 A lot of people still don't seem to realize how cloud storage actually works, so here's a quick rundown. You start off with a guy who's got a whole lot of hard drives laying around, like dozens of terabytes just not being used. He assembles these into some kind of a super NAS, and then he sells you an account so that you can store your data on his drives. Boom, cloud storage brought to you by some dude. Now, the actual cloud storage that people pay for, you know, the stuff that's run by Microsoft and Google, usually has a little bit more redundancy than this. It's typically set up in a RAID array, and they've got multiple offsite backups of the data, and sometimes they even have multiple internet connections in case one of them fails so that you can still access your data. But despite all of this fancy tech that goes into corporate cloud storage, some services, like Google Drive, still end up fumbling a lot of people's data. So this is a trending post on the Google Drive support form where this user, Yian Zhang, I'm sure I just completely butchered that name, said Google Drive files suddenly disappeared. The drive literally went back to condition in May 2023. Hi, my Google Drive file suddenly disappeared. The drive literally went back to condition in May 2023. Data from May until today disappeared and the folder structure went back to status in May. Google Drive activity doesn't show any changes. Only activity that was in May. No files was deleted manually, so no files in trash. I never synced or shared my files and drive to anyone. I used the drive locally. So this user is explaining that their Google Drive basically time traveled back six months and they're insisting that the problem wasn't user error on their part and they didn't get hacked. They weren't sharing it with anybody else. No one went and deleted their files and they go on to explain that they talked with Google Drive support in South Korea. They tried running some recovery program, Google Drive support in South Korea and that failed and they asked him to restore the drive folder. That also failed and then there's this next part here that says I reported the issue to the Google support team probably in states, I'm guessing they mean United States and they asked me to report the issue to their engineer but no answer from the engineer and cannot know whether they are reviewing my issue. So this is a serious pet peeve of mine that I'm sure some of you can also relate to whenever you reach out to some department of a company for support for a problem and they tell you, oh, this is the wrong department that you called. What you actually wanna do is talk to sales or in this case, talk to an engineer. Like, okay, sure, that's good information for me or I guess this guy to have in the future but can't you have the customer service sense to transfer me or I guess CC the engineer in this case because I'm guessing that this took place through email or some kind of instant messaging. I really doubt that this person actually got someone from Google to talk to them on the phone and of course the OP didn't get any response back from the engineer which I kind of expected because in my experience with IT, the so-called engineer typically is not a customer facing position. Their job is to make sure that the servers do the thing. Now if we scroll down in this thread a little bit, we see a response from a Google employee saying that they're investigating an issue that is impacting some users of drive or desktop but another thing that I noticed here with their pace, I mean the body of their post really isn't that important. I noticed here that the dislike count is missing from this post. So it appears that Google didn't just remove dislikes from YouTube, they also took the dislike count off of their support forms, really makes you think. If we scroll down a bit more we can start seeing that there's a whole lot of other people that are reporting the same kind of problem and this person's post by user C just 19 hours ago is one that actually stood out to me quite a bit because they say hi, I'm currently facing issues with missing files on the browser version, right? Which I guess is that's the original version of Google Drive as far as I know so that should be the one that works the best and this also kind of invalidates the crappy response from the Google employee. If we scroll up a bit we see that they were trying to say that oh it's just an issue with drive for desktop, well it's not an issue with drive for desktop, clearly it's not just an issue with the application that people are running on their computers, it's an issue with Google Drive itself if people are having this problem in the browser and the last user comment that I'm going to point out, let's see if I can find it again. So it actually looks like Google deleted this user's comment from the thread which is hilarious that they're deleting these kinds of comments instead of actually trying to fix their drive. But luckily I took a screenshot, you know, sorry if it's got lower picture quality but this person pointed out, you know, they just copied section nine of the Google Drive's terms of service and this actually is an older terms of service apparently but I think it perfectly sums up the issue that we're having here. Our warranties and disclaimer, we provide Google Drive using a reasonable level of skill and care and hope that you will enjoy using Google Drive but there are certain things that we don't promise about Google Drive. Other than as expressly stated, we don't make any commitments about the specific functionality available through Google Drive, its reliability, availability or ability to meet your needs. So it's basically just this kind of catch-all, you know, towards the end of their terms and conditions which is like, hey, if we accidentally delete your data or, you know, we lose it or whatever, it's not going to be our fault. And so all of this just completely sums up what we already knew. Google sucks and they don't care about your data nearly as much as you do but instead of just beating that dead horse some more, I wanna close this video with a solution to this data crisis. I mean, unfortunately, I can't bring back your data that Google lost but I can hopefully provide you a solution to prevent data loss in the future and that is to follow a three, two, one backup procedure. So what this basically means is you wanna have three copies of your most critical data. One of these can be your production copy so that's gonna be what's running on your laptop or server or whatever but you wanna have two more complete copies of that data and the copy should be kept on two different kinds of storage mediums. So you might use something like an external SSD and then you also have a NAS or you might have the NAS and then a tape drive, something like that. And then one of these backups needs to be off-site and needs to not be physically located at your home or your office. That way if a meteor hits it, you're still able to recover from that disaster and have all of your data in place. So if you don't already have this kind of backup system in place and you're just completely relying on Google to keep your data safe, you should stop it. Get some hard drives and start keeping local full copies of your data because Google certainly isn't. If you enjoyed this video, please like it and share it to hack the algorithm and check out my merch on based.win. I've got a lot of great t-shirts and hoodies to keep you warm during the winter season and you can save 10% automatically a checkout by paying in Monero XMR. Have a great rest of your day.