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Comment by ranting-moth | Hacker News Reader

I like the novelty of this project, but if you value your Google account I wouldn't try this out.

Google has been known to close accounts and "related" accounts for abuse (as defined by them). So even if you create another account, don't expect your main account to survive if there's any possible link between them.

They are the judge, jury and executor, so eff around at your own peril.

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$20 a month gives you "unlimited" storage at google. they gladly take my encrypted files for years now and I'm up to 80TB. i think its more than reasonable to pay them for that type of service and be slightly above board (the account type i have says i need a minimum of 5 people but its just me).

Which means that if for whatever the reason they decide to close your account - say one of the pictures in those 80TB triggers something that looks like CSAM [1] - and you are seriously up the creek.

Ditto if someone gets hold of your phone and changes the login on your account, or they decide to not let you in because something "looks suspicious".

You are brave. I hope, for your sake, you have a local backup.

[1]: https://9to5google.com/2022/08/22/google-locked-account-medi...

How long does it take for you to download 80TB? From what I can see Google allows you to download 10TB per day but who knows when they will change that limit.

My work flow doesn’t have me redownloading the entire set. I have the drive mounted so it’s more light push and pull.

Even with a gigabit internet connection that would take a couple hundred hours.

A useful rule of thumb to remember, 1gbit/second is about 10TB/day

That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. You have to pay for all the users to get the benefit of unlimited storage.

I must be grand fathered in. I pay $20 flat per month.

Are you paying month to month or yearly? I don't know if you can rely on that storage being available. See below.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-happens-to-your-g-suite-u...

I pay $20 a month

You could have got lucky but a bit risky to rely on this data being there IMHO.

$100/mo for absolutely unlimited is still an incredible bargain. $20/mo is in the neighborhood of almost free.

A hundred dollars a month is only an incredible bargain if you have huge amounts of data.

The average person could buy a $100 external drive and replace it every five years, and that would be enough.

$20/mo x 12 months = $240 annually.

$240 annual x 75 years = $18000

Almost free huh?

$12000 a year x 75 = $90000

If I could pay that in and lock it in for the duration, maybe I'd consider that, but no one is going to let you do that.

Y'all got some funny notions on "Free".

Then there's the whole issue of "What if Google gets bored?"

Where did the $12,000/year come in?

I think they messed up $240/yr * 5 people. Which is $1200/yr. Or $100/month * 12.

Fack. $1200 a year x 75 years should be $90000 lifetime..

Why 75 years?

Previous average lifespan of a human being. Just needed a number to stop the analysis at. The one that comes bundled with the implication "Welp, I'm dead now" felt appropriate given that if you are dead, and the data is too hard to access, probate will likely be the end of your data storage foray. Any longer, and you're most certainly talking organizational scale preservation efforts.

If you make a Silicon Valley salary maybe, that is.

This information is wrong. Please give an URL to the service you are writing about to prove that it is right, thanks.

It is not wrong. I pay it every month.

https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

The enterprise plan.

From what I read they have a limit of 5TB per user. What region are you in? Could you provide an archive link or something to prove it?

Which service is that? Doesn't Workspace allow 1TB?

https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

Enterprise is $20 (for me at least)

how do you manage the encryption/decryption?

One option is Cryptomator: https://cryptomator.org/

https://rclone.org/crypt/

I use Rclone but sadly started this process before it supported crypt so I use encfs

Love rclone!

Borg backup

https://diskprices.com

Price per TB appears to have fallen below $8. So that's $640 worth of storage. Basically, if you were to buy your own hard drives it works out to about $20/mo over two years..

I'm betting Google Storage is a little more fault tolerant...

This particular account while loss making for them it is not by all that much.

A comparable Cloud Storage account on GCP with Coldline storage would be $320/month ($0.004 GB/month) or just $96/month for archival ($.0012/month).

The actual cost to Google is probably < $80/month for this 80TB ( most of the data is going to be in stored in a version of archival given the standard restrictions of 10TB on export.

80TB is also an heavy outlier, given the typical available bandwidth today and disk sizes commercially available for most users it will take a lot of dedicated investment of effort and time to upload this amount of data into the cloud.

Also Google's personal storage pricing is not competitive for pure storage, Backblaze is only $7/month for example. The higher price and value is derived from able to integrate into other Google products and provide storage for those like Gmail, Photos etc.

Depends on the fault. Disk errors, fire, theft? Yes. Account suspension? Hmmm...

or change in EULA!

The other reply mentions backblaze. Whether you choose to use them or not their published driver statistics are quite useful:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202...

A well chosen model has an AFR of well below 1%. To get about say, 100TB, you'd need a dozen drives or so with ZFS and a nice enclosure. It is unlikely even one of them will fail in a given year and you will not experience data loss.

Here is a $100 case: https://ja.aliexpress.com/item/1005003125774264.html

Here is some YouTuber shoving 100TB into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boKmZKTKXHc

8 dollars for a TB of storage, man. It still makes me feel awestruck sometimes when I see stufff like a $23 3TB HDD.

You’re not accounting for redundancy, administration cost, electricity, heat management, or servers to hold the drives.

The downside of using YouTube for backups is that the comments on your backups are so toxic.

Don’t forget there is no appeal process (let alone the ability to talk to a human)

What a brave new world.

This is starting to change. India has a new law requiring social media companies to have a grievance officer and a formal grievance process that allows users to speak to an actual human. It lays out a set of valid reasons to suspend a user, and cannot suspend or penalize a user for reasons not on the list, and must do so in a fair manner as prescribed by law. If the grievance process fails it can be appealed to a government office and then courts.

Presumably even the BBC could use them...

Bold of you to assume hn hasn't fully convinced me to abandon everything but maps ;)

The 4x size increase is my biggest concern...too bloaty.

Don't forget that YouTube compresses videos, so the extra filesize makes the videos resistant to that destructive process.

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