How does people even notice that their data has gone missing? I can barely find my own documents in the train wreck that is the Google Drive UI. Any document written by anyone else in the organization can generally be considered lost unless you have a direct link sitting in an email or bookmark.
Cant have a pro in motion without a promotion point for it.. and it looks so good in the presentations. Useability? Function? Screw it.. it must look good in adds. Make all the things screenshot useable only.
I'm not defending google or saying they haven't done anything wrong here, but it is insanely hard to make Google drive. I very much doubt Google drive has a staff of any where near 100k employees and it's probably the largest file browser ever made. It's an engineering marvel. Can Google do better? Absolutely. But, it's objectively wrong to say there's nothing hard about building something like Google drive.
I think this is like looking at the Burj Khalifa and asking how hard it can be to make a building. It's not just a building, it's the tallest building ever built.
If you've made it and released it to a the public (and it has paid tiers!) then you better have made it right. This is the case for both buildings and data storage systems.
Nothing I said disagrees with your statement. In fact, I specifically said they could do better. My point is that it's wrong to say google drive is easy to build or maintain.
> How does people even notice that their data has gone missing?
They need the data and look for it and it's not there, but they remember they put it there?
At my job if a log file or data recording is too big for jira, but need to be attached to a bug report we sometimes store them on google drive. And then we link it from the ticket. If much later we get back to it and the link is 404 that would make us suspicious. If someone remembers the link working before that would make it clear it is not just a copy paste error with the url.
> How does people even notice that their data has gone missing?
That’s what I want to know too. Try to reconcile the cloud sync systems to make sure you aren’t missing anything. It’s basically impossible.
I also go crazy when I see MS touting OneDrive as a backup. I’m pretty sure moving (because of files-on-demand) my data to OneDrive where I can’t verify they aren’t losing stuff is not a backup. Add the risk of being banned and it becomes unconscionable IMO.
I mount it using their desktop client and use voidtools' everything to search for files.
Works reasonably well, though Google seems intent on breaking stuff every so often. Also Google hasn't figured out how to make it stop creating desktop.ini files everywhere yet. I'd say it makes them look like amateurs, but amateurs tend to be better at making software.
You can blame a different megacorp for the desktop.ini files: those are artifacts from windows explorer (I’m assuming you’re using a windows machine with the google drive mounted)
Partially yeah, but that's usually a system file, which isn't supposed to be visible. Google drive for some reason decides to make it visible, which is damn annoying.
This is a bit like Google drive adding two files named '.' and '..' to each folder in unix.
For non-images I suffer the same poblem. But for images I have yet to find a service that lets me search the heap better than Google Photos. It was amazing and was pre-AI craze. "My driveway in the summer." "<Child A> and <Child 1> on a dock" etc. I don't have to catalogue anything anymore. Apple has the same concept but it never works right.
