Or “How Not To Do It”

Ever since we bought our Airstream Trailer, I have documented our travels. I’ve used various apps and media to do that, but had settled on Google Drive and a whole heap of PDF files, all tied up with a Google Sites free website.

Why wouldn’t I? Everything is in The Cloud, they do the backups and I had a massive amount of storage space bought and paid for. Everything was looking rosy.

Then last week, I had a series of prompts from Google, on my phone, suggesting that I clear down unwanted data. I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention, and stuff on the phone is usually pretty meagre, so I had assumed that they were talking about duplicate files, previously deleted files, and things that hadn’t been used. I happily clicked “Yes”, even to the warning that the action I was taking was irreversible, and went to bed happy.

The next day, though, the horrible truth dawned on me when I noticed that a few files had been replaced by placeholders on my Sites page. A further delve into Google Drive and it became instantly clear that there wasn’t a single file left in the entire space. Not one. The pieces fell into place and my heart sank; I had deleted everything, and nothing could get it back again.

Google, of course, doesn’t mirror your cloud storage on your local PC like Microsoft OneDrive, so it only takes one idiotic person to make one idiotic mistake and it’s all lost. I could, I suppose, have backed up everything locally myself, but the whole idea is that using Google Drive means that you don’t have to. But in reality you do.

The good news for me was that apart from the Airstream Blog, I didn’t have anything that was critical stored in Google. I had, curiously, kept key things in Microsoft OneDrive where, even if I had screwed that up, I would have had a local backup. Also, everything I had squirreled away in Google Photos was still intact, as was the data in Google’s Blogger app. That said, I am busy making a local backup of Google Photos as we speak.

The upshot of all this has been my partial return to the Microsoft fold. Key documents are in their OneDrive, in the cloud and on my PC. I’ve gone back to Outlook for mail and calendar functions, picked up with Office products again, and I’ve even started to use the Edge Browser a bit. It’s not that the Google offerings don’t work, but I simply do not trust them any more. Anyway, I pay a fat wad of cash to Microsoft each year so I might as well get the most from them.

I’m not advocating a mass rush away from Google, especially given that most of what they do is very cheap, or free. It’s just that you have to be careful when using their products, which is something I clearly wasn’t. Still, onwards and upwards.