be risk, no matter what you do. You take steps to minimize it until your comfort level exceeds the cost or PITA-ness of your backup solutions, but those who know, know you can never guarantee you've covered all the bases.
Don't trust, indeed.
The extra word is not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t.
Really this is the most correct. Saves so much time. Just don't.
The extra words are is not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don't
It’s worth noting that Google is 100x worse than the baseline level of sucking when it comes to randomly deleting your account with no recourse.
Cloud can be a backup, it absolutely should never be your only copy.
But keep in mind they will probably use that data for anything they want, like training AI models. So make sure you are ok with them doing that on any data you put there. This is mostly why I fill my cloud space with incoherent nonsense.
If you want to back up anything important on someone else's server (cloud), put it all into an encrypted blob. It's not a bad idea to use them to put a copy of your files in a different physical location, but also don't trust them any further than necessary.
Cryptomator is a great tool for this
Or rclone.
I just use an European cloud storage provider instead. It's cheaper than Google Drive and all the others. It just does not have the fancy client, which to me is a plus honestly.
What is the cloud storage provider you use? I'm currently just renting a VPS from Contabo for a few euros a month with a Nextcloud instance running on it. It costs me four and a half euros a month.
Commenting to follow
Always, always backup. And frequently! Don't trust your local harddrive (especially if it's a device you frequently take with you), don't trust flashdrives, don't even trust your local fileserver if it doesn't have built-in backups (and even if it does, check that those backups actually work). If it's not saved on at least two physical places (two drives in the same PC/server count, but it's sketchy on its own), it's not backed up!
3-2-1 Backup: 3 copies, on 2 types of media, 1 of which is offsite.
I just scatter mine under the fingernails of multiple unhoused individuals throughout the city. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s peace of mind. I’m thinking of expanding into microfiche hidden in fortune cookies next.
I convert all my files to wavforms and teach starlings the songs
Hard to take the photo of it, but I backed up your comment to a CD:
Software used: https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage
▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒
“Well, I don’t know what I expected“
I do the same thing but inscribe them onto clay pottery.
Don't forget to draw your backups in the sand..
Uh, you should maybe read up on the latest trump executive order. Those unhoused fingernail storage units are likely to all end up in the same place.
two drives in the same PC/server count, but it’s sketchy on its own
If your house/office burns down, all your data is lost. At least one backup should be off-site!
One backup copy isn't enough anyway! The more the merrier, just make sure that enough of it is automated that your backups don't get stale, and ideally stagger the timings so you don't immediately overwrite all the automated backups with trash data once something goes wrong.
At one point I accidentally deleted a file, but I could conveniently copy it from the copy in my fileserver that automatically gets updated every two weeks.
I only do manual backups, but I'm the kind of person who does it multiple times a day anyway - whenever I do a major edit on a work or hobby file - just for my peace of mind :)
And yes, only "airlocked" backups. I manually use FreeFileSync to mirror my files to a local backup folder on another HDD (I have multiple paired folders set up inside that, so FFS doesn't have to check tens of thousands of other files if I only edited a particular project that day), and keep only that synced to Google Drive. So if either the active local copy or Google Drive is corrupted or lost, the file is not automatically lost on the other end. I also found it a neat surprise that Google Drive retains past versions of files, it came handy a few times.
Lucky me, I recently acquired two 4TB hard drives, and I'm making a point to use one as my active backup, and every few months or so, clone that drive to the other one and swap them, just in case one ever fails ya know..
Doesn't swapping increase the chance of total failure?
You're basically using them equally, which makes it more likely that the surviving hard drive failes while copy the data to the future brand new replacement drive.
(This is obviously assuming, that storing a drive is different to you using the drive and that both drives will fail around the same time)
Meh, anything can happen at any time, I've come to accept that.
These are basically brand new surveillance grade hard drives, which means they're designed to run 24/7 and run cooler than consumer grade drives. Neither one has any bad sectors, and they both purr quieter than kittens.
I always keep one completely offline and totally disconnected, sitting on a shelf, save for the occasional clone day where I have both connected.
I figure the chances of both failing at once are on an astronomical scale.
Why not just use a RAID?
My CPU crapped out. And the wire leading to the thing that goes 'beep' when you turn on cpu was broken.
In trying to diagnose the CPU issue, I had to turn computer on and off a lot.
Somehow, doing that on and off repeatedly corrupted the hard drives. So raid doesn't protect against problems like that or power spikes that fry things.
And the wire leading to the thing that goes ‘beep’ when you turn on cpu was broken.
I haven't seen a PC that would actually have audible post codes in a very long time. Nowadays it's usually LEDs, or a very simple little display.
Its a little cylinder with 2 wires leading to the mobo. Not for error codes but for the 'beep' that happe is when you turn on computer. Is that not a thing any more?
Nope. At least, not that I've seen even slightly recently. I got into PCs ~15 years ago, and they were already becoming a lot less common then. It probably still exists in some niche way, that's usually how it goes. Maybe HP still uses them or something like that.
Sorry if any of this is stuff you already know: The beep is a POST code- power on self test. That beep when you turn on the computer is basically the computer saying, "everything started correctly, from here on it's probably a software problem."
If there is a problem and your motherboard can figure out what it is- bad cpu, bad ram, no video, etc- it gives a POST code via the little speaker. It's a nice troubleshooting tool, because a lot of the time the hardest part of the fix is figuring out what part is the problem.
Redundant network storage is cheap and available. If you're a little tech savvy, one of those and a cheap hosting plan accomplishes two copies local, and one remote.
I'm using a laptop with external USB adapters.
Check my comment history though, my very last comment to another post made a silly reference to RAID..
Ah yes, the very first lesson I'd teach in my multimedia 'authoring' class: Back your shit up, here's 11 ways to do that; if you EVER tell me you lost your work as an excuse I'm going to LAUGH IN YOUR FACE as I assign you a ZERO.
I never really liked Google, but their whole thing was supposed to be that you never needed to worry about backups.
But as Google so often does, they've decided to screw people over who relied on their drive and office suite.
I never really liked Google, but their whole thing was supposed to be that you never needed to worry about backups.
no it wasn't. no sane person ever told you that. everyone always knew situation like the one described here will come sooner or later.
google might have told you so, but it is of similar value to when tobacco company tells you that smoking is healthy and to please continue smoking (and giving us money).
they’ve decided to screw people over who relied on their drive and office suite.
these people are not the customers. i will repeat that, because this part is really important - THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT THE CUSTOMERS.
when you don't pay for the service, you are not the customer, you are the merchandise that is being sold. and you are treated like one. when you are selling screwdrivers and one of them fall of the shelf, you don't bother yourself thinking if it hurt.
Do you think that people don't pay for Google Drive? The 15 GB they give you is a free sample. Their basic 100 GB cloud storage plan costs 20 USD annually and the premium 2 TB plan costs 200 USD annually. Maybe you don't pay for Google Drive, but there are over 150 million people who do. These people are paying customers.
These people are paying customers.
well, it is a good thing they are treated as such and there is no problem then 😂
That's certainly a different angle from the one you were parroting in your previous comment.
these people are not the customers. i will repeat that, because this part is really important - THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT THE CUSTOMERS
no, it is not, you just did not get it.
now hush, go pay something to google for a privilege to have your data analyzed for targeting your ads as everyone else and feel superior about it, you valued customer!
Sorry, mate. You're going to have to think for yourself instead of just repeating the catchy things you heard on YouTube or Reddit.
You first tried to argue that these people "weren't the customer, they were the product", because you thought the purpose of Google Drive was to collect data from its users for advertising purposes. Google doesn't do that, and they'd be morons if they did because they'd be quickly caught and everyone would get weirded out and stop using their shit.
No, the purpose of Google Drive and Google's office suite being handed out free of charge is the same reason they sell discounted Chromebooks to schools and provide Gmail for free. You are right, it isn't out of the goodness of their hearts. These are all basically free samples to get people using the product, so when a small portion of those individuals enter into decision-making positions for organisations, they, having tried the product, think "Let's go with Google Workspace". Google then earns 60 USD per user per year. Ka-ching.
This is a rare instance where the big corporation's interests happen to be to make the best possible product.
lol. "This is a rare instance where the big corporation’s interests happen to be to make the best possible product," said a person who suggested to "think for myself".
you need some serious cult deprogramming.
Look, you and I know this. I never trusted Google for anything. But I'm just saying, I understand why normies are shocked and feel betrayed.
I understand why normies are shocked and feel betrayed.
they can't say they have not been warned. sometimes the "we told you so" is not as satisfying as it should be...
Actually you can pay for google services including cloud storage and many businesses do this. How are they not customers?
How are they not customers?
if they were treated as such, we wouldn't be having this discussion, would we?
a bit harsh, but often the most important lessons in life are those that hurt the most.
I was training students for a deadline driven technical field. They needed to know that when deadline day comes, it's not "oopsie doopsy" my dog ate my homework, it's you are now out of business, everybody you work alongside is jobless, you are bankrupt, get your resume going and good luck dude.
This is the policy of most colleges these days. The school will provide a service to do that but it's up to the student to ensure their work is backed up. Granted most schools only offer OneDrive but still, you're told ahead of time.
Using cloud services as the only copy is literally what I have been told to do working on my PhD by my supervisors. This is in the cybersecurity department. How you think this attitude is acceptable or normal is beyond me.
The whole point of modern cloud platforms is they worry about this so you don't have to. Not that people ever actually followed 321 backup policy anyway.
Edit: at least my stuff is on two different cloud services.
I'm sure this was reasonable 10 years ago, when Google didn't have a policy of erasing people's files without reason.
I am not talking about Google but rather Overleaf and GitHub. Though there is university data kept on Google Drive including students marks.
If you are using GitHub, then the cloud copy is obviously not the only copy.
Your supervisors are wrong. How they think that attitude is acceptable or normal is beyond me.
TLDR: make multiple backups
Two is one and one is none
And none is unacceptable
This is extra bad because they want you to use cloud files in gdrive (I can't remember what the feature is actually called), which doesn't save the content locally on your computer, but puts an icon that will download the content from Google servers when you click on it. This means you have no local backup of your data in your computer backups.
And even then, if you make sure to copy the actual file, you'd still depend on them to open it if it's in their proprietary format.
In the process of degoogling my life. Email and files are gone, but I use GMaps, still.
Google (still) offers a regular backup of your data to download. You can set it up to run at intervals and just download the entire thing. Includes file (and photos), email, messages, etc. It's great for products you forget you were using, and great for an offline backup.
I use waze and google maps. Although I contribute sometimes with streetcomplete and openstreetmaps, their respective android apps are dog shit at navigating. Certain hiking trails and maybe biking trails though, they might be better but for things like driving cars, traffic reports, nearby attractions, google is still superior.
Edit: fixed bad grammar
I'm getting by just fine on CoMaps usually, but I also live in the best mapped area in the world so the mileage does vary. If I'm in a rush I'll bust out GMaps tho, have it set up in the "private space"
FYI Waze is owned by Google.
Yes, I'm well aware. I just like the user contributions part of Waze it's like google maps but aimed for driving
I have TWO USB backups.
My brother fucked one up for his Windows XP obsession. Which would be funny, if it were not dangerous.
Justified obsession tbh.
The only time in my life I've seriously considered suicide was when I lost the usb drive that had all my novel notes on it. If a major company ripped everything from me because "reasons", I'd be considering homicide instead.
By the way, git is good for more than just software. I keep my novel notes in a git repository these days.
I do my writing in markdown. Keeps me from being distracted over formatting. Easily converted to HTML/EPUB for review and editing. git + plaintext + pandoc is a dream.
Yes, same here - I do all my show scripts in Markdown. My editor of choice is IntelliJ. For any non-technical writers here, IntelliJ is like what Scrivener wants to be when it grows up.
I have tried lots of text editors, tons. None of them quite do what I want. I installed CudaText. It's now my favorite. I love it so much. The settings... Oh, the delicious settings...
The fuck was this dude watching/writing down for google to think it was related to terrorism or trafficking????
They probably assumed it was a piracy list. To them, piracy is terrorism and trafficking.
guess we just need to wiggle a sheet of paper with a list of book and movie titles to scare googie
Taken and Zero Dark Thirty
Lawrence of Arabia?
Joker, the best movie ever made.
It has driven OP down a dark and twisted path of fighting THE MAN
It should not matter at all what he wrote. This is absolutely the wrong question to focus on.
True, it should not matter, but it did. Because of that, it's perfectly valid to ask what it was and why it triggered the automated security response.
I'd make one exception.
If he was working through Bin Laden's media catalog I'd understand the confusion.
My partner wrote a couple of hardboiled PI novels about shady people doing shady shit.
What a clusterfuck.
Be careful who you trust with your data! And back it up
That's a long way to go for an ad. Good read though.
Mind spoiling it for me?
Is local storage even safe from big corp just remotely nuking your files? I'm sure there's a secret button somewhere to mass delete photos from people's phones incase they start rolling in the tanks to crush a protest.
I don't think they can nuke files from my linux computer.
yeah, the funny and sad thing here is, that there are people in the world for whom "locally" means "in my phone". 🤷♂️
Is your CPU open source? I bet you have a Intel ME or AMD PSP on your computer.
Yes, but how are they going to wipe my offline backups?
A government isn't going to care about your files outside of using them as evidence against you.
Naive
Under normal circumstances, they can't. But if they actually want to target you and they want to spend the time and resources, they could potentially send instructions to the backdoor to secretly sabotage the backup process:
Basically showing you that the backup is working, while in the background, it has been encrypting the files to a key they control during that backup process, and essentialy act as ransomware. (Modern computing has made hardware encryption so fast that it would be seamless, so it would be hard to notice that happening.)
So every time you check the backup's integrity, it uses the key to unlock the files and show you "everything is fine".
But when the time comes, they would nuke the keys from the Intel ME / AMD PSP then next time you try to access your files, you get an error message, then you try to plug in the backup drive, also shows errors. Because they already nuked the keys, you have a bunch of encrypted data you can't access.
Sounds far fetched, but theoretically its possible.
Belarusian hackers apparently did pretty precisely this to the biggest airline in the Russia, Aeroflot. They had been doing something for a whole year that successfully disabled Aeroflot's backups, and deleted everything from every computer belonging to that company. They no longer know who's working for them, for example.
I'd assume they must've done pretty precisely what you just described. So, it has been done once. And it probably will be done again, somewhere.
They would just as well nuke me litetally if we are that far down
Alternately, if you don't live in China, Zhaoxin makes x86-64-compatible CPUs. No need to worry about the Chinese government/corpos helping the American government/corpos tyrannize it's own citizens.
They're not quite as good as intel/AMD in perf or effeciency/dollar.
well I'm happy I know those exist now but its a little scary what with everything else going on in the world.
If you're running a corpo os on your hardware this could very much happen
The thing is, we really don't know what's in the hardware, how do we know there isn't a "Intel ME" on your phone that is just hibernating, waiting for the right kill signal?
Sadly, could be explosives.
They said Intel ME, not Israel ME.
Holy shit. I had forgotten that they did that. Guess the exploding pagers were kind of overshadowed by the genocide.
Phone SoCs aren't made by Intel lol. You should be more worried about modem/baseband firmware.
The phrase 'a “Intel ME” on your phone' is not literally saying that Intel has control over your phone, its alluding to the widely known Intel backdoor, basically using that to point out: "You phone could have something similar"
reads like an ad for that service they plugged
Maybe, but it's a well known writer's tool. I don't think they need to push this angle.
Cloud drives are a handy form of secondary backup, IF you secure the contents with a tool like Cryptomator. I backup my content to a local NAS which one-way syncs nightly to an external drive attached to Raspberry Pi at my office and a cryptomator Dropbox, that in turn one way syncs to cryptomator Google Drive. I also manually encrypt and upload important documents to Proton Drive and Mega as cold storage.
I just realized the other day that one of the updates on my Chromebook automatically installed something called "NotebookLM" on my app bar. Never asked for it. Never even looked at apps on my Chromebook before. But it's there now, and it super secret bloodswap pinky swares it won't steal my ideas or writing. What an odd thing to say on first open.
That's why I make my writing with a typewriter. With tesseract I have a LibreOffice version in a few minutes.
So he just moves the files from one online storage to another? How stupid can one be?
Is Scrivener online storage? I don't think it is, but I don't use it so I can't be sure.
Scrivener is an offline, desktop app. So the files will be on their hard drive.
Yup, Scrivener saves data locally. Ironically, you should never use it on a cloud drive, because apparently it can lead to data corruption. I sync my Scrivener projects across multiple computers with Git instead, because that at least ensures the files are at a consistent state.
OP has moved files there, so even if it is not a general file storage, OP uses it as one for his texts.
If I had to guess, what probably triggered the ToS violation was transferring the content the day before, maybe the method or client used to do the transfer was too aggressive.
That makes zero sense. Why would a company like Google care about a few MB or less of text files?
Again it was just a guess, but why would a company like Google just randomly freeze all the data for this one person for no reason? Feels like there has to be a cause and effect, and the only info we know of is that the backup to scrivener the day prior. Obviously they never had a problem before to amass all the documents in there, so what just happened to get banned?
I don't know the total file size or the tool used to pull the content from Google Drive. It could be that the behavior looked like file sharing to Google's servers and the policy is to shut it down while they investigate.
Feels like there has to be a cause and effect, and the only info we know of is that the backup to scrivener the day prior.
Guess we should jump to conclusions then!
Maybe they use dynamic IP and they got unlucky and ISP assigned someone else's IP address (maybe someone doing piracy or maybe a scammer) and a big corp like Google won't care if they got the right person and just assume its the same person as the person previously assigned that same IP.
If I had to guess, there's more to this story than they're telling us. I've literally never heard of anyone losing access to their personal, legal files on Google drive because it violates their ToS. Google is a shit company and should be avoided, but this story just sounds like rage bait and maybe even just "organic" advertising for Scrivener.
Yeah, not a lot of details in this case. Unfortunately though, Google has previously banned accounts that don't contain any illegal content and appealing it is a fools errand: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
But again, that story above makes sense as to why it was initially triggered (i.e. Google's automated child porn detection bots flagged the picture and account). Was it done wrongfully? Sure, that seems to be the case. But, that's not really relevant to the original post since that's not what happened to this person. I feel like we'd be seeing way more news about authors having their books randomly locked out from them because Google just randomly decided to enforce a specific ToS violation on their account.
their personal, legal files
Google doesn't even care about hosting pirated content on Drive as long as you're not sharing it to others.
I doubt they do, too. I'm just pointing out how ridiculous the picture above sounds without knowing the full story.
They don't. But they also don't care if they make mistakes, and since you aren't paying for a bussiness account, they aren't gonna listen to your appeals.
Agreed
Two independent cloud storage providers is pretty good?
How about having backups on physical media at home?
You can download stuff off your Google account here. Select what you want, not all or it might fail. Choose format, and wait for the email.
Cloud backup has its place, just as offline physical backup does. They solve for two different problems and you need both.
Cloud backup - mindless. Set it and it regularly backs up things you do, even when you're remote. Offline backup - fairly dependable, but not updated as often. Requires over action on the part of the user. Can't use remotely if you also want to secure the created offline backup.
So best use case would be cloud backup all the time, and a physical offline backup you control at regular intervals, that you'll actually do.
physical offline backup you control at regular intervals, that you’ll actually do.
ouch, right in my executive dysfunction!
But you should never trust a cloud service to keep the only copy of your data.
You should never trust any backup solution to be the only copy of your data.
Cloud backups are fine as an absolute last resort for if your house burns down and you lose all local copies of your data.
I assume you backup locally at home. Do you ever travel away from home and create files? Do you just roll the dice and assume your device with you will never have a technical failure or be stolen?
Of course, the point of a backup is that it’s not your only copy.
My comment on that was in reference to backups alone, not the originals. Perhaps the 3-2-1 backup philosophy isn't quite as known outside if the IT world.
And I don’t worry about making backups while I’m traveling, as nothing I have is so critical that losing a few weeks of files would be devastating.
For many of us that isn't the case. We may have days, weeks, or months before returning home. How about your vacation pictures you take on your phone while you are on that trip? You're okay if those go away before you get home?
There was a cool browser extension back in the days that changed the word "cloud" to "someone else's computer" in the articles on the internet. It changes perspective and eliminates a lot of headache this way.
This reframing can be super useful in getting corporate types to understand that storing stuff in the cloud isn't a magic solution, and that it comes with its own problems (especially in terms of data governance stuff).
Even on weather articles?
Especially on the weather articles. Heavy someone else's computers with the good chance of rain.
I know it's a big jump from Adobe Cloud (which probably used user behavior tracking and their work to train AI) but it is possible to make great stuff with open source apps now.
The newly released GIMP 3.0 is quite amazing considering that it is free. Is it as good as Photoshop? Maybe it lacks all the features, but it's pretty damn good. If you install GMIC, an amazing suite of tools, it gets that much closer. Inkscape is also professional level for vector work now. Honorable mentions to Krita and kdenlive (for video editing). edit: I shouldn't leave out blender, jeesus.
I left Adobe Cloud 9 years ago. Yeah I had to endure a lot of ridicule and weird looks when I told people that I only worked in GIMP, but more recently, the response is less "You're weird" and more "I need Cloud for my job/it's all I know," which is a positive change.
If nobody ever makes the leap, things will stay the same indefinitely. Don't expect market forces to change things.
You know a good open source Illustrator alternative? I’ve only worked with Inkscape here and there, but the interface is pretty challenging for me to wrap my head around after spending so much time in Illustrator
graphite looks promising but is still in early days
The only solid vector graphics app I've used in open source is Inkscape. I agree, it's very difficult to get to know, even moreso if you're coming from old school raster imaging and don't get all the mathiness. I had to learn Inkscape though, because I needed to make fantasy maps with textual titles that didn't look like crap when rescaled.
I'm no expert, but it does pay off to learn. It's a very powerful set of tools.
Honestly, GIMP and Inkscape are a sad joke. Affinity Photo/Designer are the best option right now, I think. All the features without a cloud.
You have your own definitions of joke, best, and sad. That's fine.
Laughs in self hosted datacenter
[AI slop reporting intensifies]
Reminds me of when I had about 3 or 4 TB in my schools storage because hey free benefit
They removed the education free unlimited storage during my senior year and blocked access to my supposedly permanent school email because I didn't reduce my storage usage lol
I mean it's technically permanent as long as your organization continues paying for the license
Of course, they could downgrade your license or revoke it at any time. And they definitely will revoke it when you graduate (so they can reallocate the licensing costs to new students).
Your work/school accounts don't belong to you.
Forgot to mention but my school advertised permanent access to our school email, which back then meant free student benefits like the education unlimited storage. I technically still do have access, but it's a lot less useful nowadays
Google just went back on that education unlimited thing because they realized it was not sustainable, so my school had to enforce it somehow
Don't use Google trash. Google is evil.
I'm fully expecting them to straight up delete something... And then release it as theirs any day now
This should be painfully obvious to anyone who spends a second thinking about it. It frustrates me to no end that people just trust these "services" blindly, when they can at any time, for any reason, take away your access with no recourse. Why do people accept these terms? Why do they trust companies that are not on their side? I struggle to understand it. Cloud should only be used as a backup - and not the only one at that. Is this an issue with computer literacy? Is it that people don't understand how data is saved?
Is this an issue with computer literacy? Is it that people don’t understand how data is saved?
I think it's a combination of computer illiteracy and familiarity.
Most people only know what they're familiar with. For the average person cloud services are everywhere and it seems like everyone is using them so it doesn't seem unusual to use them. These same people don't have enough knowledge about computers to understand the risks of these services or, more importantly, that there are alternatives.
In addition, even if they have the knowledge, most people would rather pay Google $20/mo than to buy a $500 Network Attached Storage machine for their home network.
I don't want to be the old guy, but back in my day... if you wanted to watch a movie or listen to a song you had to figure out how to get it, how to play it, how to connect your TV/speakers, etc. The fruits of technology were available for anybody who cared to spend a little bit of time to learn.
Now, there's zero incentive to try to figure anything out because it's much easier to install Spotify with a single button than it is to install Airsonic or Jellyfin. Streaming services never have to worry about competing with self-hosting because they're ensuring that nobody needs to learn anything about computers.
So much of our lives are touched by computers that it seems irresponsible not to understand how they work.
I've not missed cloud functionality since I worked out Proton Drive and Syncthing.
The cloud is only part of 321
Boomers remember when they made memorable movies, and now they fight for people to forget them.
12,000 words? So, like, two chapters?
that's like one eighth of a whole-ass book, my friend. and after a year of writer's block that shit would hurt to lose.
Alright cool, probably takes a long time to do while also having a job and a family, but I'm just saying there were times in college where I wrote out 5k words in a day, formatted and typeset within a week.
I once wrote 5k words uphill both ways in the snow.
Literally, though, yeah I did.
alright, cool. so what?
So its a pretty small number of words.
Are we supposed to clap you now?
Honey, you need to buy me some drinks first.
Do you think your 5k words in a day were written well enough for someone to pay for it? Homework is not a product you have to market.
I was a 3.8 with degrees in Engineering and a minor in Humanities, and yes actually I am a published scifi writer as well.
I don't mean to put anybody down, unlike you, but 12k simply isn't a lot in the context of a manuscript.
Anybody reading this who dabbles in writing should spend more time on it to reach realistic goals in their lifetime.
My point is that your 3.8 Engineering/Humanities assignment is not a product that needs to marketed to the masses. 5k words in that space is easy, and I think this because I have done the same thing in the same field (Engr).
12k words isn't a huge amount, but as a published sci-fi writer you already understand that fictional writing is a saturated market with brutal competition, and publisher deal deadlines can be brutal too.
Maybe he was writing in german? Some words can be sentence long.
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