

Is Google Docs' Revision History a Stable Long-Term Audit Trail? - intellection
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/39851/is-google-docs-revision-history-a-stable-long-term-audit-trail

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intellection
No guaranteed, faithful audit trail is given by Google Docs. Logs are lost by
Google because of (1) deleterious forced upgrades (2) forced space
optimization (3) no downloadable backups preventing loss.

1\. Revisions Deleted by Upgrade: Google Docs' last official upgrade did not
save, nor migrate, old Revision History to their new version, resulting in
total data loss and no alternative.
<http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/docs/Tsd-E-bzsh8>

2\. Automatic Revision Pruning: Docs deletes versions to save space, but you
cannot control it, nor mark versions to save forever.
[http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95902)

3\. No Downloadable-Publishable Revision History: Contrasting Google Docs'
promise to share our work, only you and people who can edit your document are
able to view Revision History, making real public
transparency/accountability/downloadability difficult if not impossible.

Google is known for their likeable Data Liberation Policy. but it severely
misinforms people who do not know Revision History is not faithfully backed
up.

I welcome Google to commit to never losing anything you share and write, and
optionally allow others equal transparency to see everything we save (or
tried...) and share.

So if Google Docs' deleterious behavior continues, people will continue to be
disappointed if their archived data is unpredictably, untrackably, so very
loseable.

