Conversation

Notices

1. Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 21:51:29 UTC Bernie

   2 days ago I started a Google Takeout, and it's still in progress...

   I excluded Photos and Drive, but the first tarball is 33GB... and for some reason it's named 002. Where is 001?

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 21:56:39 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     The other tarballs are just a few MBs long, but they're taking forever...

     Tarball 007 was created at 2:48am, and 12 hours later there's still no 008.

     (I do have plenty of Drive space left.)

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 21:59:25 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     Another oddity is that all tarballs from 003 through 007 contain Nest thermostat data.

     I only started using Google Home 2 months ago, and I have only one thermostat... how can it produce so much data?!?

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:02:30 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     I'm not trying to build a conspiracy theory on #Google doing something shady with my account data....

     I'm just very curious: what kind of bug or edge case would cause Google Takeout to behave in this manner? 🤨

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:09:45 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     Having worked at Google previously and having lots of friends who still work there doesn't particularly help.

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:12:55 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     No, Google employees cannot access PII of random users, although an on-call SRE for Takeout might be able to see error logs related to requests that are causing crashes or other issues...

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:17:10 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     Did you know that Google Takeout was previously known as "Google Data Liberation Front"?

     I miss the days when a group of Googlers could spontaneously come up with a product like this... and launch it publicly with such an awesome logo 😂

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:22:38 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • Hobbs

     @cmhobbs Yes, batch jobs like this get very low priority on Google production servers... they might get starved for I/O to data and even get suddenly killed if the job scheduler needs more memory for a spike of search requests or anything...

     These long running jobs should checkpoint their progress frequently so they can resume, but it might not be feasible for some backends. Nest is an acquisition, so perhaps they're still storing data to some RDBMS? YouTube was initially on MySQL lol 🙂

   • Hobbs (cmhobbs@pleroma.asn.mobi)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:22:39 UTC Hobbs

     in reply to
     @codewiz perhaps whatever tooling performs the export is doing it in a concurrent or maybe event driven manner so it's happening as the data is made available or as processes have clearance to run? as large as google is, i'm sure loads of people are constantly accessing resources. it would all have to be balanced somehow.
     
     just playing devil's advocate. i don't care for google in general.
   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:27:53 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • Patrick Georgi

     @patrick Actually, I'm unable to download the files currently... perhaps they're "locked" during the export?

     But I can still preview them in drive...

   • Patrick Georgi (patrick@georgi.family)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:27:55 UTC Patrick Georgi

     in reply to
     @codewiz Those Nest things are supposed to be "smart" so they might not only have temperature curves (to figure out how the building heats and cools) but also behavioral/location data of you to make guesses when to pre-heat so the home is comfy right when you get there?
     
     But since you're downloading the data, you could take a look ;-)
   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 22:41:12 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • Patrick Georgi

     @patrick Ah, it was caused by blocking third-party cookies in Chrome.

     Drive is the first product I see that doesn't work with this setting...

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 23:20:15 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     All right, I was able to download some of my Nest dataset and (unsurprisingly) experiments and debug logs take up much more space than actual thermostat readings and settings.

     #Google #Takeout #Nest

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 23:27:09 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     Tarball 009 arrived, and contains an HTML file with a detailed report of export errors.

     As I suspected, there must be some bug with the Nest / Home App exporter...

     #google #takeout #nest

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 23:36:47 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     Just to be clear: I'm not pissed or anything...

     I still believe Takeout is an awesome feature and all Internet service providers should be obligated (ethically AND legally) to provide an equivalent service to export user data.

     By the way, when was the last time you backed up your #Mastodon account? 😉

     #Google #Takeout #Privacy

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 04-Sep-2022 23:40:19 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     Ah, actually Google Home and Nest are separate products with separate datasets, but both have buggy exporters lol

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 02:49:06 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • Benoit

     @benoit Back when I was living in Cambridge, we used various Hangouts chats for my shared house, my anime club and various groups of friends.

     I wonder if the chat history will be migrated to Google Chat and remain searchable. I'd hate losing those memories when Hangouts finally shuts down...

   • Benoit (benoit@toots.benpro.fr)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 02:49:07 UTC Benoit

     in reply to

     @codewiz Hangouts 20GB 😱