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  • Ice T and Cloud Storage – Bad Day for Google Docs.

    Way back in 2014, Ice-T that musician, rapper, songwriter, actor, record executive, record producer, and author we all know and love, sent a pretty pointed, expletive-laden tweet vowing to never connect to “the cloud”. So Google Docs would apparently never be a thing for Ice-T.  The tweet looked like this …

    There were quite a few retweets and some media attention paid to his rant, but then like tweets do … it faded into obscurity.

    That is, until last Tuesday, when Google® had a problem with an errant algorithm that shut folks out of documents they were working on, causing all manner of angry tweets and a reminder that Ice-T may have been on to something. They sent out the following in their blog post, The Keyword (clever name huh?):

    Protecting our Google Docs and Drive Users

    Protecting all Google users from viruses, malware, and other abusive content is central to user cyber-safety and sometimes we remove access to certain files in order to provide these protections.

    On Tuesday, October 31, we mistakenly blocked access to some of our users’ files, including Google Docs. This was due to a short-lived bug that incorrectly flagged some files as violating our terms of service (TOS). The blocking raised questions in the community and we would like to address those questions here.

    Many were locked out of documents containing months-worth of work and were in a panic as to whether or not their work was still backed up and how soon it would be accessible. Google seems to have tamed the wildling within its walls, but it does give one slight pause and has this writer trotting off to Best Buy® for a terabyte or two of cold hard terrestrial storage, just in case.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love me some cloud. Real-time edits between team members on living documents is the way to go and blows Microsoft Word out of the water for document collaboration, so I’ll continue to Google Doc my business life, despite Ice-T’s warnings to the contrary. But as a back-up to my back-up, I’ll be occasionally saving those big presentations and other important or work-heavy docs and projects to my trusty desk-based “Drive D” … so if another cloudy day happens, I’ll be ready.

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