Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme | Hacker News Reader

Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

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151 pointschesterarthur141 comments

I launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006.

While it is true that data accumulates as time goes on, it's not as big of an issue as described. Older data tends to be smaller, for example, photos were lower resolution. That is compounded by the fact that storage is getting cheaper. For example, the price for a 500GB drive in 2006 is the same as a 14TB drive price today. If your getting the same subscription dollars, it suddenly becomes cheaper, every year, to store legacy data.

In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work.

> In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work.

How do you handle such users at MediaFire?

It appears MediaFire is no longer unlimited

There's nothing you can do other than move away from unlimited storage. The model, as the OP states, works well initially, however over time, "power users" emerge to want to make use of unlimited. The only choice is to remove unlimited storage as a fixed subscription fee. You may have metered billing (unlimited storage but you are charged per GB) or to do away with unlimited storage all together.

Keep in mind, that change is great for the business and 99.9% of the users. The business saves money on resources, and those resources are re-invested into the other 99.9% of users.

Edit: grammatical error

Marketing wise, it's better for the business to market with "unlimited" than creating a limit, even if it won't affect 90% of the users. For users, it creates a different feeling of freedom, even if you never use that freedom.

If you still want to play that game then restrict the service in other ways. You could for example throttle user upload to 10mbit/s if they have uploaded more than 500GB per month. That way no single user can practically upload more than 3.5TB per month. The 2 petabyte abuse scenario would have been avoided while still being able to brag about some users storing 50TB of data on your platform.

A side note on this:

I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data).

In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges. As such, it's not unlimited storage even in theory. I know this is the point of such approaches, but I'm curious why there aren't more lawsuits to this effect.

Similarly when you get e.g. 10GB of data on cellular networks and are charged for each subsequent block, there's really no way to use your 10GB. You either have to stop just before you hit the limit, leaving some data on the table or you have to go over and pay for another block. Ideally the networks should use up all the data and then ask you if you want to purchase another block. Otherwise there's no way you can actually use exactly what you ostensibly pay for.

I think you missed that the speed limit would affect uploads after transferring 500G _per month_, not total? So in a year you would be able to store 6 terabytes. This would probably work out fine, because e.g. typical use of cloud storage is probably backups, and the first uploads are the largest.

I think some networks have operated in the way you want: you get full speed to some specified limit, and after that you are throttled (significantly). That works out fine to use the complete limit. On the other hand if you do want to use 15G, it's easier to do, when the block gets charged automatically.

I think it would be very hard to have a lawsuit about this if the contract includes these details.

You're still calling it unlimited while placing a limit. You've been clever about how you impose the limit, but it's still there.

Unlimited storage means just that. They never said infinite inbound data transfer speeds. "If you can get it to us, we'll store it" is totally reasonable.

>"If you can get it to us, we'll store it" is totally reasonable."

No it isn't. On the one hand you say we'll store it if you can get it to us, then on the other you build an obstruction to data getting to you. Data propagation is part of storage. I have to get bits off my processor, to your physical media to be stored, and you just built a barrier to keep that from happening. You don't get to use "unlimited" for marketing attractiveness, then bait-and-switch.

So maybe to you it sounds reasonable, but to anyone that values being up front about the service they are offering, that's nothing more than selling a product you can't deliver, i.e., deception and false advertising.

I have unlimited data transfer on my home internet connection. Is my ISP pulling a "bait and switch" because my internet bandwidth isn't also unlimited? Ignoring the whole "physically impossible" thing, of course.

The entire universe is a bait and switch using that sort of logic.

If the provider deliberately reduced speeds to ensure that you would never be able to get past a certain amount, then it's a cap. A naturally occurring limit wouldn't bother me, but that's not what we're discussing here.

Yes. Your ISP is. Because as one gentleman found out when doing terabytes worth of off hours remote backups, your ISP is more than happy to come back and bite you if you actually put those contractual terms to the test.

The fact is, every last ISP has been caught extracting higher fees from users for purportedly unlimited plans, to which the user was given the understanding they werre paying to not be throttled then hiding behind weasel worded contractual clauses to avoid culpability so as to not be held to task by having to improve their network infrastructure to handle actual traffic needs.

I'm more than versed in networking. I may not work backbone services, but I'm aware of the foundations of it, and I've gone out of my way to get familiar with the business environments and models around it.

Yes it's all statistical multiplexing. Yes. QoS is a purportedly necessary scourge to everyone in the modern day. Why? Because we allow ISP's and connectivity providers to sit back and provide lackluster links, overpromise what's being delivered, and wiggle off the hook.

My assertion is you shouldn't be able to market unlimited. All it does is create a misleading and unmeasurable relationship where no one can be held to account, and the status of the "relationship" between the customer and provider is opaque to the customer.

Yeah, I know, it just reminded me of this general thought I've had for a while (that being said, it's still limited once you throttle it so the same argument would apply.)

It’s still a finite time to upload for any given data size.

It’s not like uploads have infinite bandwidth in the absence of these limits.

There are networks that let you do that. GiffGaff in the UK is one. They're even fairly generous in giving you a couple of extra GB for free if you only go over occasionally.

Of course it's better marketing wise to market your products/offerings/capabilities as better than they actually are. Even if 90% of users don't notice the difference, it really shouldn't be surprising that some small fraction of users will notice and will be unhappy.

Actually, that's a pretty interesting solution, I wonder if that would work. Unlimited storage, but you can only upload 100GB per month. Or 1TB per year, so you can upload loads of data at once.

The ISPs have tried some 'fake unlimited' plans over the years, which got a lot of pushback. eg, unlimited data but you're capped at 2G speeds after 10GB. It's a model that totally sucks for normal users who happen to hit the limit, but could work better in a storage context: full speed instant access to a 100TB archive blob isn't quite as much a day-to-day personal essential as basic mobile data. And if you DO need fast access, there should be a path to pay for it.

I don't think it's quite the same - ISPs trade specifically in the amount of data uploaded/downloaded, so when they say you get "unlimited data per month" but in reality that's capped at 100GB, then yeah, that's misleading advertising. This is more akin a storage facility that says "we'll store unlimited number of your items, but you can only give us 1 tonne a month". But you know, if you keep supplying them a tonne a month for 10 years, then yeah, they will keep your 120 tonnes of stuff.

"How do you handle such users at MediaFire?"

You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away.

I learned this a long time ago (1998) while consulting for a very large and successful early web host (Simplenet). They allowed unlimited bandwidth and one of my first questions was "how do you make that work?".

They mercilessly throttled the top 1-2% of users until they just went away. Easy.

That very well illustrated to me what happens when interests are not aligned. The provider is going to actively work against you - as opposed to actively enable you.

> You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away.

Carbonite is an online backup provider that got caught doing this by the U.K. government in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonite,_Inc.#Misleading_adv...

Thanks for the great service MediaFire is. It outlives many file sharing services out there, the links are pretty safe to share, knowing that they will be retained for practically forever.

Mathematically speaking, even though there is a recurring cost, if the cost goes down over time it's entirely possible for the cost to be finite overall. Simple example: If the recurring cost halves every year, and in the first year it's X then the cost to store it forever is 2X.

Just because it has halved every year for a decade doesn’t mean it will continue. Cf Moore’s Law

That’s why he said “mathematically speaking”

I've long suspected that r/DataHoarder is why we can't have nice things, i.e. cheap online data storage that is slightly subsidized by the average user who only stores a little. Thanks for confirming from the point of view of a major storage provider.

When stock brokers were charging commissions this was their model too.

They would take the user profile of most of the users that gravitated to their specific sales pitch, and make a commission structure that worked for them and let that subsidize the outliers that traded different products like high volumes of sub-penny stocks. (There are some fixed costs to stock and options trading, which are now subsidized by selling data instead of charging commissions)

I follow r/Datahoarder for best practices and methods for getting my own stuff (like HumbleBundle or purchased eBook libraries) to my own local storage but, some of them really abuse online storage providers. I cringe sometimes reading all the posts.

Why on the world someone try to mirror nearly everything to somewhere like Scrat from the Ice Age?

It’s mainly because they can, but I also bet it’s that feeling that you’re “cheating” the system (like why people cheat in online video games)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding

Some people even hunt for "Unlimited for life" early adopter plans and grab them, then abuse them.

One of the backup services imposed a 12TB limit. Evernote reverted their unlimited data storage pledge, Google retired unlimited data in GSuite. I cannot say all of them due to hoarders but, Evernote CEO openly said that "People tried to zip and upload their backups to our servers. We're not that big".

>Google retired unlimited data in GSuite

They actually did not. The $12/user/month plan with an unenforced data limit was rebranded as the $20/month Enterprise Standard plan with unlimited storage explicitly allowed. Existing users are currently grandfathered in at the $12 price but may be forced to "upgrade" at some point in the future.

"Customers that have 5 or more End Users will receive a total amount of Google Drive storage equal to 5TB times the number of End Users, with more storage available at Google's discretion upon reasonable request to Google." is not very comforting language.

I think you're looking at the Business plan. Enterprise is separate. You can't get an Enterprise plan without contacting Sales unless you're grandfathered in.

https://workspace.google.com/terms/user_features.html

I'm looking at Enterprise.

> You can't get an Enterprise plan without contacting Sales unless you're grandfathered in.

Having to contact sales and prove myself is not exactly the same as being retired, but it's pretty similar in a lot of ways.

Oh I see. So it's actually the same as the old plan (unenforced storage limit), but without the (also unenforced) minimum of 5 paying users.

I also just read that you can in fact get an Enterprise plan without contacting Sales by buying a Business plan and then upgrading through the admin console.

So maybe less retired, more downgraded.

I understand and while we all understand that it isn't technically "unlimited", they still are just using the service they pay for in the way it was advertised to them. If it isn't unlimited and you don't want to deal with that 0.1% of users, do not advertise it that way.

Again, I think it's ridiculous to use online storage services in that way but still, is it really fair to blame the consumer here?

I use some of the techniques as offsite "well, maybe it's with that cloud storage?" disaster recovery backup options.

I have used Backblaze, and was storing 16TB there, and that was $50/month.

I did a simple envelope calculation, decided I could either hand-roll a offsite system with 2x consumer harddrives, or look for other options.

I have 28TB backed up with another provider now.

Why haven't I tried either AWS or Azure cold-tier storage?

I have maybe 2 hours a month where I can spend looking into solutions to my offsite backup situation, and I am somewhat concerned that I could mess up the AWS solution and cost myself thousands of dollars. This coupled with a lack of time, significant competing concerns (keeping a job during a global pandemic job market; work-load; personal life), and "eh, I'll get to it"-laziness, means I have to put this on the back burner.

If you handed me a simple solution using rclone, zfs send, btrfs-send, or a pre-canned "this is what it would cost" Bacula approach, I would move to it.

> r/DataHoarder

To be honest, 99% of the posts there are about building your own NAS.

And I don't fully agree with the "we can't have nice things" narrative in the Google Photos case. How bad was Google hurt by the actions of these few "power users"? Before that, how much did they profit by driving out competition with their "unlimited" plan? (Which, by the way, was neatly integrated and advertised into their own mobile OS...)

The uber strategy (speaking of ponzi scheme...).

99% of the users of unlimited plans are only storing a smalll amount of data

I don't really get the gnashing of teeth about Google withdrawing the "Unlimited". Google never promised anyone "Unlimited" anything, the details of the contract always said "we reserve the right to modify this in the future".

People who aren't data hoarders, who contracted with Google in the spirit of the contract ("more storage than you will need"), are still getting what they signed up for. People who contracted with Google not in the spirit of the contract ("Haha, unlimited, huh?") are also getting exactly what they signed up for - the letter, rather than the spirit of the contract. Google is keeping the spirit of the contract with people who took them up on the spirit of the contract, and Google is keeping the letter of the contract with people who took them up on the letter of the contract. I cannot see any fault in this.

I don’t think it’s them, I think it’s the people at r/plex that are using google drive as their data store and people bragging about having 100s of tbs of content.

I doubt that is so much of an issue as most of the content will be deduplicated across users.

Standard practice is to encrypt media stored on cloud storage to avoid DMCA fuckery.

That tendency to become cheaper over time is known as Kryder’s law and it’s held up well with some notable jolts like the 2014 floods in Thailand:

https://blog.dshr.org/2020/11/storage-media-update.html

I think you’re right on with the extremes - even outside of paid services I’ve seen that generally hold true where a small percentage of your users are responsible for most of your storage growth. Setting a generous base tier avoids a lot of micromanagement for people who are never going to be major consumers.

>"I launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006."

Oh hello there. Best wishes and hope life is wonderful for you.

The company that saved me big bucks on Amazon S3 fees that were absolutely insane. Yet the same company that completely ignores requests to fix disappearing files that remain in disappeared state despite re-upload.

"In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work."

I maintain that there is a deeper problem and that is the concept of aligned interests.

The provider can say all manner of nice things and we can all smile and feel good but if the economic interests don't line up no matter how trivially there is going to be an antagonistic relationship. I don't care how much tailwind we're all getting from diminishing hard drive costs - the relationship remains fundamentally broken.

I want my provider to enthusiastically embrace my own goals - especially in critical areas like data backup.

Wow MediaFire, I remember years ago when I was 11 I absolutely loved the service. I thought it was so cool you could see how many people downloaded your files haha thanks for building MediaFire

I wrote about this back in 2009:

https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stor...

... and the key concept is aligned interests:

"... paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions."

When you are doing something important you want your interests to be aligned with your provider.

If you pay for every bit you store, your provider will enthusiastically enable you to store as much as you can. Your interests are aligned. If you're paying flat-rate unlimited, the relationship is an antagonistic one and the provider will do all manner of sneaky, underhanded - even outright hostile - things to stop you from storing more bits.

> ... paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions.

This looks like a good theoretical point, but I don't see how it holds in practice. What would be practical examples of this happening? (assuming POV of somebody not intentionally abusing the system)

> If you pay for every bit you store, your provider will enthusiastically enable you to store as much as you can.

Again, good point in theory, but I'm not sure how this works psychologically - flat rates bring peace of mind and allow easier budget planning. I still remember how internet browsing in dial up days were sort of stressful.

"This looks like a good theoretical point, but I don't see how it holds in practice. What would be practical examples of this happening?"

The example given in my original blog post:

"the more you upload, the more we throttle you. The little users don't bother us and the big users eventually just go away"

"Again, good point in theory, but I'm not sure how this works psychologically - flat rates bring peace of mind and allow easier budget planning."

Wouldn't you get more peace of mind knowing that your provider was working hard to support and enable your use-case ?

> "the more you upload, the more we throttle you. The little users don't bother us and the big users eventually just go away"

The thing is that I use the services mostly as envisioned - I don't upload > 2 PB of cam recordings (one r/datahoarders case I remember) into unlimited, so I fall into "little users", just like probably > 99% of users ...

> Wouldn't you get more peace of mind knowing that your provider was working hard to support and enable your use-case ?

Perhaps I'm naive, but usually I believe they do that either way. If I'm not happy, I'll go to another provider, but so far I didn't really have bad experience with "unlimited" services.

Missing one fundamental feature of a ponzi scheme: the transfer of value from the victims to the entity running the scheme. Folks have occasionally claimed without evidence that photos are being used to train nefarious machine learning models. But in fact the free tier of storage has simply been that: an entirely free halo product.

At least for internet bandwidth, it is more like an insurance scheme. You pay more than you probably need/use. Such that the seller gets to price in the risk for them that you will actually be a heavy user. And, like insurance, if you are actually a high cost user, you are probably SOoL. :(

I think all these analogies are quite leaky. There is a very simple rule that can be used to explain situations like this, without any awkward analogies: don't expect to be able to indefinitely cost a company much more money than they make from you.

I don't even really disagree. But I should be able to expect that they can't advertise what they can't deliver.

I don't know why you would expect that. There is copious evidence that, over time, the signal from advertisements and statements decays. There are a few companies that still follow policies they put in place decades ago, but it is the unusual case.

Moreover, "unlimited storage," of course, does not mean unlimited storage forever. Nobody and nothing can give you forever. It means there is no limit presently.

You are arguing past me. I'm talking about "unlimited" plans being sold today, that have rather low limits. You are grand standing that everything is limited.

Which, yes. Yes it is. Should we allow folks to sell unlimited gigabit connections, but only have a connector in their data center? That you can only use for limited time?

Now, do I agree with unlimited promotionals that will eventually go away? Yes. Do I like loss leaders that are basically made to gas light and destroy competition with the obvious goal of just out lasting how long the competition can manage? No. I find that rather reprehensible.

They don't, the fine print always explains what the company means by "unlimited".

Of course they do. But they are certainly playing on the mind of the average consumer who thinks they are buying more access than they are.

We don't accept that from "door buster" deals in papers. Curious why we fully accept it from cell providers.

There are several things that compound that

- Storage price decreases near exponentially, while data usage also increases near exponentially, meaning that new data will always make the majority of your usage, no matter how long you and your users have been in place.

- On Google scale, your are bound to have a lot of redundancy in data. Chances are that what you have in your Google drive, someone else has it. And large data provider often only store one copy of the data internally (with necessary backup). It is controversial for privacy reasons, but that's a way to deal with a large number of users using a lot of data.

- There is only so much a user can produce. For example, if you are dealing with eBooks, you can probably put all text only eBooks humanity have produce on a single hard drive. So no problem going unlimited here. For pictures, unless you are constantly shooting, you are not going to produce terabytes of data. 100 GB is actually an awful lot of data, and few applications produce that much, for most people, only video is on that scale.

So it means there are natural limits. Also, unlike with a Ponzi scheme, there is actual value being produced. People pay money for a service, they don't intend to get their money back. There is no real reason for the system to collapse.

> Chances are that what you have in your Google drive, someone else has it.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find this odd. Anything that is not unique to me, and can be downloaded again - I try not to have any copies of it taking up any of my space, local or in cloud storage. What I care about most are unique possessions - my (personal) photos, spreadsheets and documents. These are things I keep copies of both locally and online so that either could fail, but they still exist somewhere.

>> 100 GB is actually an awful lot of data,

Absolutely not. It's about 10-15 average photoshoots (for arbitrary RAW image size of 25Mb) and no place for processed images or anything else.

Yes but that’s not typical. What’s typical is grandmas shitty jpegs

Don't know about your experience, but in mine, grandmas of today are rather trigger-happy. Smartphone photos aren't raw, but it's still megabytes of data for each photo.

How is it a Ponzi scheme if any photo uploaded before July 2021 will still be stored for free? In such a scheme the last N people to join lose their "investment". In this case any new user could easily upload their entire library before then and have it hosted on Google's infrastructure (theoretically) forever, for free.

Does anyone have any good suggestion on an automated way to back up my entire google photos collection?

Currently I use Google Takeout and then upload a ton of zip files to a backup like Backblaze.

But it's tedious as heck and has me maintaining scripts to manage it. Which is the worst because I touch it once a year so I forget everything.

I'd pay money for a business that handles this. I just want my photos safe from a Google tantrum, but I don't want to do the work.

Just a simple google search on terms "github google takeout photos" gives a link to a script https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper plenty of other projects to use or get an idea for your own. Even if you are not a programmer writing a python script is not hard.

The backblaze part you can automate with rclone or 10's of other commercial software or any from this page https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html

Thanks. I've done all of that and is what I'm trying to avoid.

The organization and data which is in that takeout is a complete mess of years of design changes from picasa -> photos, empty folders, duplicate date folders, hidden old crap from your Google+ account (like banner pics) which you can't see anymore to delete, just stuff everywhere inside those zip files. $0.02 if you ever have to actually deal with them, add time to first normalize what you unzip.

In all fairness, organizing old photos in general (especially scanned in pre-digital ones) is pretty much a horrid task in most cases. I'm dealing with it right now and stuff is linked to all over my hard drive, dupes in different formats at different levels of quality, limited metadata, etc. New stuff suffers from there being just so much of it--much of it repetitive--but at least it's in some semblance of order.

Afew years ago, I ran all my family photos through a script that renamed them based on the year, month, and date. I may have retained the old name in the metadata.

I'm looking for the script I used. I also have some tools that compare hashes and find duplicates.

You can google that stuff, or if you want to hire me to help, PM me.

Years ago when Flickr made a big change and I needed to extract my original uploaded content (almost same exact scenario as this thread), I found this script as a starting point (it uses jhead): http://neverfear.org/blog/view/148/Rename_all_jpeg_files_by_...

For me, Flickr has always just been about copies of local files. At some point though, I do need to look at what all I've uploaded there. At one point, my Lightroom database got corrupted. I was able to recover it but I lost the local service mirror of what I had uploaded. (And a fair bit of stuff pre-dated using Flickr in any case.)

I sorted stuff by ages and, very roughly, by content ages ago. So it's not horrible. By biggest issue is that when I first started using Lightroom I didn't really have a good orderly ingestion workflow so there's a duplication of raw scans, PSDs, JPGs, different versions of edits, etc. It's hard to automate and what to save and what to toss from the catalog is somewhat a matter of judgement.

>I ran all my family photos through a script that renamed them based on the year, month, and date.

I actually don't care about the filename, although maybe once things are cleaned up I'll do an export of everything. It's all in a Lightroom catalog now. It's "just" a matter of adding more primarily location-based metadata and making sure everything I especially care about is in appropriate Collections.

zip files suck for jpg, it's already compressed. If you're storing raw formats, it might help some.

Google takeout delivers the results in an archive (.tgz, .zip, etc.) you grab via URL; it's just a delivery mechanism from Google to your hands for the data drop/transfer.

I agree but I use zip as a handy container format. Assuming I have 50 image files I use the -0 option for no compression. It runs a lot quicker and it is easier to send/upload/download 1 file than 50 individual files.

zip -r -0 file.zip dir

I discovered ratarmount the other day (pip3 install ratarmount), which fuse-mounts tgz. Fancier, you can glob all your Takeouts into a single merged directory (ratarmount *.tgz ~/takeout). Even fancier, PhotoStructure will then read and de-dupe that directory hierarchy. I just added person and album metadata parsers (those will be in the next release), which were the last bits that we're missing.

I use the google api and this, https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

I backup everything to my local server.

I also do some side work, feel free to email me if you would like me to help you set this up, if you have a server, we can do it all remotely. p n u t@ (borowicz).org, remove spaces and ()

Check this thread out:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/k5nzkj/google_p...

Google Photos isn't 'safe' or versatile enough to be a good location for your master copy. It works better as a convienient photo browser with some backup and sharing features. There is a rclone backend for Google Photos but it has a few limitations due to the api. Theoretically you can use this to mount Google Photos locally but there are a few restrictions.

Personally, I think that using any of these services as your master is a mistake. But I realize it's what many consumers do. (And, to be fair, it probably is safer for most people than storing one copy on a spinning disk drive was. Which is also what many consumers did.)

I use Microsoft OneDrive to instantly upload my photos to the Camera Roll, and then I use a rclone daemon to move the images to 2 backup locations (after applying encryption).

I tried the way of uploading directly to my target backup locations from my phone using RCX (rclone for Android), but uploading camera roll at convenient times, automatic retry, and features like automatic albums and such are nice to have and hard to get in open-source software, so I stuck with OD.

rclone has a dedicated googlephotos source/sink module, so you can look into it.

I second rclone. It's rock-solid (at least until Google changes their Photos API), and should be fine to automate via cron: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

plus one

OneDrive backup unfortunately is very buggy on iOS

'rclone' is built into the rsync.net platform which means that you can do your google takeout and then directly back it up to your rsync.net account:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:/blah /rsync/account

No download/upload over your home connection and no intermediate transfer required.

There is special pricing for this kind of 'expert' account:

https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html

... and we are all very enthusiastic about supporting and documenting workflows like this so please come try this and show us how you want it to work.

... oh and now that I think about it, rclone connects directly to google photos so I think you can skip the google takeout and just:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone gphotos:/what/ever /rsync/account

This sounds wonderful. I'll try the gphotos (or maybe both) route and write about my experince.

Thanks!

... to clarify, I made up that 'gphotos' alias in the command line - I have no idea what the actual alias is ... but it is all documented here:

https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

... and you can, indeed, rclone directly from google photos to your rsync.net account, etc.

> There’s no free lunch in this world unless you’re willing to run around to different dumpsters to get it.

I'm stealing that one.

While in general I understand (and agree to an extent) the sentiment it's nothing at all like a Ponzi scheme.

Storage keeps getting cheaper.

A $5/month income per user should allow at least 1TB of storage. If they use unraid (at 20% redundancy) than more like 1.7TB per user and that is not even going into them using used hardware (Not the HDDs but servers) or shunking HDD's which could allow over 3TB per user.

What is "unraid" ?

Software RAID and virtualization. You install it, (optionally) RAID drives together, then you can assign cores to certain OSes and do PCIe pass through (among other things). Basically, it’s a GUI for VT-x, but runs “below” your OS, not “above”.

I think AWS, Azure and GCP are not reducing prices to the same extent as storage capacity expands and this makes it difficult to offer more storage to my users.

There is an exception to what the author is saying: make the cost of adding data for the user exponential (or at least non-linear). This is what Crashplan does with their unlimited backup model. It's unlimited, but at some point (number and size of files to keep track of), your computer will be limited by its processing capabilities in a manner that you can only solve by throwing more metal at the problem, which becomes uneconomical for the user. (Source: the internet, I can't remember where, but might find it when I'm back on my computer)

Yep. Customers are inherently limited all on their own, they do not stay customers for too long, do not consume unlimited resources and so on. Unlimited storage, especially of photos, is probably the most self limiting service there is. How much photos customers can upload or download is limited by storage they have, bandwidth to the servers, willingness to wait for photos to be uploaded and downloaded, camera resolution, time spent on taking photos, on viewing them, etc. I suspect even getting to a TB of remotely stored photos is almost impossible for an average customer.

I usually shoot in raw format and my Pictures directory is just a bit over 1TB. That's with about 70K photos in my Lightroom catalog--which reflects much but not all of the contents of that directory.

My total cloud backup to Backblaze is about 4TB.

That said, I generally agree. I certainly don't represent the consumer just snapping photos on their phone which probably represents "average" today.

Another Ponzi-like scheme: "Lifetime."

I think lifetime can very well work if done right, but not at zero cost for a user. You need a healthy business with guaranteed sales.

FL Studio [1] is one example which does it right. After buying a license you get lifetime free updates. But they offer different editions and plugins which are not free. So first, they get users hooked with lifetime updates and in the long run this will probably work out for them, because some power users want more in the long run.

On the other hand, services which are free and suddenly transition to a subscription based model annoy me to no end. The last time I experienced this was with a free e-mail hoster called Migadu [2] which killed it's free plan this year.

[1] https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/

[2] https://www.migadu.com/pricing/#what-happened-to-the-free-pl...

Even worse when a service with a paid lifetime license transitions to a subscription model. See: Cerberus [1], a Find My Phone style app. Luckily I'd migrated to the built-in Android equivalent before I got the email that my lifetime license was expiring.

[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/12/21/cerberus-paid-lifet...

A guide to scaling enterprise SaaS product and engineering teams, from $0 to past $100M ARR BUT we won't tell you where we work or who we are.

Am I missing something here? It's easy to give out advice anonymously and I don't really see anything in here that is groundbreaking.

But isn't Google so profitable they can afford to lose money offering unlimited storage because that way they will attract more users than competing services.

I'm hitting this with internet. So frustrating that for most places "unlimited data" is about 20 gigs.

But that’s like saying you are frustrated by auto companies because your car isn’t free and doesn’t last unlimited miles. Don’t you normally pay for things?

What? I paid for an "unlimited" plan. With a family of six on it, we are past the limit in less than two weeks.

Would be akin to getting a monthly bus pass that cuts you off if you use it four times a day every day. Sure, it is more than most people use, so surely unlimited bus use for the month should just be two trips five times a week? :)

No, it isn't like that at all. Software doesn't translate to physical analogies well, but a closer analogy is saying that he's frustrated because his "Unlimited Miles" gasoline actually only lasts for 100 miles, then he has to buy more.

This probably translates well to electric vehicles. If you got one that was an "all day" battery, but only if you limit it to two hours of driving.

Probably works for a lot of commuters. Quite cumbersome for those it doesn't work for.

If the auto company promised unlimited miles then set up road blocks after 20 miles of usage, then it's exactly like you said, minus the random implication that he doesn't pay for things like the unlimited we are talking about paying for.

Is a like -> is like a?

Like never appears in the original article.

It's a hustle but not really a Ponzi scheme.

Yeah definitely more of a hustle than a Ponzi scheme. I would maybe call it a long slow bait and switch?

Yes, Bait and Switch is the right term.

The author is trying to allude to the positive business sentiment of an every growing base which fuels the hustle until there are no more takers, but it doesn't quite work I think because it was always costing and losing money.

With Ponzis, you need cash from ever more investors to payout previous investors.

It's not really a ponzi scheme. You're not investing (uploading) your images with an expected return on that investment.

Yeah, it seems closer to a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation. Where a few users deplete a shared resource affecting everyone else.

Unsurprising really, there's some fun example on Reddit's Data Hoarder sub. And stuff like this https://www.vice.com/en/article/a33j5a/a-redditor-archived-n...

Except that they did not pay for their fair share of a limited resource but for an unlimited amount of it.

Can we please dispel this notion that “unlimited” means literally unbounded to the point of absurdity. Seemingly everyone understands that bottomless breadsticks doesn’t mean that Olive Garden literally has infinite breadsticks and that you’re not allow to show up with a semi and tell them to fill it up.

Unlimited means that you don’t have a set quota and as long as your usage doesn’t cross over into genuine abuse of the service that you don’t have to worry about it. If you cat /dev/random into your unlimited storage provider 24/7/365 you can’t really be surprised when they ban you.

Unlimited literally does mean unbounded, not "we don't tell you the limit". You cannot abuse a service by using it for its intended purpose. Storing data for possible later retrieval, even exabytes of data, is the purpose of a data storage service.

Storing large amounts of random data merely to waste space might qualify as abuse. But that is a) a strawman as far as I can tell and b) it isn't always possible to tell apart random and encrypted/compressed data apart anyway.

Personally, I'd prefer that companies not use terms that can't be literally true and that obviously must have some limitations to guard against someone who wants to upload data--e.g. high res video--to the cloud constantly.

No... Because that isn't unlimited. Period. The limit in your case is when you decide "usage crosses into abuse of the service". Which means there is no communication ahead of time to the user what behavior to avoid.

Just admit all people want is to be able to ride the gullibility of people who aren't as picky about language as the people who actually give a crap about clear communication. What businesses want to sell is a conditionally vague statistically multiplexed service level, and I'm willing to bet most don't even go out of the way to let the User know what they're overall footprint within the scope of the entire system is, which is info they'd need to manage usage patterns themselves. It's the hallmark of manipulative language.

The difference is that there is a common understanding of what unlimited breadsticks means. If you asked people what a "reasonable" amount of unlimited data storage meant, you'd get answers all over the place.

If it were, hypothetically, come percentage of new users who were consuming most of the resources, it would still be just as big a problem. (In fact, maybe more so if a changing pattern of use suggests that your pricing model is no longer profitable.)

Sure - the title is crafted for rhetorical effect not literal accuracy.

But it's comparable, in the sense that the "returns" for earlier customers (ongoing provision of storage service) are funded out of the contributions of later new customers, and when the supply of new customers runs out, the returns can no longer be funded and the system collapses.

Edit: Also not that the phrase "is a Ponzi scheme" is often used in opinion pieces to describe all kinds of business and economic models that are not literal Ponzi schemes: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22is+a+ponzi+scheme%22+-wha...

I think accuracy is important. If an author isn't trustworthy or correct on this, then why should we listen to their other information in good faith?

I think it's not just new users. It's also new content/files. Existing users uploading more pictures can also generate revenue, right?

It's a metaphor or analogy, which is a perfectly commonplace and legitimate form of argumentation.

> I think it's not just new users. It's also new content/files. Existing users uploading more pictures can also generate revenue, right?

Well, no; if it's an unlimited usage plan, then there's no more revenue from existing users, but they become more costly to support as time goes on, making the system ever more unsustainable and destined for collapse.

It's only legitimate if it's accurate and presented as an analogy. The title of "Unlimited is a Ponzi Scheme" is not worded to be an analogy and isn't accurate.

"there's no more revenue from existing users"

That's not what the article says. Existing users can create revenue. The cost could outweigh the revenue depending on the amount stored. If it were solely about new user adoption, then it wasn't presented properly in the article:

"They make money inversely proportional to how recent you stored the thing."

It fits the flow model of a ponzi scheme:

At each future stage a growth of fresh input is required to make up for a growing backlog of past transactions. Since the world is finite, the available growth must come to an end while the back log does not. (A possible disagreement with this is if expected media quality/size is growing in size similar to Moore's law.)

The author makes their own distinctions in the article, but I don't see how you could choose a more appropriate title without assuming a lot of pre-existing knowledge in the audience.

Perhaps you can correct the definition on wikipedia then.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

A more appropriate title could be "Unlimited Data Storage is Dependent on New User Adoption". No reason to use a title that doesn't fit and is just sensationalized marketing.

Wikipedia's definition is great but is naturally focused on the social details rather than its nature as an inherently devolving system of resource management. Still it's coverage of how they fall apart is good AFA the system problems.

I suppose I should update more wikipedia entries, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree

References an early example of such a problem article: "Binary Tree". An outrageous use of metaphor that should clearly have been named "Data is in no way an oak".

Nice strawman argument.

The word "binary" is a modifier of the word "tree". Anyone with a basic understanding of English knows that a binary tree is different from an oak tree. The modifier in "ponzi scheme" is "ponzi". The very definition stated that it is a scheme related to financial investment and returns, which doesn't fit the situation in the article.

If you compare the binary tree and ponzi scheme examples, you will find them quite similar. You have base word (tree/scheme) and a modifier word (binary/ponzi). So your tree example is actually a great point supporting my argument - this may be a scheme, but it's not a ponzi scheme.

The ponzi scheme was not a scheme to defraud investors it was a scheme to profit from mail regulations that ultimately defrauded investors since there were few consumers of the actual postage stamps. As such the fuller name of what seems to offend you is an intentional ponzi scheme-like fraud. The important modifier would be like, as in simile. Binary tree does not use simile so it is apparently more strongly a tree than something tree-like.

The ponzi scheme was very similar to offering unlimited plans despite most users having very little interest in storing much or having the constant but moderate usage pattern that would need to accompany that for it to run on ads. AFA schemes both are marketing gimmicks misrepresenting the market to sell an unlikely profit system as viable, and when it collapses the people sold the system's superiority to reasonable offers end up upset. Both of these gimmicks can be done intentionally or accidentally as described in the wiki entry.

Unlimited plans are in fact very similar to THE ponzi scheme, more so than an intentional ponzi-scheme-like fraud. Many even argue that the ponzi scheme is not a good representative of ponzi scheme frauds, rather many are based on fraudsters understanding the original ponzi scheme (ponzi himself probably did not initially understand he was getting into fraud of investors until the scheme already had investors.)

At any rate, you seem to understand that there's a lot of room for discussion on how unlimited media is like the ponzi scheme itself or a ponzi scheme fraud. Semantic arguments over who is defrauded and who expects what are pretty pointless as in modern finance the users and investors are all in the mix that is the public and is being uniformly addressed by the company whether in casual media or SEC filings.

The problem is that there is no overarching word that describes this class of "scheme". There are pyramid schemes, ponzi schemes, matrix schemes, unlimited schemes and so on. Everyone uses an example of this class of scheme and then say that X is "ponzi scheme like" instead of saying that X is an instance of "circular fraud" where "circular fraud" is a term for this class of scheme I just made up on the spot. Just invent a word for this instead of complaining.

>f an author isn't trustworthy or correct on this, then why should we listen to their other information in good faith?

The author is correct because of the word "like" in the title.

Others here have suggested “bait and switch” which, IMO, is a more apt descriptor

The word "like" was not there previously, nor is it on the title of the article.

The entire fiat economy is a Ponzi scheme

Previous generations bought in only to have their pensions legislated and gambled away.

Oops!

Trump was making moves to enable the same gambling with 401k’s earlier this year (easily Googled).

Ephemeral value can be wiped away with legislative overhauls. We’ve done this over and over, by bailing on every ephemeral value store, from Greek and Pagan gods, and eventually stocks and Wall Street (barely a couple hundred years old, I’m sure it’ll stand the test of time, ok, sure).

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