He’d moved his “files” out of the Google Drive folder on his PC, not realising that they were only links. If you delete a file on your local device, does that delete the same file in the cloud? (Which folders are synchronised and which ones aren’t?) Further, are the files on your device really files or are they placeholders – merely links to a file that is actually somewhere else?Ī few years ago, Ovi Demetrian provoked a lot of discussion when he posted a website, Google Drive Sucks: “I lost years of work and personal memories that I saved as Google Docs files because of a poor user interface,” he wrote.

That syncing feelingīut you must understand how the synchronisation works.

Today, I’d add a corollary: backups don’t really exist unless you have at least three on different media in different places, and deleting one must not affect any of the others. You may have come across Schofield’s Second Law of Computing, which states that data doesn’t really exist unless you have at least two copies of it.

Safe dropbox