For example, I set up an external hard drive (EHD) that syncs with the data on my PC’s hard drive. People also get caught out by local file synchronisation. Briefly, you have a file, but you can’t access it because the account that created has been closed. This is about the way file ownership works in the Google Apps suite. There’s an even scarier story on Reddit: How we lost over €6,000 by not understanding Google Drive. (Uploading files manually via web interfaces works as you’d expect.)

If they went online, of course, the files weren’t there. Someone would install Google Drive on a PC, drop some files in its folder, see them upload, then delete the files. When Google told him he was running out of Google Drive space, he went online and emptied the trash folder … which promptly deleted his files. He’d moved his “files” out of the Google Drive folder on his PC, not realising that they were only links. If you delete a file on your local device, does that delete the same file in the cloud? (Which folders are synchronised and which ones aren’t?) Further, are the files on your device really files or are they placeholders – merely links to a file that is actually somewhere else?Ī few years ago, Ovi Demetrian provoked a lot of discussion when he posted a website, Google Drive Sucks: “I lost years of work and personal memories that I saved as Google Docs files because of a poor user interface,” he wrote. That syncing feelingīut you must understand how the synchronisation works. Today, I’d add a corollary: backups don’t really exist unless you have at least three on different media in different places, and deleting one must not affect any of the others. You may have come across Schofield’s Second Law of Computing, which states that data doesn’t really exist unless you have at least two copies of it.

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