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Comment by davidjgraph | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree, but as a vendor that only implements bring-your-own-storage, I can tell you it's not much fun from the supplier standpoint. Our no 1 support request is something along the lines of:

"I've deleted my diagram, can you restore it for me?"

"No. We don't store your data, we never even see it"

"What a useless service, just get my data back or I want to speak to random escalation person"

99% of users don't care about privacy, architecture, etc. They want it to just work (TM). They want us to be able to undo their deletion, find their data when they forget where they moved it.

So it's users pressuring suppliers in the wrong direction, it's not all one way traffic.

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(Disclaimer: I work at Google, not speaking for the company, etc)

We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better.

This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!). So it makes sense for them to offer a different feature set, and accept that it's not going to be suitable for some people.

Just for info, the last time we ran stats on which cloud storage our users pick it was:

Google Drive 53%

Dropbox 4%

OneDrive 1%

I don't think you're having a problem selling the idea :).

And where did you got that data from? Because where I live dropbox is far and ahead in user-base compared to Google Drive. That's the feeling I'm getting, mind you, I don't have any actual data... But even the apps I (2do, 1Passwd, etc.) use have support for Dropbox while none of them has support for GDrive.

I got that data from our SaaS application that offers storage using those 3 providers. Our target market is much more business over consumers, I suspect the figures look different in the consumer market.

Oh cool.

> We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better.

It doesn't really secure users' data, since Google is able to read that data. Were it truly secure, it would all be encrypted with a high-entropy keys known only to the users.

People without backups could always choose to store their keys with Google, but people who want their data to actually be secure would be free not to.

> This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!)

What's hard about "Backup to google drive / dropbox / icloud"?

I've seen single-developer applications do this. If a company of 10 people can't do this, they need to question the competence / diligence of their team.

> We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better.

This is exactly the right solution, and credit to Google for providing it.

> This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!).

I'm surprised you say that; it doesn't seem to me that 'dump this user's dataset to JSON/XML/whatever' should be very hard to do. Admittedly I've never worked on anything at Google scale. What am I missing?

> What am I missing?

To pick a few things I can talk about - sufficient replication to not lose data, data security that actually works (small companies can't - and shouldn't - afford disk shredders and internal access audits), targeted obliteration of customer data on request (including getting it out of the backups without rendering the backups worthless), and making sure that your exported data dump which contains massive amounts of personal information is only ever released to the correct user.

Doing any one of these things in isolation is not all that hard, because you can trade off against the others (for example, it is dead easy to do a data dump if you don't care about data security). Doing all of them at the same time is a large, expensive development project that would sink any startup.

Users no more expect vendors to lose their data than they expect banks to lose their money. I suspect we'll eventually end up with some sort of standards body making sure you do backups.

I don't quite follow your point. We didn't lose their data, we never had it.

I've probably put the comment in the wrong place in the tree, sorry.

The analogy then is having the bank tell you to take your deposit home and hide it under your mattress. That mental model just doesn't fit into people's world-view.

> 99% of users don't care about privacy, architecture, etc. They want it to just work (TM).

This is the sad Catch 22 we live in where privacy is jeopardized at the cost of ease of use

Do you think there is any value in educating the customer further? Periodically (5mins) reminding the user with a small notification to save (and backup) their work? I agree it can become a UX Nightmare (e.g. MS Paperclipguy), but having a checkbox "do not remind me again" could possibly go a long way as well.

We autosave to their cloud storage. The case I'm talking about is where they manually delete files on their cloud storage and expect us to restore them because we're the app vendor that originally wrote the files.

> So it's users pressuring suppliers

So may be managing data by product supplier is NOT the wrong direction?

It's about expectations. Users expect supplier to store and manage their data. If bring-your-own-storage became mainstream, users would know that it's them that manage their data and wouldn't have these expectations on the supplier.

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