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Comment by bingobongodude | Hacker News Reader

This is meant and advertised for backup.

hearing the argument "This is for data, not for backups." strikes me as so strange.

I can understand why a company would care about the access policies; if you are storing some kind of database that is accessed constantly and routinely then it's nice to know -- but when did we become okay with categorizing bits beyond that?

I don't really care for the future of needing a subscription to backup cat photos, specifically. I'd rather bits be bits except in limited instances where the data is priced based upon access frequency/retention/guarantees. (yeah, it stands to reason that cold storage that has limited access should be a fair bit cheaper than hot storage where the data is ready to go ASAP.)

This kind of thing just accelerates the stenography arms-race wherein people try to store their terabytes of data as cat pictures.

Where is the difference though seriously? If it is for "data" I might be accessing it every other minute. If it is for backups I might be accessing it every other minute as well. I do look at my cat pictures every other second though and yes I do encrypt them before and after I do so. The whole spiel of cold/hot storage ..

But not for backing up 5M files. Again, the latency per-file will absolutely kill you.

Just for performance, if you insist on backing up the content of 5M files to Google Drive, you really need to write a custom script to tarball and compress whole directories on-the-fly or something.

I mean, 5M files is like multiple sets of map tiles for the entire world. Sometimes people definitely need to work with those, but using cloud backup through the Google Drive API interface is just not the way to go there...

This is not for you or Google to decide. And no, I can sync changes without having to tarball. I might only touch one of those 5M files a week actually, depending on my structure.

Well of course it is for Google to decide. They're the ones running the service. ;)

But again, if you ever want to retrieve all 5M files, I hope you're willing to wait a few weeks-to-months, because that's what it's going to take...

Which is why it's a terrible idea not to tarball them first to something more manageable in terms of latency per file operation.

It was not for them to decide up until now. And yes of course users were willing to wait $duration for it until now. If you are suggesting a work around that is okay. It is not okay for google to tell their users to tarball "now" "because".

Honest question, but where do they state it's for backups?

In all their docs concerning Android devices for example.

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