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Comment by asuffield | Hacker News Reader

(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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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