Danger of Google Docs

[Bramblethorn]

If you value your work you need to own your tools. If you value your product you need to keep it safe. So just buy yourself a word processor and a USB drive. It's not difficult.

The life expectancy of a USB drive is generally estimated at "up to" 10 years (if not lost, or stolen). My account here is older than that.

There's no single foolproof solution for this. Anything kept locally can be lost or stolen. Anything kept on the cloud (aka "someone else's computer") is at their mercy, and while you're much less likely to lose data to hardware failures/ransomware/etc. it's still a possibility.

Outfits like Google are a double-edged sword: yes, they want to mine your data for everything they can get out of it, but they don't want anybody else getting access to that data (without paying them for it) and they're big enough to afford excellent IT security and lawyers. If the government wants to find out who's writing porn, yes they could lean on Google, but it'd be much more straightforward just to subpoena Literotica for your account info and follow the chain from there.

(Or somebody hacks Literotica and posts a data dump of everybody's account name and contact email online.)

If your priority is to avoid data loss, then your best bet is to use a combination of local and remote backups. And "remote" means remote; don't be like the financial company who had their head office in World Trade Center 1 and their offsite backups in World Trade Center 2.

But also, if you are using remote storage options don't lose track of how your access to those options might depend on local stuff. I know of one author who used a mix of local backups and Google storage. He got raided by police in a mistaken-identity case and they took every electronic device they could find. One of those devices was his phone, and he'd set up two-factor authentication on his Google account (usually good practice!) but without the phone he couldn't authenticate. So the local copies of his work were sitting in a police locker, not to be returned for months, and the Google backups were still there but inaccessible.

Also, whatever backup solution you use, test it regularly. I've heard horror stories about people who suffered a data loss, went to their tape backups, and found that the backup system hadn't been writing anything for the last six months.

 

[NoTalentHack]

The life expectancy of a USB drive is generally estimated at "up to" 10 years (if not lost, or stolen). My account here is older than that.

There's no single foolproof solution for this. Anything kept locally can be lost or stolen. Anything kept on the cloud (aka "someone else's computer") is at their mercy, and while you're much less likely to lose data to hardware failures/ransomware/etc. it's still a possibility.

Outfits like Google are a double-edged sword: yes, they want to mine your data for everything they can get out of it, but they don't want anybody else getting access to that data (without paying them for it) and they're big enough to afford excellent IT security and lawyers. If the government wants to find out who's writing porn, yes they could lean on Google, but it'd be much more straightforward just to subpoena Literotica for your account info and follow the chain from there.

(Or somebody hacks Literotica and posts a data dump of everybody's account name and contact email online.)

If your priority is to avoid data loss, then your best bet is to use a combination of local and remote backups. And "remote" means remote; don't be like the financial company who had their head office in World Trade Center 1 and their offsite backups in World Trade Center 2.

But also, if you are using remote storage options don't lose track of how your access to those options might depend on local stuff. I know of one author who used a mix of local backups and Google storage. He got raided by police in a mistaken-identity case and they took every electronic device they could find. One of those devices was his phone, and he'd set up two-factor authentication on his Google account (usually good practice!) but without the phone he couldn't authenticate. So the local copies of his work were sitting in a police locker, not to be returned for months, and the Google backups were still there but inaccessible.

Also, whatever backup solution you use, test it regularly. I've heard horror stories about people who suffered a data loss, went to their tape backups, and found that the backup system hadn't been writing anything for the last six months.

While we're on the subject of backups, I highly recommend the 4/3/2 rule, or something like it to everyone:

At least:
4 backups in
3 places on
2 different forms of media.

So, for me: Google Docs in the cloud, Literotica in the cloud (for finished works), and Word docs on my computer, copied over to a USB stick, too.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Just be sensible. There's no one way to completely eliminate risk, and there never will be. If you are scared enough, buy a typewriter, ink and some paper. Then never publish anything online. That's how you protect your intellectual property.

What is this "sensible" of which you speak? We need conspiracy, urban myth, paranoia, the more fantastic and foolish the better, to inform our truthes. Haven't you learned this by now?

 

[Bramblethorn]

Correct, nothing is 100% private, but just handing them over your ideas makes it far too easy for them. Keeping your own files may not be 100% private but it's far far more private than clouding.

Depends who the threat is.

If my main worry is Google snooping on my documents and training AI on them or using them to build a marketing profile on me or whatever, then yes, storing them on Google is a terrible idea. Likewise if my biggest worry is something like "US government cracks down on erotica and requires internet companies to help identify anybody writing about forbidden topics"/

OTOH, if I'm more worried about something like "partner finds out I write porn", keeping it on Google is a much safer option than anything I'm likely to implement at home.

There will always be trade-offs between convenience, privacy, and protection against data loss. People would do well to sit and think "what are the threats TO ME?" and choose their strategies based on that, rather than looking for a one-size-fits-all answer. The solutions that are appropriate to, say, a human rights investigator travelling in Russia or China are very different to the ones that are appropriate for most of us writing erotica at home.

 

[Bramblethorn]

While we're on the subject of backups, I highly recommend the 4/3/2 rule, or something like it to everyone:

At least:
4 backups in
3 places on
2 different forms of media.

So, for me: Google Docs in the cloud, Literotica in the cloud (for finished works), and Word docs on my computer, copied over to a USB stick, too.

One of my first IT experiences was helping a doctoral student retype a 100k-word PhD thesis from hardcopy after a data loss incident. It made an impression on me...

 

[ElectricBlue]

While we're on the subject of backups, I highly recommend the 4/3/2 rule, or something like it to everyone:

At least:
4 backups in
3 places on
2 different forms of media.

So, for me: Google Docs in the cloud, Literotica in the cloud (for finished works), and Word docs on my computer, copied over to a USB stick, too.

I'm a dangerously slow learner. I have one copy of most things on this device, and the published copy on Lit. Once it's published, why would I need those files again? It's not as if I'm going to pass this incarnation of myself down to my children, "Kids, there's something Dad needs to tell you."

I've lost more useful digital things from outside my writing, for reasons I don't fully understand. Files sit on my home computer and slowly degrade over time, yet other files from the same period, same formats, are perfectly fine. It's as if the ones and zeroes get rusty. But that's to do with moving parts, I guess, the hard disc whirring around.

And I've lost every email file twice in the last twenty years, but you know what, it didn't make an iota of difference in my life. Might have been important at the time, but years later, I'm not so sure. My memory though, while that keeps working...

 

[alohadave]

I've lost more useful digital things from outside my writing, for reasons I don't fully understand. Files sit on my home computer and slowly degrade over time, yet other files from the same period, same formats, are perfectly fine. It's as if the ones and zeroes get rusty. But that's to do with moving parts, I guess, the hard disc whirring around.

It's called bit rot. Data will spontaneously degrade randomly if left alone for too long. It happens to all media, and the only real solution is to access and resave it to a different location periodically.

It used to be that something like defragging your hard drive was a good way to refresh the data since files were frequently moved during that process.

 

[mildlyaroused]

I'd add that for those storing everything locally, definitely invest in an SSD instead of an HDD. They are pretty cheap nowadays, and (particularly if you don't use clouds, and are transporting your drive) they are much less susceptible to things going wrong.

It's called bit rot.

Ironically, more modern systems are probably more at risk of bit rot too. At risk of oversimplifying things, this is because older drives used SLC NAND (or a little later MLC), which is generally more resistant. They were also manufactured with larger transistor sizes. Who would have guessed that there are tradeoffs to multiplicative increases in size and speed!

 

[VallesMarineris]

Google isn't going to kill Google Docs tomorrow. It's possible, of course, but it's like saying that Microsoft might kill Windows 10 tomorrow without any warning. It's a flagship for them, and would be a terrible business decision.

I have to disagree. The correct comparison to Windows 10 for Google would be Google search. Those are the core products on which the business is founded. Google killing Google Docs would be like MS killing, say, Teams Live Events or Xbox Games Store, both of which sound important but are due to be killed in a few months. XGS has been around almost 2 decades. How long has Google Docs been around?

Unless you use a VPN every moment that you're connected to the web, your data will be collected.

Re privacy, it's true that there's no way to keep everything absolutely private (there wasn't even before the Internet) but you know that joke about the two guys in the woods who come across a bear? And the bear is really mad! They start running away but one stops and says, "Why run? We can't outrun the bear." The other says, "I don't have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you."

If you're not the low hanging fruit, the scammers and hackers won't waste time on you. You already do this IRL. You don't leave your keys in the car when you go into the mall. You don't put your purse down on a seat in Starbucks to save it while you get your coffee*. And (I hope) you don't send your credit card information through email. These are simple precautions that keep you from losing valuables. If you value your writing work you won't do it on a system controlled by people with a history of pulling the plug on apps whose ROI won't meet next quarter's projections.

VM

*Except in Japan, which is shockingly safe.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Call me a luddite, but I fundamentally dislike the move to cloud services and Web 2.0 on-line tools rather than having software and data all handled locally. Sometimes I even use my laptop and don't connect it to the Internet at all!

Google probably doesn't care about my erotica (which is mostly pretty tame), but if I were to back stuff up in the cloud, I'd store an encrypted zip file rather than the raw files myself. (I'm not that organized, I periodically e-mail said zip file to myself)

 

[ElectricBlue]

It's called bit rot. Data will spontaneously degrade randomly if left alone for too long. It happens to all media, and the only real solution is to access and resave it to a different location periodically.

It used to be that something like defragging your hard drive was a good way to refresh the data since files were frequently moved during that process.

That's useful information, so thanks for that. I used to defrag for performance, now I see I need to do it for longevity. Didn't know that before.

I'm guessing a fucked up file won't recover itself though?

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

I'd add that for those storing everything locally, definitely invest in an SSD instead of an HDD. They are pretty cheap nowadays, and (particularly if you don't use clouds, and are transporting your drive) they are much less susceptible to things going wrong.


Ironically, more modern systems are probably more at risk of bit rot too. At risk of oversimplifying things, this is because older drives used SLC NAND (or a little later MLC), which is generally more resistant. They were also manufactured with larger transistor sizes. Who would have guessed that there are tradeoffs to multiplicative increases in size and speed!

Isn't telling people to "definitely invest in an SSD instead of an HDD" in contradiction of then following that up by telling us how HDDs are less susceptible to that "bit rot"? I mean, at work, we have thirty-year-old HDDs in the shelves that, if needed, still work perfectly. Somehow, I have trouble believing that SSDs have a similar lifetime (though, I admit, that's mainly because SSDs haven't been around long enough to proof me wrong).

 

[MrHereWriting]

I've also never trusted that the work people are going back and forth with doesn't end up stolen.

My gut always told me never to share my work and ideas with strangers, and the one time I went against that instinct, I got burned.

Always be careful with your work and ideas, because you never know.

 

[mildlyaroused]

Isn't telling people to "definitely invest in an SSD instead of an HDD" in contradiction of then following that up by telling us how HDDs are less susceptible to that "bit rot"? I mean, at work, we have thirty-year-old HDDs in the shelves that, if needed, still work perfectly. Somehow, I have trouble believing that SSDs have a similar lifetime (though, I admit, that's mainly because SSDs haven't been around long enough to proof me wrong).

Sort of. The trouble is that the risks of using older HDDs generally outweigh the risks of bit rot. Bit rot as an issue is actually very rare, and it can be mitigated. Older HDDs, meanwhile, are far more likely to fail outright or become damaged than SSDs. They can also become incompatible as the tech world marches on forward, which is a pain.

And you are right about lifetimes. SSDs do have limited lifespans. Not in terms of how old they are, but how many times they have been used. With enough writes, the memory cells will become unreliable, and they will stop working. The average consumer, though, will never reach that point of failure. Modern SSDs can last up to 100,000 write cycles. That means for my 2TB SSD I could write 200,000,000 gigabytes of data.

Writing data aside, manufacturers also often include a number called an MTBF, which generally indicates how reliable an SSD will be over time. Nowadays this usually sits around 1.5 million operational hours. You're more likely with both SSDs and HDDs to just hit a random, absolute failure in the system than you are to reach the natural end of their lifespan.

So, yeah - solely to prevent bit rot, a modern SSD might not be the best way to go. But for the greatest blanket of insurance, it usually is (remember, bit rot is very rare). I'm far from an expert, but there is loads of research around for people to look into. Just be careful about what you choose to store your notes on!

 

[ElectricBlue]

Just be careful about what you choose to store your notes on!

I could do what my mum did. She kept every letter she and my dad wrote to each other when they were courting (except for six months of her letters to him - she must have done something terrible, because he burned them) - she kept them in a black metal box along with the passports and other essentials. My siblings all said, no, you should leave all that alone, it's their relationship, not ours. "Mum said she wanted me to have them," I replied, "she said so, when she wrote her book." I've not read them yet.

 

[mildlyaroused]

I could do what my mum did. She kept every letter she and my dad wrote to each other when they were courting (except for six months of her letters to him - she must have done something terrible, because he burned them) - she kept them in a black metal box along with the passports and other essentials. My siblings all said, no, you should leave all that alone, it's their relationship, not ours. "Mum said she wanted me to have them," I replied, "she said so, when she wrote her book." I've not read them yet.

This all sounds like the perfect setup to a gripping tale: family letters passed down, six mysterious months your parents wanted to forget, nuanced family dynamics... it's practically writing itself!

In all seriousness, though, the longer I knew those letters were around the more difficult I'd find it to ever actually read them.

 

[lovecraft68]

My gut always told me never to share my work and ideas with strangers, and the one time I went against that instinct, I got burned.

Always be careful with your work and ideas, because you never know.

Don't be shy. Share your story with the class, and I'll respond.

 

[lovecraft68]

This isn't about google, but seeing we're talking about sharing stories with editors in any way.

Some years back there was a very popular editor here-and of course now the name eludes me, its been a long time-who edited quite a few stories for authors over the years. One day I get an e-mail from Smashwords that someone else posted the exact story I had, and looking to see who's story was the original, which I easily proved was mine. But that led me to amazon where I found this woman had listed over 300 e-books and every one of them word for word stories other authors sent her to edit. Some title changes, but other wise the same

300 stories.

So, even here, you never know.

I have an editor for my erotic horror novels, but I've known them for years and we've met in person several times. I trust her more than I trust most of my family (okay, that's not saying much) but for anything here, I just do the best I can.

 

[MrHereWriting]

Don't be shy. Share your story with the class, and I'll respond.

Looks like you just shared it.

Edit: But since you don't mind, you took my idea for a mythical creature who helps influence couples into incest and had a rivalry with Cupid and turned it into Hell-Bent for Incest.

I asked for you opinion, and you were "inspired" to write your own story based on my idea and not one word of acknowledgement. You took it in real time. This wasn't like I published it months earlier and you liked the idea. You straight up took in real time. You told me it gave you an idea for a story, but not to worry, it wouldn't be anything like mine. (Not quite true, was it?)

Without me sharing that idea and the little I had written of it, you would never had written your story. All I asked was for some acknowledgement, even in private, cause it bummed me out at the time, and nothing. Maybe your pride won't let you be honest with yourself or me, but that's on you.

Now, maybe if you didn't feel guilty, you wouldn't have asked me to elaborate.

That's my only gripe with you on Lit or in general. Other than that, I respect the opinions you share on here and most of the things you have to say, and your ability to keep grinding out stories. (Hopefully, that continues.)

It was a lesson learned that reinforced my gut instinct on not sharing my ideas with anyone.

 

[lovecraft68]

Looks like you just shared it.

Edit: But since you don't mind, you took my idea for a mythical creature who helps influence couples into incest and had a rivalry with Cupid and turned it into Hell-Bent for Incest.

I asked for you opinion, and you were "inspired" to write your own story based on my idea and not one word of acknowledgement. You took it in real time. This wasn't like I published it months earlier and you liked the idea. You straight up took in real time. You told me it gave you an idea for a story, but not to worry, it wouldn't be anything like mine. (Not quite true, was it?)

Without me sharing that idea and the little I had written of it, you would never had written your story. All I asked was for some acknowledgement, even in private, cause it bummed me out at the time, and nothing. Maybe your pride won't let you be honest with yourself or me, but that's on you.

Now, maybe if you didn't feel guilty, you wouldn't have asked me to elaborate.

That's my only gripe with you on Lit or in general. Other than that, I respect the opinions you share on here and most of the things you have to say, and your ability to keep grinding out stories. (Hopefully, that continues.)

It was a lesson learned that reinforced my gut instinct on not sharing my ideas with anyone.

We're talking about an eight year old conversation so you'll have to cut me some slack on every detail.

You sent me some thing about an incest fairy. I said good idea, I can see it being done with demons. I'd had an idea for some type of 'pusher' type scenario to get people to commit incest, but never pursued it because other stories would get in front of it. Your idea gave me the "Oh, yeah, demons" thought and I said something like that.

My story-for anyone who cares- featured demonic twins who were once human and hung for committing the crime for incest. They rose through hell to become demons and their mission is to give people already having taboo thoughts a push by possessing them. There is one reference to cupid-I believe, I am not rereading an eight year old story-where someone asks them if they're like cupids and the brother makes some insulting remark about them, and that's the end of any mention of it

I went to look for your story because I was going to link them both for anyone who wanted to take a look, but looks like you never posted it. Hellbent is 9 lit pages and contains four seperate sex scenes in addition to the siblings fucking around in between and divulging their past and making bad jokes, and also revealing that even though they're demons they weren't allowed to force anyone to do this because they're mission was to inspire forbidden love because "God" saw it as a sin and they wanted to perpetuate sin, but because they were in love themselves, and still were, they wanted to keep it that way.

30k, a back story, multiple pairings, a devil of details....yeah, I 'stole' all that from your description of Iffy the incest fairy.

Understand by your logic, anyone who has ever written a babysitter, cheerleader, teacher, or any other common trope, should thank the hundreds of authors who have written the same basic scenario before them.

And FWIW, I see you have a mom/son lap story. Those stories are two things, absurdly successful, and very similar because of the limited type of scenario to allow for that specific encounter. The ones before yours have had monster success. I didn't see you thanking anyone for the idea, or saying "Inspired by" although it obviously is because that's a limited fetish within the I/T category.

If you didn't publish your story over this, that's a loss for you and your readers. You think if you posted it now anyone would say "Did you steal this from LC?" I can assure you the answer is no. I'll go further and say that for the size of this site and how long its been around, someone could dig up stories that would be close to some supernatural being making someone screw a family member.

Couple years back I wrote a 92k taboo novel starring the sister from Hellbent who possesses a woman and pushes her to have sex with son, but the entire thing is a deep dive into the shame of sex instilled by religious upbringing, and her own wild past she's kept secret from her son.

Want credit for that too?

Now, anyone wasting enough time to read this airing of grievances can agree with you or me, or just think we're a couple of idiots. Its all fine with me.

But at least people can decide and this wasn't left as veiled snarky remarks.

 

[MrHereWriting]

We're talking about an eight year old conversation so you'll have to cut me some slack on every detail.

You sent me some thing about an incest fairy. I said good idea, I can see it being done with demons. I'd had an idea for some type of 'pusher' type scenario to get people to commit incest, but never pursued it because other stories would get in front of it. Your idea gave me the "Oh, yeah, demons" thought and I said something like that.

My story-for anyone who cares- featured demonic twins who were once human and hung for committing the crime for incest. They rose through hell to become demons and their mission is to give people already having taboo thoughts a push by possessing them. There is one reference to cupid-I believe, I am not rereading an eight year old story-where someone asks them if they're like cupids and the brother makes some insulting remark about them, and that's the end of any mention of it

I went to look for your story because I was going to link them both for anyone who wanted to take a look, but looks like you never posted it. Hellbent is 9 lit pages and contains four seperate sex scenes in addition to the siblings fucking around in between and divulging their past and making bad jokes, and also revealing that even though they're demons they weren't allowed to force anyone to do this because they're mission was to inspire forbidden love because "God" saw it as a sin and they wanted to perpetuate sin, but because they were in love themselves, and still were, they wanted to keep it that way.

30k, a back story, multiple pairings, a devil of details....yeah, I 'stole' all that from your description of Iffy the incest fairy.

Understand by your logic, anyone who has ever written a babysitter, cheerleader, teacher, or any other common trope, should thank the hundreds of authors who have written the same basic scenario before them.

And FWIW, I see you have a mom/son lap story. Those stories are two things, absurdly successful, and very similar because of the limited type of scenario to allow for that specific encounter. The ones before yours have had monster success. I didn't see you thanking anyone for the idea, or saying "Inspired by" although it obviously is because that's a limited fetish within the I/T category.

If you didn't publish your story over this, that's a loss for you and your readers. You think if you posted it now anyone would say "Did you steal this from LC?" I can assure you the answer is no. I'll go further and say that for the size of this site and how long its been around, someone could dig up stories that would be close to some supernatural being making someone screw a family member.

Couple years back I wrote a 92k taboo novel starring the sister from Hellbent who possesses a woman and pushes her to have sex with son, but the entire thing is a deep dive into the shame of sex instilled by religious upbringing, and her own wild past she's kept secret from her son.

Want credit for that too?

That's a nice story, but you told me that my story inspired yours. You didn't have it before hand. You even added the Cupids (as a throw away line when it was going to be a big part of my story). And it wasn't a brief description. I discussed with you my overall plans for the character, and talked about making it a series, with several 'parings.'

Lap Sitting: Actually, I gave SimonDoom credit on here, the Forum, for me writing my take on that story. EDIT: I also gave SimonDoom credit in my first response comment on that story, 2 years ago.

As far as the usual tropes, the Mythical Creature trope isn't a common one as far as I/T goes. I hadn't run into yet (that's not to say it didn't already exist, but it's no babysitter/lap sitting trope). You took my idea and ran with it when I thought you'd just give me an opinion on it. A word of acknowledgement was due because you'd never had written 'your story' right then and there without me.

Again, you did this in real-time, during a conversation we had about my idea, and decided to write your own version of it before I could get to mine. I never wrote my story. I was working on a long work at the time, and you put out Hell-Bent before I could even think about getting back to Iffy the Incest Fairy. I just said 'fuck it' after that and moved on to other works.

As for your other stories, there's no reason I should get an acknowledgement for them. Everything is inspired by something, but when you get inspired by the story right away, that's when some kind of, "Oh, by the way, a little shoutout to KindofHere for giving me the idea for this story," was 'due.'

I went to look for your story because I was going to link them both for anyone who wanted to take a look, but looks like you never posted it.

You say that now, but in private you never mentioned that, and that would have been good enough for me.

 

[NoTalentHack]

*taps the other sign, admittedly at least partially to annoy lovecraft* We Need to Talk… About Plagiarism

 

[MrHereWriting]

*taps the other sign, admittedly at least partially to annoy lovecraft* We Need to Talk… About Plagiarism

It's not plagiarism.

 

[NoTalentHack]

It's not plagiarism.

Exactly. But people still act like it is. He’s talking about people stealing entire works whole cloth, which is a (very minor) risk of sharing a piece in the cloud, while you’re bringing up “stealing” an idea. His, at least, stayed somewhat on topic with the rest of the thread.

 

[MrHereWriting]

Exactly. But people still act like it is. He’s talking about people stealing entire works whole cloth, which is a (very minor) risk of sharing a piece in the cloud, while you’re bringing up “stealing” an idea. His, at least, stayed somewhat on topic with the rest of the thread.

Commenting on his comment, and how you should keep your stories and ideas close to you.