Mistakes in the Cloud: A Cautionary Tale

Welcome to building better developers, the developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season and we're looking at mistakes and things that we've learned from them and how to turn those into success. This episode is not as far reaching an error and a lesson as some of the other ones. It is also a little more specific or maybe in some cases much more specific and sort of a new kind of thing that has shown up. This episode we're going to talk about basically mistakes in the cloud. Now the specific one I'm going to entail was probably the first time I saw this thing in action but I have seen it multiple times and I just figured this is probably the story to use for the example even though it wasn't exactly this again, it wasn't a mistake I made but that's not to say that I have not made that mistake on a couple of occasions or close enough to it. I may actually even step into those to talk about some of the things I've done to fix it after the fact. This specific instance was a few years ago and we used Dropbox. We used that for this little company, I don't know maybe a dozen people there at the time, something like that but we used that as our, what some people refer to as their network or their shared drive. It worked great. We had sales guys that had laptops and were remote a lot. We had developers that were remote at times and it just didn't matter where you were, you go ahead and connect up to the company Dropbox that had some huge amount of storage, a couple terabytes or something like that on it and then we had folders that were as you would typically expect, particularly if you're used to like a SharePoint world, then you're going to have sort of like departmental folders that under those they were broken down by projects or customers and it was everything. Now not everybody had access to everything. You could, typically your department, you had the entire department set of files and such and then you may have some access to others as well, just sort of dependent. But when you think about it, it's like you've got an entire series set of folders that are shared and so yeah, you ran into some things here and there like if you have a document open and somebody else tries to open it then there can be some issues and this was before those were all hammered out but that's actually just a slight side note digression of this. This particular day I was sitting there happily working right along and I had, which probably a lot of you do, I had it configured so there were notifications that would come up that would say this file changed or this file updated or removed or added, things like that. I would see that pop up periodically on my desktop. I'm sitting there working along, cranking through some code or something like that and suddenly I see a notification pop up that says such and such file was removed and then another one and another one and another one and another one and I started looking at that and looked at sort of the history of it and it's like these are all sales documents, tons of them. And I was thinking what the heck is going on? And I looked at the user and I knew that the user was leaving soon, I can't remember if it was that day, that week, something like that but they were on the way out, they were moving to another job. And I was like what the heck are they, what are they trying to do? And realized what they had done, which is the error of these cloud kinds of things sometimes, is that they thought that they could just delete all these files off their local machine and free up space on it. Not realizing that all those files on your local machine are copies of stuff in the cloud and in this case when you have an auto sync turned on, as you start deleting those files, it's going to start deleting them out of the cloud. Now they've done some things to improve that a little bit more, to let you, you know, give you more warnings that such things are going on but it can still happen. And I have seen it with Dropbox, I've seen it with OneDrive, I've seen it with you name it, I've seen it happen because now that we have this super connected world, it is very easy to do something that you're thinking is only going to impact you but it actually impacts everybody else. Now this is not, like I said, an uncommon problem and it's not, it's a mistake, it's an error, it's a misstep or whatever but it's one of those things that it's, it falls in that category I guess of like honest mistakes sometimes because you, you know, maybe you don't think that that thing is connected at that time or that it's going to pick that up automatically as quickly as it does. And this is, this goes for even things like, you know, email and some of the other things we do or, sometimes it takes that, it's worth it to take that extra second or couple of seconds before you click on, you know, OK or send or execute or do or whatever the button says and just make sure that you, the scope of what you're doing is not bigger than you expect it to be. For example, deleting files off your local drive and inadvertently deleting files from everybody's access. Now in this particular case, Dropbox itself has backups, it has, you know, a way to restore those things and at that point I think we had at least 30 days or something like that. So it was, once I saw what was going on, I went over and said, hey, stop, don't delete any more things, can you stop that process from deleting files because you're deleting them off of the shared drive. It was like, oops, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know, we forgot how to get that process stopped, went back into Dropbox and restored all of those things. It was not a horrible process. Since then, I have done it once or twice and found that it is easier instead of using those those cloud types tools. This goes back to having regular backups. Is that typically I have been able to go directly to my own local backups, restore all those files, and then all that stuff gets picked up on the, you know, on the cloud again. Now it can take a while. If you're a company, if you're working with a company that's got lots of huge files and you've got a slow connection, it can take a while. So if this happens to you, make sure you notify the appropriate people and say, by the way, this just happened, it's in the middle of restoring. Don't panic. Your files will be there. Or if you don't know how to do all of that, go to somebody that would be an administrator or whatever and say, hey, I just did this and let them figure out how to fix that problem. Now, the moral, I guess, of this story or the key learning of this story is that we are way more connected than we are used to, I think, for a lot of us. It's sort of new. The last few years, a lot of people have gone to remote work. And now there's even this sometimes there's this blending of personal and business hardware. Now, a lot of places have done what I call, for example, say the smart thing. And they you have a work laptop that you take home, you do your work on it. It's connected. If you want to do personal stuff, do it on your own personal computers so you don't mix and match those things, because it's way too easy to accidentally put the wrong thing in the wrong place. And maybe everybody you work with doesn't need to see your family reunion pictures and things like that or worse. So it's good to get into the habit now of figuring out like some of those boundaries of not only in this goes actually beyond just the devices, but defining what's work and what's personal life, but also remembering that all of this stuff is connected. So there's good and bad to that. That's a sword that cuts both ways, in a sense, because in the one sense, like, for example, photos, lots of people have photos on their phone and then they have some cloud storage that they use to keep all those images out on the web or out in the cloud. They don't think about it in the web, but out in this cloud thing. And I know a lot of people that have saved them because they had all these pictures, they were stored in the cloud, their phone got lost, run over, fell in the ocean, whatever it is. And when they got a new phone, they were able to just pull all those things back down off the cloud. It was its automatic backup. But with that, we sometimes just take two things. Sometimes we take those things for granted and we don't realize and we've seen this in some of these other episodes. We don't realize when it doesn't work or maybe the limits, the limitations of whatever that feature is. And we may give it more credit than it deserves, and it ends up biting us because we think we were better protected than they were. It'd be sort of like saying, OK, I've got a helmet on so I can go motorcycle riding, but the helmet's actually made out of, you know, I don't know, some frail plastic or something like that. You have this false sense of security because what you think that tool does is not what it actually does. So it's one of those things, read the fine print, understand and maybe this goes back to that disaster recovery kind of thing. Test out these these tools so that you are comfortable with when they when they back up, how they back up, how do you restore things if you even can. What happens if you change something? You know, if you is deleting a file less trouble than just saving a file on top of that, because sometimes you can't go back to that prior history. And you can. You can do more damage by changing, essentially changing the file than just deleting it, because the delete you just go back and restore the change. You may have to go figure out what change, what state was it in before you made the change you did not want to make. And if you've done this for a while, work in IT or actually just working with computers, you may have and probably have stumbled into that thing where you were like, maybe, for example, you were writing a Word document and were going gangbusters. You got your, you know, your paper done or whatever and saved it even and everything. And then you you went in and maybe reedited a bunch of it or maybe you something was lost and it came up empty and you just saved that on top of your prior file name. So you just overwrote all that work. Stuff can be scary and difficult to fix. So understand the limits of what it is you're you're using the tools that you're relying on. And whenever you're doing anything that mentions cloud, be conscious of that. You know, be intentional about how you use it, because there are all sorts of little good and bad things that can be a part of it. It can save you so that you may not have to do other complex backup strategies, but it also can cause you issues because there may be things that you want to do that you don't want. You don't want to waste your bandwidth on some background process, sending a bunch of files back and forth or loading things back and forth. Or there may be things where that cloud tool only brings stuff locally so that you can use it in a disconnected state if you specifically tell it to. So you may think that you you're traveling, you're going to put all your work documents on your laptop because you've got it there. You've got that whatever the tool is, you know, the cloud tool. You're like, oh, OK, well, I'll just I've got access to all of these. This will be great. I can work during my long flight and then realize that, no, actually, those things all are just living in the cloud. And once you're disconnected, you don't have access to them anymore. Or the only way to do that is to tell it forcibly when you're connected, save these things locally. There's a lot of little things here and there, but I think it's just a world where it is useful for us to understand what is being done for us and what the limits of those are. And it probably could be you could probably take this into a bigger thought than cloud services and where our files are and who has access to them and how do we have access to them and how do we restore them if we need to? How do we get them cleaned up or removed off the cloud if we want them taken off the cloud? And then it also gets into things like there's limits. So you may have something that's a really great cloud tool and you hit a limit where you've just got too much stuff out there and now you have to start removing some so that it's still useful to you. Those kinds of things can be challenging if you're not, you know, sort of thinking through them beforehand. I know this is totally a first world problem. It's it's something that's probably in the grand scheme of things, very minor. But if you're that person that lost a lot of work or cost your department or company to lose a lot of work, it is a very big problem in that moment. And that's why I just want to throw this one out there and say, hey, be careful out there. We have we're basically walking around with sawed off shotguns that we could easily blow our legs off with. It can be a great tool, but it can also cause a lot of damage if we're not paying attention. And don't be afraid to set properties and access and passwords and restrictions so that you you do whatever you can to avoid yourself falling in a situation where you inadvertently pull off one of these little errors. That being said, I am going to avoid the error of going too long this time. We're going to try to keep this one short so that you can go out there and have a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. You can enable us by simply saying, Alexa, enable Building Better Developers. And we will be there ready for you every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast. Whether we are your favorite podcast or not, we would love to hear from you. So please leave a review on Amazon. Now back to the show.