Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
I've never posted anything like this, but this is the only place I have any hope of a human response after youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company. My wife started a company that helps people transition from colleges in their home country (for instance the IIT system in India) by translating their credit system into the American educational credit system.
She utilized a youtube channel with unlisted videos to explain to internal employees the nuances of difficult evaluation types, for instance how to determine for CEGEPs in Quebec the difference between upper secondary and post secondary. Another example would be how to award credits for MBBS programs from U.K modeled educational system (West Africa, India etc).
Youtube sent her 3 strikes in one week. On videos that were 4 years old, indicating cyber bullying. These videos were unlisted and literally contained only incredibly dense, rather boring videos covering the nooks and crannies of various educational systems and how they relate to each other. When she responded, she received an auto reply that stated you get a reply within 2 business days. No further response despite repeated requests within the system, then tweets, and finally submitting a new appeal form from scratch to which the reply was nothing can be done because too much time had passed.
This content was incredibly time intensive to create and was basically another job on top of her position as CEO. As a small company this was a devastating blow. Her work youtube account is now removed.
Personally the cynic in me speculates that google cleans out low hanging fruit, using metrics, and there was nothing in the content that triggered the bot at all, just a case of over 700 somewhat lengthy videos that were getting almost no traffic, and they get to delete them and hide behind the byzantine garbage fire that is their "support".
If you work for the youtube division and can help, I'm begging you please send me a message or reply to this post, it seems this is the only way to rectify this kind of problem. If there is anyway to download the videos that is all we are asking for.
-jdh
453 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadI don't mean to be an asshole, but nobody guarantees you that your videos will stay up perpetually on YouTube. Especially if you've got hundreds of private or unlisted videos, it doesn't particularly surprise me that YouTube would pull them down, even if only for petty reasons. If you've been following the state of their website over the past few years, this sort of behavior is becoming quite common, and even among YouTubers with millions of followers I don't think I've seen them reverse a claim of this scale.
Yes, it's a shame. If you don't have them on your own computer though, then are they really yours? It's a hard way to learn that local backups are important, and "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs.
People fuck up, it’s just a matter of when, and when we do it’s better to help and hope that some day you’ll be helped in turn.
Except that is exactly how cloud companies market themselves. That is exactly what cloud companies have been telling consumers for a decade+.
Right up to the point of commercials showing someone lose a device and saying “no worries, it’s all in the cloud!”, etc. We’ve been told for years that our data is safer in the cloud than it is on our own devices. That the cloud itself IS the backup system.
Normal people didn’t just arrive at this conclusion on their own. They were fed it directly from the companies that we are all now supposed to just innately understand are not to be trusted with our data.
And why should they? Google actively markets itself as trustworthy. Unless you know someone who has been burned, the average non-professional YouTube user who just thought it was a sensible way to host their videos would not be aware of the pattern.
What the purpose of your comment? It's not helpful.
If that weren’t the case, I agree with you, it’s a good message to spread.
Run this:
youtube-dl https://youtube.com/c/MyChannel
and have a snack while it finishes. You'll thank yourself later.
I think it's important to mention that such trust is misplaced and risky, ALWAYS make backups. Sure it's generally common sense for many, but the OPs story is a nice example.
I don't think that that's particularly true of HN readership though.
If GP's comment was on a more mainstream forum e.g. Reddit, then I would agree with you, but as it stands it feels a bit gratuitous.
In other words, the next generation of normies will probably understand this because of people before them learning the hard way.
Please don't scold someone who's already in a shitty situation, or lecture them with the obvious. That breaks the HN guidelines, notably this one: "Be kind."
It's extremely easy to do this kind of thing on the internet and not as easy to realize the effect it has on people, and also on the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But that’s Google’s business model. The service is free.
I might need to rethink uploading my Factorio speedruns to YT...
Still, safest option might be to use unconnected account for it.
That said I feel like going forward y'all need to share work videos internally, rather than depending on YouTube.
As an ultra longshot you might find the videos on archive.org
This is a thread of someone who was trying to find his old videos .
https://archive.org/post/1102732/many-youtube-videos-which-u...
Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?
Brainstorming an interface, I can imaging "archive your original source materials" as an upsell alongside the YouTube upload, with an option to archive the actual video file as well. This would actually be enabled if you were to subscribe to the archival service, which would be paid in advance. Perhaps we can argue that such files should be considered private materials rather than redistributed works, so not subject to copyright takedowns.
And that's the problem here: With no humans in the process, YouTube treats ordinary users and predators exactly the same way, because ultimately, algorithms are stupid and don't make good moderators.
Does it have to be that way? There are various reasons for banning an account.
If the content is actually CSAM, then I imagine a provider's hands are tied under US law at least. But algorithmically flagged CSAM has a confidence percentage associated with it. A provider is not legally obligated to deny you archival access to video of a kid's pool party given a false positive flag by a scanning algo.
Then there are lots of other reasons that an account may end up banned where archival access doesn't necessarily have to be problematic. For example, there's no reason to take away access to completely original COVID denialist videos, even if the platform decides that it's not going to allow them to be shared.
"Your account may be terminated at any time"
No business owner wants to print that in large letters above every upload form: "Thanks for uploading, your content may be deleted at any time, keep a copy."
What we need though is some accountability especially from large companies and for real users.
How long can we go before we start treating online stuff like real stuff? Why is my car protected from theft but my data isn't?
And size should have nothing to do with it. I believe treating most SaaS providers the same.
Blame never rests on the user, either way. Google will always have far more power than the user.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?p...
This will generate a link that could possibly have an archive of every video uploaded by that account.
You don't have have any contact information listed on your account page. Please do so.
"Unable to access a Google product If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended."
This is so incredibly frustrating. I wish I had asked on hacker news before trying for so long to get a response from google.
*If* this is possible, of course, it only works where the GDPR holds ground - so the EU, sadly. But again, *if* this is actually possible, that's a pretty big win for the GDPR and all the more reason to make noises about it.
Which was why I was wondering out loud - I'm curious how far detached my mental model is from reality.
D:
Oooooh, I wonder what happens if I signed up for a service and then requested "all current and future data on, about and related to me"... that would mean it couldn't be deleted until I'd been sent a copy.
Forward-acting, perpetual motion FOIA machine go brrrt? Yes please lol
Do you use Macs? Do you have Time Machine?
[1]: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube#Older_unliste...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/
It's been over a decade since YT would simply allow you to download the video file directly (does anyone still remember the "s/watch?v=/get_video?video_id=/" trick?), probably for DRM reasons. Even if it did, I doubt the Internet Archive would have bothered to try archiving due to the immense volume that video takes.
At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry.
Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can address?
Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately.
No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an argument in favor of why they should.
Use services of companies you can trust, and or host your own content. If the content is important, pay for its hosting, because that's the rational thing to do, buy the service level to match the value of your content. That's the correct solution to this problem. You can't trust YouTube in that sort of use case and we don't need a giant new federal agency to make YouTube host videos long-term against their will, it's absurd. Hosting those videos on Hetzner or DigitalOcean or similar would be inexpensive for a small business (or use a paid video hosting service, I'm sure there are several of those around).
The content owner likely wanted to use YouTube because it's free. That turned out as one might expect.
Then, one day someone at the gallery decides that the art contains something that doesn’t look right. Maybe it’s a peach, in the background, that looks like a butt.
So, to resolve the problem, they burn all of your art to the ground.
The fault is not with gallery destroying copy, but with destruction of the original.
FDA, youtube edition: alphabet is the only company approved to host videos for public consumption, because they're the only one that has an approved copyright/hate speech filter (regulated for safety, efficacy, ADA compliance, and to be non-discriminatory). All other sites are prohibited from operating unless they spend $5B to get their systems approved.
It goes like this: Large consulting companies are structurally incompetent and keep running to the ground financial and government IT projects. After starting to see their lunch taken by small specialized and competent small operations, a underground operation starts to require the regulator to force companies working in the space to get certified as "Financial Services Provider". Regulations will make sure the number of required certified professionals, minimum capital etc...Are of a nature to drive out the competent small boutiques.
Projects are of course still done, by forcing the small companies to subcontract on a 2nd and 3nd level via the now certified ( but still incompetent) large consulting companies.
We were told explicitly that this was because council needed someone big enough to sue. To this day it makes no sense to me. But that’s how it was.
Whether the reason was made to justify the existence of some parasites doesn't change the fact that it's a real reason. A company that's been in business for over a century isn't going to go out in a year, and worst case someone will have the knowledge and certs to keep the ship running.
I have personally seen one of the big consultants change entire project methodologies twice - at the customer’s expense - within 6 months, in the same project.
This is leaning more into the big business revolving door problem - but in any case, I don’t think it’s widely accepted that the big consultants reduce project risks in any meaningful way.
And quite frankly, if your strategy is to sue a company if things go pear shaped, why in gods name would you choose IBM as your partner?
Lawsuits by government agencies against suppliers are rare, and likely to result in a loss if attempted against large corporations. Companies like Microsoft or Oracle have armies of the best lawyers on retainer. Government agencies can only afford the ones that have sensible shoes and patches on their jacket elbows.
A recent case in point: The NSW Transport department had a legal spat with a huge contracting company Acciona, and ended up losing the court case to the tune of over half a billion dollars!
That specific case made me laugh out loud because the company I worked for had signed a very similar contract with the same department. I remember looking at it and thinking it was some sort of joke that nobody in their right mind would sign (on the government side). It included none of the "hard but essential" bits, and all of the easy fluffy bits. They signed it. They argued with us over non-delivery. We pointed at the contract and made them pay us 5x more than the original amount to do the actual, hard work.
The real reason that government agencies like big contractors is because they are reassuringly expensive. They're the "big name" that looks good in reports. They're chosen by people with unlimited funding, no profit motive, and the power to choose a vendor with the sole motivation of covering their ass. That's it. No need to be "efficient", or "fit for purpose", or any such thing.
These decisions are all made by a small number of people acting in individual self-interest. Optimising for their own continued employment. They're trading your taxes so that in the event of a failure they can point at the name on the report memo and say: "See! Not even Big Name Vendor could implement this! It's not my fault!"
I once got "fired" from a consulting gigs where things went wrong and I took it very hard. A salesman explained that our purpose is to be easily fire-able so that the manager at the customer can keep his job. That's why he paid us triple rates compared to a direct contractor. I was back on that site 12 months later, once everybody forgot who I was.
TL;DR: Organisations that mis-allocate punishment and reward force their internal middle-managers to protect themselves at the expense of the organisation. Big consulting firms exist to milk these inefficient organisations, and this has nothing to do with lawsuits.
Acquainted with a few pretty terminations for cause, some of which put resellers out of business.
Of course lawsuits against suppliers are rare, because conflicts between suppliers and clients are resolved through contract law. When I was managing customers' servers we had specific SLAs and service metrics that if not attended to resulted in the supplier reimbursing the customer by a _nice_ amount. A Sev1 incident on mainframes that was attended to later than expected could cost tens of thousands to the supplier.
You point to government agencies, but you forget that the consumers of these services are also large Fortune500 companies with very explicit profit motives, cost-saving policies, and relatively effective IT departments. Large companies are as leery as governments of small suppliers for the same reasons. Is the argument valid considering that there are very competent organizations that hold the same reservations?
Lehman Brothers was around for 158 years and it imploded in much less than a year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kur94OyXf3U
https://about.fb.com/regulations/
Which then links to this page:
https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/four-ideas-regulate-intern...
Basically, what I gathered is that they want to create a high barrier to entry for their potential competitors, as one would expect. There is nothing useful to people in those regulations.
The bill of rights in the Constitution doesn't prohibit people from opening businesses - I don't see why an online bill of rights would do so
It’s a little late now. But the answer was for her to backup her videos on $60 USB hard drive and pay a service like Backblaze.
Comparing an agency that is there to make sure people don’t die from bad food and drugs to wanting a government agency to regulate third party content storage that can easily be backed up is nonsensical.
He’d spent years adding photos and reviews and his photo views were in the millions, then Google flagged him as doing something that violated their terms.
Within a week his whole account had been taken down and there’s no way to speak to a human about what happened.
Never even received confirmation of which post was in violation and what the issue was.
How did we get to a situation where the people that spend the most time using the platforms end up losing the most and having no way of getting support.
But of course this would require the creators of the automated systems for detecting violating content to have a healthy measure of self-doubt regarding the perfection of what they build, which is the kind of thing Google's hiring process seems likely to weed out from what I've read.
Thus my conclusion Google is unlikely to ever build an automated system that will take as a central precept that automation is imperfect.
The flip side of this, is where YouTube/Google is finding excuses to conduct "purges" of data and older accounts. They know what they're doing is wrong, but it has plausible deniability to it.
So easy to pull, "Don't blame us, blame the algorithm." As if it isn't people programming and supervising it, and there isn't loads of user complaints as to what's going on.
They’d go out and photograph places that had poor photos on maps to improve them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Worth giving a go at least...
My anecdotal experience (just poking around) is that Google never deletes publicly-facing data, because it's cheaper to just keep it. So there may be a reasonable chance the photos are tucked away somewhere, along with the metadata pointing them to the account in question.
The real & lasting solution is to not try and build a business on something that unreliable. It is up there with storing emergency supplies for a flood in the low point of a floodplane. Any level of thoughtful contingency planning will reveal that storing all your videos on a YouTube channel with no personal backups is going to be a disaster if anything goes wrong, ever. As has been revealed, this woman had no control over her (very valuable) data. Y'know, whoopse. Lots of sympathy but this is a potential ending to giving all your data to Google.
Of course there is room for interpretation here what is included in "personal data". Nevertheless, I would recommend to any EU citizen who finds her/himself in a similar situation as the OP to inform the data protection authority with jurisdiction over her/his place of residence.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I know It is easy to say to own your own things / Video. In reality a reliable storage system is not easy nor cheap. A BTRFS / ZFS system that is Turn Key solution with drive redundancy and error correction by default. And that is ignoring other things like security.
My dream solution would be something like an Apple TimeCapsule that also works for iOS. And may be a bundled subscription that give you offsite backup and snapshots.
It's not a highly redundant enterprise solution, but it's decent for home and small business users, especially since the alternative is usually 'nothing'.
Only Qnap offers ZFS and Synology offer BTRFS. And none of these file system are default option. ( I dont think they do scheduled scrubbing by default either ) They are also only available on mid range model. Qnap had third or forth security issues with Bitcoin ransomeware. Synology requires lot of work to turn off All internet facing features. To the point they dont want you to do it because all Internet facing features are their product differentiation. I think most user want more like a DAS ( Direct Attached Storage ), or NAS that is only accessible via Intranet.
Once you have that setup, a DS220+ with two 4TB NAS Drive and a usable 4TB storage cost $500. ( Or $400 if you use non NAS / Long Warranty Drive )
I am not sure if $500 / $400 for 4TB is cheap or affordable to average consumers.
Unfortunately there aren't much R&D into optical disc technology. Would have been nice if we get 1TB per disc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
That said as said in the other comment M-DISC is really the way to go. Burn a couple of these, store them separately. They're rated for 1,000 years of storage if stored even somewhat properly. You can get them in 100GB sizes, so perfect for this kind of job. Burners aren't crazy expensive, 100GB discs were around $10/disc last time I bought.
[0]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/#Configure
[1] https://kobol.io
A stack of DVD's in a book shelf.
That said, I'd also guess there's a countdown timer before they get deleted permanently.
I hope you can get a human from YouTube to talk to you.
It may benefit you to post a link to the youtube channel so someone can proactively investigate. Lots of google employees read this forum.
The youtube channel in question.
https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/
If this seems interesting, the immediate priority would be to backup your cache folder immediately (%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache), then extract and search it at your leisure.
(This is all for Windows, but IIUC there are alternatives for Linux and macOS.)
Is this situation really that bad? D:
(# AIUI companies are obliged to share with you any PII they hold that identifies you.)
To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is a paid service (I guess is youtube part of that?) now.
I just assumed if there was a problem we could youtube-dl everything, it didn't occur to me that control of the account would be suspended arbitrarily with no recourse for literally no reason. Despite reading about similar things here for years.
I guess I just thought those were lightning strikes, and I was focusing my time outside of work on the new SPA rollout we were working on for the company. I understand excuses like armpits are something we all have and they all smell, so I'll just say I fucked up and own it.
I appreciate all the advice and I understand why you are all saying what you are saying.
This was spur of the moment post (I didn't think it through) and I hadn't updated my contact information on my profile. I've done so now.
Thanks.
Geo dispersed NAS is probably the most cost effective long term but for now the important thing is getting data off Google services before you lose it forever. So take a look at other cloud providers in the short term. The more you interact with Google and ask questions the more likely it is they shut down more access.
If you have your domains registered with them move it somewhere else, preferably a dedicated registrar so you can at least re-host email and website.
I reported the situation to Google and they could confirm with the parcel company the delivery was not completed successfully (plus some additional background checks they did after requesting access to my account) and they refunded the order.
The thing is I was not brave enough to place a second order of a Pixel because of fear of risking closure of my gmail account if the phone in the second order was also stolen before delivery, so I ended up ordering a Nokia instead.
Going forward though, Vimeo feels like a better fit for you guys. Caveat emptor, never rely on free services for critical parts of your operation.
Don't rely on a single service. Having the same data at two free services is probably more safe than relying on a single paid service. At least for data loss.
If data is sensitive don't rely on any service, just encrypt it with your own key.
Given how giant companies (especially Google) behave, I do not feel it is an esoteric thing to do. Anyone with even a modicum of technical skill can roll their DIY NAS. For the non-tech savvy, buying off the shelf is fine.
Should not be needed in real life but this is the world we live in where robots have way too powerful ban hammers and the only way to get any support is to make sound in public forums or have a large social following.
Then depending on what you want out of the device, do one of the following -
1. If it's strictly storage and you want the niceties of ZFS, install TrueNAS 2. If you want expandable storage without ZFS + VMs + Docker with a nice GUI and are willing to pay for a license, install Unraid. 3. If you want ZFS-backed storage + VMs and no docker, and maybe some datacenter-style capabilities, install Proxmox 4. If you want all of the above and are willing to manually configure everything, then install Ubuntu Server + Cockpit for managing the machine headless + Portainer for managing a large number of docker containers.
So on balance I'd say paying for something is a pretty good deal.
I think Vimeo is a good choice for hosting new videos. For archival I would consider just using a single NAS of your own and then have that replicate to Amazon Glacier in at least 1 other region (unless you already have the rack space and someone to physically manage the NAS box in another region).
For gawd's sake, buy some terabyte drives and make a backup that you control. Mail a copy to your mom just in case.
The point I'm making about contracts here is not solely about having the option to sue if the other party doesn't uphold their end of the contract. It's about even having the option to agree to conditions that aren't ridiculously one-sided in the first place.
It's not cheap but passive.
Even reading this post, many readers are will also just assume the same as you did, that it was a lightning strike and will never happen to them... Not sure i have a solution myself.
Insist that your issue be escalated to an internal bug so that it is properly triaged.
Even if the videos were deleted as part of the suspension, it's highly likely that there are still multiple backups and cached versions in Google's systems. They should be able to help you restore them at the very least.
It opens them up for a massive claim if it later turns out that they really did have the data somewhere, though.
They bet on people not suing and they're right most of the time customer don't demand. It does not mean, just because they actually get away with it by play dumb, that there are not legal basis.
But tbh I think even getting and external drive and backing up to it should at least be done in parallel to any cloud service you choose.
If you weren't a mechanic, you wouldn't avoid maintaining a car and then get upset that it broke down eventually, you would pay a specialist to maintain it for you.
Youtube is cool because it's "free" but you also get almost zero support from Google and they are pretty the worst in my opinion. I have got decent support from AWS and Microsoft (never tried with FB).
People look at the cost of properly storing the data without thinking of the cost of not doing it.
A team I was helping with was in charge of making a lot of training videos which were then used in paid classes. Several employees working at least 4 days a week shooting and editing videos. They had been keeping all their master copies on the same memory cards they used in their cameras, "backups are too expensive!". Then one of their memory cards corrupted, and I asked them to calculate the amount of salary went in to making the data on that flash card.
That afternoon a NAS was delivered with authorization to backup that to separate cloud services. Suddenly when they bothered to have that perspective the cost of a NAS was dirt cheap despite being way too expensive days before.
If youtube deletes your account, you take the drives out of the closet and re-upload. If a drive fails, you use youtube-dl to repopulate it.
The only way this fails is if a drive dies / house fire on the same day that youtube deletes your account. If you are really that paranoid about it, keep a second copy of each drive at work / home. But you really, really don't need to.
As some one working in storage, please do not get tons of NAS they are pain to manage eventually. Example: linus-tech-tips could not do it properly.
If you use youtube-dl how large is one video? Lets say 2 GB. I presume, every week you create have 2 videos? Then 4GB per week.
Google gives you $20 for 100 GB. Every year create a new account - like - company name.2022 dump everything there. Hire an clerk to make sure the credit card is payed every year.
That way you do not lose all videos at a time.
Heck you can even create free Google drive account every few months and segment them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ckoej1/googles_...
NAS is fine if you know what you are doing, cloud storage (S3, GCS, B2) is probably best though.
The difficulty in managing a NAS is completely different if you buy two off-the-shelf Synology boxes and log in and point-and-click turn on snapshot sync between the two and create an Amazon Glacier backup task.
Object storage like Wasabi and BackBlaze B2 are $6/year for 100GB, and much easier to upload, maintain and retrieve from in the future.
I decided to look at using AWS S3 to archive my media library. If you use the `DEEP_ARCHIVE` storage class, I believe costs are ~$1 per month per TB. The downside of such a storage class is that it takes ~48 hours for files to be "defrosted" and ready to download.
Before I push any of my media (that I have legally purchased), I also encrypt it to hedge the risk that AWS suddenly decides to start doing automated scans/fingerprinting for copyrighted content. I assume that's overkill but w/e.
Here is a CLI I wrote to make the above a bit easier: https://gitlab.com/tlonny/dfrost
This is really dependent on where you live, but as you are paid customers I would suggest to file a lawsuit in a small claims court. Seriously! Google is not playing its part on a legally binding contract, and money exchanging hands is enough to make it valid for the courts. The amount of work poured into these videos, compared with the equivalent compensation that you would have to pay for an employee to make the same work would also qualify for damages. This can also protect you against retaliation from google. But again, IANAL and check our local legislation carefully before.
Where I live it's a thing a person can do in an afternoon (usually takes less time than fighting big companies' support online), do not require lawyers, and the other part also can not bring a lawyer to conciliatory session (for big companies this is usually a sham: even if their representative does not have a lawyer present at court, be sure that s/he was heavily counseled by company legal staff before and everything presented was proofread by them too).
Oh the irony. Just like deleting user videos for no good reason without warning and not offering any means of appeal.
I think Google has the responsibility to make it VERY clear that you can lose access to your content without notice. I don't think users truly understand that now.
Eventually, I just switched to fastmail and gave up Google altogether.
These days, I grab my Google Takeout every year or so and also have a Fastmail account that pulls in every other email I receive.
I lost access to my Yahoo mail address from teenage days and consecutively the YouTube account associated with it. The videos are still up and it's just random shenanigans, but still. Learned my lesson with big tech companies.
Yes...
Every piece of data I have that I care about is backed up following a 3-2-1 model
I am also in the process of moving off Gmail due to the Legacy termination.
>I don't think users truly understand that now.
In my experience user don't truly understanding anything, given that I work in data storage I take is seriously, I am also called on my people on a semi regular basis to recover from data loss because their drive crashed, or something like that. every time I attempt to educate them on low cost backup solutions to prevent it in the future, less than 1% even after suffering data loss will learn the lesson and start doing backups
That is for onPrem hardware failure. For a service like Google, facebook, Microsoft, etc they just simply do not believe they will ever lose that data.
Hell just the other say in a sysadmin forum people were debating is business even need to backup data in Office 365 because "that would be a waste of money"
People have taken the meme of "internet never forgets" far to literally
My digital footprint is only something like 2 TB, but none of my devices can store this kind amount of data at once without external HDDs. So doing a backup is a step by step manual and time consuming process of downloading and juggling data, rotating individual backups, etc. I rarely could think of doing it more than once per year.
Even if your devices can not store that kinda of data, and 2TB is nothing IMO... (My home has raw storage online capacity of over 100TB right now, and probably triple that in offline / non-powered on storage)
There are countless economical cloud backup services, and of you are creative ways to put import things into multiple "free" services
For example one person was really concerned about their photos, but they did not want to pay for a proper backup. My suggestion then was at a minimum to use 2 or more of the free photo services, They had a Amazon Prime Subscription, used an iPhone, and had a google account so Prime Photos, Google Photos, and iCloud where all options, picking at least 2 of them would be better than nothing. It would not be a proper 3-2-1 backup, but it would protect against something like random account deletion from one of the providers
The point is, there are creative ways to ensure access to data with out having to have a massive storage array in your home like I do. I value privacy and control more than most, this is also why all my home automation non-cloud based, I dont use Google Home, Siri, Homekit, Alexa etc. and I will never buy a device that requires cloud service to use. But I recognize I am not like most people sadly....
I cannot understand why anyone would tolerate the risk of losing important information.
I will not put anything on a cloud service (let alone a free cloud service) that I rely on in any way. Including E-mail. If my only copy of some content is in the cloud, that means I have deliberately made the decision that that content is expendable and my life would not be affected if my account disappeared tomorrow.
It's really sad that we have to read these stories weekly, but somehow the word just isn't getting out there. Don't rely on someone else's computer to host the only copy of irreplaceable content! This does not absolve cloud providers from being better stewards of people's data--it's just a cry to be careful with things that are valuable. I know this sounds like blaming the victim, but how many more of these stories have to be posted to overcome everyone's "It won't happen to me" attitude?
It's because companies - sometimes purposefully - continue to make it difficult to maintain an off-line backup of cloud data in a reasonable way, and people can't be arsed to figure out how each service allows users to backup their data (if at all). The most accommodating cloud service on this front, google with their google takeout service, offer scheduled multi-GB zipped archives for download.
Backups should be automatic and standard. Offer a standard incremental syncing api (not downloads) and integrate it as an opt-out (not opt-in) step for signing up. Then have an industry-standard app (like how google authenticator is standard for otp) handle backups.
Anything more complicated than that and will continue reading stories like this.
In 2022 it's plain stupid to keep your email in Gmail or rely on Google Photos as the only storage for your family archive. People pay $15/mo for Netflix, but can't pay $50/year for a email address? Nobody will lend a random person $1000, but people still happily give their work, worth orders of magnitude more, to a company that has literally zero obligations to them.
I sincerely sympathize with this couple and wish they will eventually recover their stuff, but c'mon, let's be proactive and prevent such incidents (and educate/help others)
I honestly think there are less than 1 in 100 people who have a working system of backups that would bring them back all their photos taken from their mobile phones.
Since Google turned off syncing of photos to Google Drive, my system broke for instance. Like OP, I haven't had time to set a new backup process up since then.
Do it now[1].
Assuming what you already have setup for Google Drive is using rclone, it's probably not going to take you longer than what it took to write that comment.
[1] https://wiki.emilburzo.com/backing-up-your-google-digital-li...
You could easily ruin someone's YouTube channel by finding unlisted videos through the rest of the Web and reporting them, like this poor couple have found out....