The point is to sync so if your local computer fails you can retrieve them. A situation could occur where your hard drive fails AND you're locked out of your Google Drive account.

Commandment: Make backups.

If you violate this commandment, you will eventually lose your data.

Commandment: Test your backups.

If you violate this commandment, you will discover that you weren't ACTUALLY making backups.

I think his point was that this could be a way to backup certain critical data without having to think about it… but that their history of hands-off customer service & support may prevent that type of use.

User Commandment : Trust remote storage as a reliable source of back up in case of data loss.

If you violate this commandment, you will eventually lose users trust.

User Commandment : Once I sync the data, it must be available to me without any hassles on demand.

The usual technical lectures to users asking them to do things instead of making 'just work' don't fly.

That is why they ship TV's(with channels), Washing machines(with timers) and microwave ovens(with presets) without you having to bother too much about frequencies, volume/rotations and wave equations.

The user wants a product that 'works' the way he wants.

Yes, those are nice commandments. But most Google users aren't nearly tech savvy to follow them.

The existence of this new product does not make users more or less tech savvy.

If a user goes from 1 copy (hard drive), to 2 copies, then it's a net gain for their backups.

If a user goes from 2 copies (hard drive, some backup system), to 2 copies (hard drive, Google drive), then yes, arguably, it's a net loss for their backups, because they can simultaneously have a HD failure and get locked out of their Google account.

But arguably, they could live in Joplin, MO and both of their current backups could be toast.

Best to have three - hard drive, backup drive in a safety deposit box, and Google Drive if you like the convenience and access and cost, and don't mind the privacy implications.

I don't mind the privacy implications. Google doing something evil with user's data would be absolute suicide for them.

The lock out thing is exaggerated. Having a Google backup is much safer than local manual backup for almost everyone.

I agree completely.

If you also use two-factor authentication, I daresay that you are in the 99th percentile, or higher.

I don't like being pedantic, but a sync'ed copy isn't a backup. It might protect against hardware failure, but it won't help against accidental deletion or corruption.

I'm not sure if GDrive has file versioning/restoration built into it or not, but there is an important distinction to be made here.

https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans... notes that old versions are saved for 30 days or 100 revisions, which does provide some protection.

How many ordinary users even understand the term 'backup' is itself a big question!

The use case is simple - When I put data on something, It must be available to me.

I can't learn how to be a sysadmin or expect my father to do that just to use this service.

Yes, but that's a two point failure. You don't engineer for two point failures until you're absolutely sure that you've covered all the single point failure cases, which basically means never.

You don't get a copy of the files on your computer which are in google docs format.