[crazygringo]

> I think users should be able to have a reasonable expectation

Sure, of course they should. But nothing in this life is perfect. Google engineers will roll out a configuration change that has unintended consequences that results in data loss. Or your account gets falsely flagged for abuse and you get locked out. Or your computer gets infected with ransomware that accesses your cloud sync, creating duplicate encrypted files, deleting the originals, and emptying the trash -- so much for your version history.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket, create your own backup. It's "the user's job to do that rather than Google's" because at the end of the day, other people mess up, and it's your personal responsibility to safeguard against that if you want to protect against losing your data. It's always been this way and always will be.

[fauigerzigerk]

I'm not denying that it's a good idea to make independent, offsite backups of cloud data for many reasons (even though some cloud services have protections against your ransomware scenario).

But I think it's a bit unfair to blame users for using something like Google Drive as a backup system, because it does in fact have all the main features of a rather mediocre backup system.

Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers, such as making proper backups, copying files to multiple devices, keeping it all up-to-date and in sync.

These things are hard to get right. Most people's backups are utterly chaotic, unreliable, insecure, incomplete and vulnerable to some of the same attacks you describe.

[BSDobelix]

>Google Drive as a backup system,

That's the point, OP had it's data just once (on Google Drive), that's not even a bad backup, it's non-backup.

>Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers

"Supposed" was never good enough for my data, but now you have Cloud services AND your computer AND you phone AND your password/key AND the chance that they block your account for whatever reason, i just see more burdens not less ;)