A Bad Design Story: Google just made my startup lose two years of work
A cautionary story about how poor user experience combined with even worse customer experience results in a tragic loss of data
I'm leading a startup, Dailysqueezer, since a couple of years. During this time I’ve collaborated intermittently with a few developers. To coordinate our efforts, on May ‘15 I set up a Google Apps account for the team (now called Google Suite). Basically we used it to draft and share our functional and technical design documentation.
Lately I’ve been working mostly on my own, so I decided to close my Google Suite account. Little I knew that my attempt to save $200/year would lead me on the path to data hell.
A recipe for disaster
I kept my shared files in Google Drive, a Dropbox like cloud storage service offered as part of G Suite. Like Dropbox, you get a local folder where you have a local copy of your files. This is what mine looked like in my Mac finder:
So in order to cancel my G Suite account, I first had to migrate all those files. The easiest way seemed to move them to my personal Google Drive account. I googled for instructions and this is what came up.
Piece of cake. So I followed the steps, and once I had moved all files, I opened few to check that everything was OK, which it was. I then went to G Suite’s admin page and cancelled my account.
The next morning, when I tried to open one of my files, I got an error message. So I tried again. And again. And again.
I tried from both my local folder and my Google Drive web page with the same results. I could not access any of the Google documents I had migrated from my G Suite drive the previous day.
I do not want to dwell on the anger and frustration I have felt these days. But if might help others, I want to share what I’ve learnt from all of this story.
What had just happened
As far as I can tell, most of us believe that our local Google Drive folder keeps a copy of every file we have in the cloud. But the truth is — as I found out a couple of days ago — that all those google document files (.gdoc, .gsheet, .gslides extensions) like those you can see in my folder above, are not actually documents but just links to files in Google’s cloud. So when I migrated my files, what I was actually doing was copying a bunch of links to cloud hosted documents in my G Suite account. The moment I cancelled my account, they were gone forever.
As I said, almost nobody is aware of this fact. Just have a look at this article at Techradar. I quote page two:
Apart from keeping a copy of your files in a dedicated Google Drive folder on your hard drive, another advantage of using the Drive client is that you can set it so files you add to the folder get synced automatically to the cloud
The web is full of posts along those lines. It is a mystery to me why Google wants us to think that we keep local copies of our files in Drive. Maybe they want us to believe it works like Dropbox. But it doesn’t and that misrepresentation has had a huge cost on me.
Being a user experience designer myself, I would strongly suggest Google to add a symbolic link emblem to all of its document icons. Something like you can see below.
Most advanced users would immediately recognize its meaning. But also less savvy users would be able to spot that there is something fishy about those file icons, and might act more cautiously. Simple, right?
Introducing G Suite the infallible
However what really frustrated me to the point of writing this post is G Suite cancellation policy. Once you cancel your G Suite account, there is no way on earth you will be able to reach G Suite support. Email, chat and calls require some form of authentication which is only possible if you have an active admin account.
So whatever issue you might experience after account cancellation, be it overbilling or data loss like in my case, Google will not even let you tell them. This attitude seems a bit arrogant to me. More so, since a quick look in Google’s support forums show that mine is not the only case of accidental data loss with Drive or G Suite. And after all, these guys are supposed to be the data company. So I guess it would not be that much trouble to implement a 5-day grace period for cancelled accounts.
Conclusion
Google search returned — highlighted — wrong instructions. Google Drive’s design is misleading. G Suite cancellation policy however does not allow any form of communication, left alone data recovery, reflecting the unrealistic belief that there can’t be anything wrong on their side.
Seneca once said: “”To err is human, but to persist in error is diabolical.” Google seems to be moving quite smoothly along that path.
