Why you may care and the right way to forestall it in normal accounts
One other tremendous fast submit so please forgive typos! I’m actually busy lately. Hoping to get again to my collection on house networking as quickly as I full 5 cybersecurity shows for conferences and courses (see posts on Twitter for when and have been I’m presenting), deal with a bunch of consulting calls for IANS Analysis, and get a penetration take a look at setup.
I bought an e mail the opposite day saying that Google goes to interchange all of the duplicate recordsdata in my drive with hyperlinks. There’ll solely be one copy of the file and all of the duplicates of the identical file will hyperlink to it.
That appears like an excellent factor at first. It saves on storage. Nonetheless, I’ve some situations the place I don’t need that to occur. Typically I’m making a backup of a file for a purpose. I’d create a duplicate of an authentic and put it in one other folder for one more particular person to assessment. That particular person can touch upon the file. Till that particular person opens the file and makes a remark it will be the identical file, I presume, bit for bit utilizing a hash or nevertheless Google goes to make this modification.
From my understanding of the documentation, in some instances, you may find yourself with a state of affairs the place the particular person I wish to assessment the file has a hyperlink solely to a file in a location after the transformation, and the file exists in a folder the place they don’t have any permissions. If I’m studying accurately, in that state of affairs, the reviewer will lose entry to the file. They gained’t have the ability to do any work on it. That’s an issue. I additionally don’t see any means you’ll be able to management which file is the unique and which is the hyperlink.
In one other state of affairs I may need backups of recordsdata in two totally different places, one in a neighborhood drive and one in a shared drive the place different accounts have entry. That means if I lose entry to a selected Google account the shared drive will likely be accessible from a distinct account.
Aspect be aware: That’s not one of the simplest ways to do backups. Create backups in a totally separate location with totally different credentials and incapability to delete or change recordsdata utilizing the person credentials whose recordsdata you are attempting to again up. That means if a selected set of credentials get compromised, all of your backups gained’t be deleted or encrypted.
Anyway, I stumbled throughout this setting accidentally in Google Workspace. I don’t suppose I noticed it within the e mail Google despatched to me, however I’m actually busy so maybe I simply missed it. It seems you could override and switch off this computerized conversion of duplicate recordsdata to hyperlinks right here (however just for sure forms of accounts):
When you have issues about this file conversion course of you may wish to go in and make that change earlier than the method begins. The documentation is imprecise and says you’ll get a notification. I believe they have been going to start out the method on my accounts someday in June however it most likely varies.
Teri Radichel — Observe me @teriradichel
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