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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.
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The extra word
s areis 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.
I’m fully expecting them to straight up delete something… And then release it as theirs any day now
[AI slop reporting intensifies]
Am I too old? I only trust hard saving to offline storage. Be that an external hdd or a flash drive.
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.
Especially trusting cloud storage without a local backup for psyche-critical work - absolutely bonkers
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
what needs to happen is companies not have this much power ever.
There is zero chance that we can get the oligarchy to surrender power peacefully, so that’s not going to happen unless…
For legal purposes this comment is a joke
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.
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).
The same laws are still on the books, actually! We just never use them anymore.
The big one is the Sherman Anti-trust Act.
I’m in university (as an old) and just about everyone from faculty to staff has been pushing me to put everything in OneDrive. I know better, but young people tend to trust that an educational institution is looking out for them.
My freshman year I met teenagers who didn’t know what a flash drive is. Most of them have iPads with no storage, one of my classmates was just uploading all her lectures directly to YouTube so she could review them later.
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.
Yeah, I understand why employers use it. Oddly, I used to work for Microsoft and can’t remember using OneDrive for our projects lol
But as a student I really prefer saving stuff locally and to a separate storage device. The university system has been hacked at least once since I’ve been a student, we all lost our credentials and were required to physically go to the campus to reset them. The university also revokes access three years after graduation.
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? No, I consider people in their twenties to be young people.
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.
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.
ZK encryption has [yet] been debunked yet but I am sure there is risk there too
ZK encryption has been debunked
I’d love to see proof of that
Typo
What are you referring to? What is “ZK” here?
Zero Knowledge ie service provider doesn’t have view of the content just that you are using the service e
So something like MEGA or Proton Drive?
All proton services are zk except their LLM Andy is trying to sell us recently.
Filen, bitwarden any self respecting service is now zk.
If it ain’t, you are being punked
Thanks for the explanation. I always knew that concept just as E2EE.
E2ee to me is like signal, ie they don’t store data except meta data. Zk implies data at rest is encrypted
I am no expert just a prosumer
“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
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.
OP has moved files there, so even if it is not a general file storage, OP uses it as one for his texts.
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.
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.
Agreed
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.
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.
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.
Two independent cloud storage providers is pretty good?
How about having backups on physical media at home?
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
The fuck was this dude watching/writing down for google to think it was related to terrorism or trafficking???
My partner wrote a couple of hardboiled PI novels about shady people doing shady shit.
It should not matter at all what he wrote. This is absolutely the wrong question to focus on.
I’d make one exception.
If he was working through Bin Laden’s media catalog I’d understand the confusion.
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.
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
Lawrence of Arabia?
Joker, the best movie ever made.
It has driven OP down a dark and twisted path of fighting THE MAN
What a clusterfuck.
The cloud is only part of 321
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…
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.
Cloud backups are fine as an absolute last resort for if your house burns down and you lose all local copies of your data. But you should never trust a cloud service to keep the only copy of your data. And you should absolutely never store your data unencrypted on a cloud service. All it takes is one undesirable file (say, a movie you torrented) making its way into your backups for your account to be terminated.
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. 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.
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?
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.
Laughs in self hosted datacenter
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.
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.
alright, cool. so what?
So its a pretty small number of words.
Maybe he was writing in german? Some words can be sentence long.
Schreibblockadenüberwindungsworte
Ich gehe in die Selbstbedienungsladen
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.
