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Hi JDatavault,Cheers,

Marie... the follow up you sent tonight is the exact same follow up you sent me three weeks ago. The docs are not in the trash, they were never shared.. I did not have apps or an external domain linked I was not sharing them... 15 documents with all my clients extremely private and personal information including the passwords I created to access their accounts have all vanished... This means I cannot perform any work whatsoever on thier projects and thus I canot complete them or get paid... thus my family will lose the income of months of prep work unless someone canhelp me find my documents. Iknow I was STUPID... GALACTICALLY STUPID to trust all this incredibly sensitive to Google docs, but I didnot want it to fall into anyone elses hands  as if I had comitted it to paper. I have been using gogle docs ofr over a year with no issue or problem. This has never happened before... I am not an idiot, I am capable of following all the suggestions posted n this forum and I have done that. This is what I do all day long for three weeks is try and find an answer to what happened to my  data. Please if you can help me and if you can't please stop sending me the same stuff you sent me almost a month ago which a 5th grader of course would have done on day one of this crises.

did you find a solution or did you commit suicide ?

thats why the google data liberation font exists : http://www.dataliberation.org/

If you ever saved that information on your local computer only, anybody would blame you for not keeping a proper backup. Now, don't get me wrong; Google Docs is orders of magnitude more reliable than your computer for sure, but you should still keep a backup of anything important. Although I don't know anything about what your situation is, it is likely that your problem will be solved in a short time, but that can happen most quickly if you work with them like a grown up. Calling people names in all capitals with excessive punctuation is probably not the most favorable mode of communication.

Google benefits when people use their products, so they have to take it seriously when problems do occur. On the other hand, it is completely unreasonable to expect that hundreds of millions of users can get immediate personalized attention for free whenever something out of the ordinary happens. If you do need this kind of immediate attention, they offer ways that you can purchase more customized support - but do not confuse this with wanting "TO CHARGE US TO USE IT TOO". Google Docs is still free. They are giving you something of tremendous value at no cost to you, and just as always it is unwise to look a gift horse in the mouth.

did you change you email account login or anything like that. If you set up a new email for a login it can move the docs so you cant see them.

How can you complain so much about a free service? You managed to run a business and feed your family, for free, and because you didn't back up YOUR BUSINESS (I can use caps lock too) you want some company who didn't receive a penny from you to drop everything and commit resources to solving your problems.  Please allow me to highlight once more that you are paying nothing for this service. Get over yourself, never put all your eggs in one basket, if you have something extremely valuable either buy insurance or back it up.

Does the paid version guarantee your data ? i dont think so

JDatavault, I understand your hurt, but chris and emergence, though harsh, are right.

I´d question whether there were sabotage or your account hacked.  If you say those documents were so extremely important and sensitive, then it is strange they would disappear when hundreds of thousands of people (at least) are not having those issues with normal, run of the mill, documents. Maybe I´m way off, but it sounds like it could be a case of you doing something...through error or security breach....to screw yourself over.

JDatavault,

I'm curious, if it's such sensitive data... Why aren't you encrypting it and keeping it on a secured data storage format?

<<I would like to inform you that I have requested TC Gill to mini-escalate your problem, to draw - once again - attention from the Google Docs Guides.>> Which I  have done.

It seems that many responses take the attitude that the person who posted this "is getting what he deserved" - either he did something abnormal with his account, or his account go hacked, or he didn't report the problem in a calm and considerate manner, or he should have backed up his data, or he should be paying for a service if he expects help with his problem.  While I find some of the suggestions helpful, I find the attitude behind them rather strange.  Google provides this document creation and editing service (and I'll assume they don't do it out of the kindness of their hearts) and it seems to me that they should have a mechanism in place to recover documents that are "disappeared".  I may be particularly sensitive to this person's plight, since I just logged in and discovered an important document of mine has also gone missing, but I also work for a company that provides a free online service, and we have procedures in place to do our best to recover any vanished data. It seems the minimum a responsible company should do, given that it's certain to happen from time to time.

<< It seems the minimum a responsible company should do, given that it's certain to happen from time to time.>> I agree.

This is a harsh lesson that everyone must learn. Back up your data! It's unfortunate that you had to learn it so harshly.

Remember this one rule, any data that you do not have at least two more backups of is data you do not care about!

I think JDatavault is right to feel abandoned and disgruntled. As Google states in its 'tour of Google Docs' (http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour3.html):

There's nothing to download; you access your documents, spreadsheets and presentations from any computer with an Internet connection and a standard browser. And it's free.

Safely store your work.

@idahospgs
In a sense you're right, Google reps should help with a given customers issue. In no manner was I attempting to imply that he "got what he deserved". But he's been carrying on about how sensitive this data is, and that it needed to be secure. Having done a bit of secure work the proper method of handing "secure data" in my head is encryption (with redundant backup, i.e. a thumb drive) on a secured platform (again a thumb drive would suffice). If he loses his password he's SOL, if he doesn't he has a backup in case one of his storage points becomes compromised (in which case he dumps that point, but has a backup to work off of), or otherwise looses the data.

Google Docs is a great system; so was a 5.25" floppy disk. But apparently they have something in common, they both seem to lose data for odd reasons. Again the solution is simple: backup your critical data. It's been a tried and true lesson of the computer industry, everyone has lost weeks or months of work and had to either re-create it (and usually they do it better), or they scrap that project, learn their lesson and keep backups and move on.

I think the main reason his attitude has taken such a beating is because most of the people looking to help others on this forum probably also help others in a professional capacity (i.e. help desk) and they see 100's of contacts like this a week; so they're running to the aid of their fellow techies. Personally while I was doing tech work, I would take my time getting to responses like this, while the people that asked polite, used decent grammar, and were as precise with a description of their problem as they could get, got a little bit ahead in the queue; you do catch more flies with honey than vinegar after all. Eventually in a case like this I'd help him, but it'd probably be towards the end of the day or even the week, just to take the thumbscrews to him a bit. Are the Google reps doing this? I can't say, I'm not one of them but I do know that they're human too.

Personally I have an issue that I've posted about a couple of times in the past few weeks, and I've not had a single response from a Google rep on my incident at all. But I'm not knocking the reps, they're probably pretty overloaded, and the dev team I'm certain is looking at chunks of code and asking themselves "WTF doesn't this work, when it compiles?" There's apparently bugs in the system, and eventually they'll get ironed out, the question is simply how long, unfortunately the answer (that no body wants to hear) is: when it's fixed.

But that's my $25. (Adjusting for inflation.)

Hi everyone,

I know this is a lively discussion thread right now and want to jump in and assure you we are working with JDatavault to resolve that issue. We feel these issues are important to address and appreciate you escalating them.