Bye bye data: when the awful truth syncs in
It was all going well. Too well. I opened the door to my office with a jaunty air on Sunday evening, just as a final check to make sure everything was prepped for Monday morning before the final push of sending this issue of PC Pro to the printers. I may even have whistled a sunny refrain as I logged into my computer and navigated my way to the main folder. Then it hit me.
Empty. Where there should have been all of this month’s InDesign files and PDFs was a yawning expanse of white. The whistle froze on my lips as I leapt from folder to folder, looking for anything that was the sum of this month’s combined hard work from the 20-odd people (emphasis on odd) that contribute to this fine magazine. But everything had disappeared.
The whistle was now a whimper. Perhaps it was just my machine?
“Hi Tim,” popped up a message from Max, our production editor. “Hope all’s well and that you’ve had a great weekend. Just thought I’d check into Google Drive to see what to prioritise tomorrow morning and, slightly worryingly, everything seems to have disappeared. Is it just an issue at my end?” No, Max. No it isn’t.
So, don’t panic. British pluck and all that. In fact, time to tap into my inner Sherlock. We use Google Drive to synchronise our work, and it didn’t take much ferreting around to spot a pattern. At 3.39pm on Sunday, an awful lot of files had been moved to an unknown location, with one user icon showing alongside the long list of vanished items – that of associate editor Darien Graham-Smith.
A forthright message full of exclamation marks provoked no immediate response from Darien, so with time hurtling by I decided to get straight onto Google support – this is a paid-for service, after all. Now, Demetrius was courteous and helpful, but after half an hour of toing and froing he explained that – good news – Google could restore the files but – awful news – it could take up to 48 hours. We had to send the magazine to the printer on Tuesday afternoon, so that timeframe didn’t wash.
I decided to sleep on it and see what tomorrow might bring. Which, it turns out, was chaos. Darien revealed that he had told the Google Drive app to move the increasingly hefty PC Pro folder off his system drive and onto an external SSD, but he was as baffled as anyone by the outcome. The files weren’t on his new drive; they weren’t on his old drive. They were nowhere.
Luckily, he had a suggestion. I searched my own system for one of the lost files, and there it was in the root folder of my Google Drive: a PDF that I had produced the previous day. It seemed that Google’s restoration procedure had stuffed any files that I had created there, so maybe the same was true for Max and all the InDesign files he had created? Bingo!
All of this detective work spanned several hours of panic and cursing, and hammers home a point that we all know but that is far too easy to ignore: synchronising is not the same as backing up. In fact, synchronising is backup’s enemy. Due to the arcane way in which Google Drive works, it’s easy for one person to make a change that leads to unintended, perhaps disastrous consequences for everyone.
What to learn from this? I need to practice what Jon Honeyball has been preaching for 30 years. Back. Up. Your. Data.