Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted
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The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. Now, the account is scheduled for termination since he's not paying for a valid current account.
It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.
Why do you think this?
Seriously I'm all on board with giving Google the much grief that they deserve - but I also would expect someone claiming victim here to have more of a claim than abusing a "unlimited" account and getting mad about it. Yes 100% Google should be holding onto their data or offering them the ability to pay for the larger data tier - that part is BS.
Get mad at the FBI for raiding you, get mad that you didn't think of another cloud service to store with or pay for an appropriate service (0.07$/TB [my rough calc] is dirt cheap to the point of suspect). I also have to assume that the individual, former anonymous hacker has some wherewithal to be suspect of 'unlimited' packages from large corporations.
There's gotta be more to this story -- it smells off.
So, not excessive. 237 TB does not exceed unlimited. What am I missing here?
>they knew they had found a loop hole in google policy.
What, exactly, is this loop hole?
> Because they are using 237 Tb in an unlimited service from Google
Google's a trillion dollar company. A popular saying amongst Googlers is "I don't know how to count that low". They're used to big numbers.
I work at a much smaller company. We are not a trillion dollar company. Even we, when offering an unlimited service, ask ourselves: "What happens if someone takes us up on this offer?"
It's not a loophole, it's what he paid for.
It's fine to stop offering an unlimited service. We did! My only beef with Google's conduct here is the 7 days of notice prior to deletion.
I've followed Mike Masnick's reporting in other cases. He seems like an even-handed, fair journalist. I trust that he's not hiding the ball, nor letting the other journalist mislead him about the situation.
I also have past professional experience that leads me to believe Google does what's easiest for Google, not what's best for their customers.
In one case, Google suspended a Google Certified Publishing Partner's GAM account for several hours with no notice. The partner had several years of history with Google, did $100M/year of revenue with them, and had an assigned Google rep who did weekly calls with them.
Google reactivated the account, but only after significant disruption to the partner.
I agree that it's good to be a critical consumer of news, but eh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably Google being blissfully ignorant of the impact they have on their users.
The victim is "taking advantage" of an advertised feature of the service they paid for, and has done nothing wrong. The fault lies entirely with Google for advertising unlimited storage, knowing full well that no such thing exists. Same with every other cloud storage service that once advertised unlimited storage. Just because someone who understands how computer storage works could probably figure out that it wasn't really unlimited doesn't make it not false advertising.
It’s also reasonable that companies products change. And maybe it doesn’t last forever, fair enough. But if your product is backup, and you pull the rug with a 7 day grace period, of course people are going to be upset and warn others not to trust you.
If it's excessive, then Google shouldn't have offered an unlimited data plan. They could have called it a 100 TB plan, but they chose to call it unlimited to make it sound better and then canceled it once people took them up on the offer. Regardless of whether that kind of action is legal, it's a shady business practice.
For that matter, there's nothing wrong with Google discontinuing the plan going forward, but they had plenty of options for making the transition more fair and building consumer trust without hurting their bottom line too much. For example, they could have converted his account to a 250TB account and tripled its price, at which point he wouldn't be in immediate danger of losing his files but would be pressured into gradually moving to a more cost effective solution.
I have a tough time believe that they didn't give any warning and then kicked them off the service.
It was unlimited. If they didn't want it to be unlimited, it should have had a limit on it.
Right, which is why they discontinued it.
They offered unlimited, not unlimited forever.
They were moved to a new storage subscription in mid-2022 and while they were over the limits, Google ignored it up to this point.
I somehow doubt google drive would even support that level of egress.
I'd be surprised if it doesnt support it. Its google after all. Despite their shitty customer support, their engineers dont mess around
Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position.
He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data. He need to get his data out. Trying to get my data out of Google, I've gotten ~1TB out in ~1 week. This is about a year's worth of time to not lose it.
The facts are not "even less inflammatory."
A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company.
Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy.
Why do you think this?
Because people with that much data know how much it costs to buy hard drives to store that much data.
Ask any of them how Google was supposed to make money off of them as a customer and watch them go for a gold in mental gymnastics.
It's not at all unreasonable to think a company might offer a service where they make a profit on the average customer, but make a loss in some edge-cases. It's not such an uncommon model.
When you use the actual numbers instead of a theoretical argument it falls apart even quicker. These are message board arguments, not ones you'd make with a straight face in person.
No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.
Support is part of the cost that is rolled into that pay-per-usage fee IMO.
Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)
Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.
I've experienced this first-hand and they're pretty fair about it. I believe they asked me to upgrade to Enterprise once I was serving something like >10-20TB per month of images / audio files (this was several years ago though!)
> if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files
Lots of sites have images. When exactly can I start to expect paying? Will this unspoken limit change in the future? Will I be notified when it is? As-written, it doesn't seem that way since it's opaque.
I imagine it pretty much comes down to "did this one thing that an individual is free hosting suddenly become popular or are they constantly taking the piss/running a biz off free".
They have an internal metric - I just wish it was public. How can I make a business decision on cost without this?
I think the answer is that Google did in fact target companies with exceptionally high storage needs. They were just assuming that everyone who had lots of data would also spend a lot on other services and that didn't pan out.
A better comparison is probably a restaurant promising unlimited coffee refills for life, forgetting to make it conditional on ordering food as well. Then some office worker who never eats breakfast turns up every morning for three double espresso refills.
In your analogy it would be Amazon setting up an S3 front on their corporate unlimited Google account. That didn't happen, it was just someone with more data than average. Google knows very well what the distribution looks like.
Contrast this "unlimited" with how gmail was rolled out – gmail didn't offer unlimited email storage, it just offered a number orders of magnitude greater than everyone thought was realistic at the time.
I have no problem with banging on Google for offering "unlimited" things without telling you what the limits actually are. But at some point, you have to expect some level of knowledge and sophistication from the users. I think accumulating 237Tb of data is well past the point where you should not just take "unlimited" at face value, ask hard questions about exactly what the limits of what they're offering are, and move to a better supported service, even if it costs some money.
It's probably also time to re-think - do you really need 237Tb? That's a huge amount of data. Is this like raw 4k HD video of every interview you've ever done, uncut? Maybe it's time to cut down on things a bit.
If Joe Blow's computer shop down the street offered "unlimited storage" then normies would understand that to be bullshit. But when Google gives that offer, it's taken literally because Google. And this is Google's own damn fault, their PR teams built Google's reputation to impossible heights deliberately.
Lesson being: do not rely on devices or services that rely on a third party. They absolutely will screw you; it’s only a matter of time.
If you do not believe this, then I would say that you have not been around this industry long enough. There may be rare exceptions, but this should be your rule if you care about the longevity of your software and data.
You can't expect customers to go into this as battle-hardened as their opponent.
If you don't own the hardware and software stack, you don't own the service.
Sure, we could boycott. How often is that ever effective in this modern age? Is it ever, because I don’t think I ever heard of such outside of history books?
Our lawmakers are corrupt and wholly in the pocket of those who would stand to benefit from perpetuating this shameful status quo. From my perspective, there ain’t damn thing we can do to fix it (or a thousand other problems), unless we are ready to start holding them accountable. I think that will take putting some of their heads on pikes.
Absolutely. The word "unlimited" has been misused by so many companies (especially ISP and mobile) that anyone who has their eyes open should expect it to mean limited.
Also if there is a deal that is exceeding better than other options, don't be surprised when the rules change later.
Remus says it better in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38628966
Google clearly made a mistake in offering an "unlimited plan" so it makes perfect sense that they're going to discontinue it, and offer 60 days before the data becomes read only. If it was just that, there wouldn't be any article.
The fact that they regret offering an unlimited plan doesn't, however, give them the right to tell him that they're going to give him 60 days before the data becomes read only but it won't be deleted and then suddenly tell him that actually his data is going to be deleted in 7 days, which isn't sufficient time to transfer it elsewhere.
Is this not exactly what has happened? He was clearly threatened harshly, and... the data isn't yet deleted?
Google initially told him that there was no hard deadline for getting the data off—just that his drive would be read-only as long as it was over the limit.
Then, 6 months later, they told him he had 7 days to get it off or it would be wiped.
How exactly is that not a harsh threat? Sounds like a harsh threat to me. They were nice before, he didn't comply, now they're jerks. But it remains just a threat unless they actually wipe the data. Which they won't, because he's surely downloading it right now while we yell about it on HN.
And there’s no practical way to download that amount of data within seven days, just based on the bandwidth this would require. The situation would be totally different if they gave him six months notice for the deletion.
The poster upthread was trying (vainly, I guess) to make a distinction between the two.
He didn’t comply with what? Show me where in Google’s communications where it said they were going to delete his data.
It sounds like he (I think reasonably) believed that would be the new reality after the grace period: that he couldn’t write new files, but that his existing data would be accessible indefinitely in read-only form.
Sure, it’s clear from the context that Google vaguely wants him to stop being a headache for them. But planning for a read-only future is very different from planning for your data to be vaporized. As GP points out, Google could get eviction done in the same timeframe but save considerable face if the initial correspondence had said “you’re using way too much, it’s against our TOS, and we’re deleting your data in 30 days,” then given him a 30-day “reprieve” when the deadline drew near.
I also very much agree that the monopolistic behavior you're mentioning is not a think we should just go accepting and even more, not be victim blaming. It feels really weird to me that people are blaming the reporter. You know, a 1.6 trillion dollar company vs well... nearly anyone else.
For reference, the standard scam before was to offer $40/month for e.g. 1GB of data. At that point, you'd pay a crazy amount for each additional MB of data. This was horrible with very fast data, where you could accidentally burn through the whole quota with a misclick e.g. grabbing a large download.
Unlimited with throttle is super-friendly in comparison. I need data in case of an emergency -- enough to send and get emails and have GPS. I don't need 4k video streaming in an emergency. I don't want a $1000 bill for that. It keeps me in a sensible position, without requiring unlimited liability for the carrier.
My cell network (not Fi) has crazy fast internet (I'd throttle it if I could, t avoid overusing it).
If I go over some amount, it goes to 3G speeds (probably 200kbps or similar).
If I were to run at 3G speeds -- continuously, peak speed -- for a month, I couldn't e.g. hit a terabit of data. Ergo, there is a cap, and it's short of 100GB. You cannot get to 100GB be because of the throttle.
I think this is very good behavior, but it is capped.
"Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account."
I don't see how can this be seen as "taking advantage of a system".
Thats highly subjective to the point of meaningless.
Every single person who had these 100+ TB plans knew it was unsustainable. When you have that much data you know how much it costs for hard drives to store that much data.
If the article had actually stated the amount the guy paid per month (what,$20-$60?) everyone would know that he should've known this was coming.
We had to move a bunch of data off gdrive too, which did little for our opinion of Google's business customer support and was a PITA I didn't need, but the first warnings were in 2002 some time and we were nowhere near as egregious in usage as some of the/r/datahoarder crowd that had multiple petabytes hiding in the lowest cost Gsuite legacy pricing.
That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable).
If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your quota it will get deleted in 180 days" I'd consider this entire post to be a waste of space - but that's not what happened, and I'm very sympathetic to his situation.
otherwise it says, verbatim:
Hello,
Your account was previously placed in a 14 day grace period because you exceeded your pooled storage limit.
The pooled storage grace period expired on May 25, 2023 and your account is now in a “read-only” state. In this state services are impacted, including users not being able to upload new files or create new Google Docs, Sheets, Slides or Forms. Learn more about the features that are currently impacted.
To prevent any further disruption to services, you can free up or get more storage.
Sincerely,
The Google Workspace Team
Trust in Google might be near zero on HN these days but they still have a pretty good reputation with the general public. Expecting every non-technical user to see through the BS feels pretty wrong to me. I mean, what's the point of consumer protection laws if they don't push companies to be honest?
Otherwise its false advertising.
Edit: the real mistake here is trusting google, a company with a track record in messing up with their customers (from retired products to accounts frozen without any hope of appeal).
I can't even find that they're a tech reporter given that:
> The footage Burke obtained and shared with other journalists was obviously embarassing for the Fox brand. And that’s saying something, considering what Fox is willing to publish and air of its own free will and volition. A pair of videos featuring unreleased footage of a Kanye West interview allegedly illegally obtained by Tim Burke featured the rap star saying things even more abhorrent than his usual blend of sexism, bigotry, and conspiracy theories.
They certainly don't seem like someone with an expert's understanding of cloud storage costs, do you have evidence to the contrary?
They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they withdrew the unlimited service he was using?
I'm no fan of Google, and I agree with you that a good service would have offered an at-or-slightly-above-cost data export for that volume of data... but he's deliberately misrepresenting the situation here (either that or is painfully naive)
Edit: as somebody else pointed out downthread, he also would have received numerous e-mails throughout 2022 telling him that the unlimited service was being shuttered
7 days to download 200TB+ does not seem reasonable.
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/13321050/what-will-h...
"If I cancel my additional storage, will all the files/documents that took up the additional space, be deleted? Or will I still have access to them?"
"You will still have access to all your files but, if you have used all storage you won't be able to add or create NEW files until you have space available."
Which sounds like you're right, unless the Product Expert was wrong.
If your data is going to be deleted, it should be painfully obvious well in advance.
At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter if hidden in the terms of service or somewhere if it is made clear that the data will be deleted. It doesn't even matter if it is clear to @andrewmutz and @garblegarble that the data will be deleted[0]. What matters is if not thinking the data would be deleted is a reasonable interpretation. Full stop. It also matters that when explicit communication (unequivocally interpreted as slated for deletion) that the user was given 7 days, which was not even enough time, especially considering Google's egress rates.
There's a lot of this on HN lately and I'm not sure why. Communication is fuzzy people, I'm not sure why that's surprising. But when there's disagreement don't ask yourself which is right or wrong, but if a reasonable interpretation was made. Because communication is like an autoencoder: there's what's in your head (input), what you say (lossy compressed intermediate latent), and what is received (decompressed information with imputation). There's too many attempts to defend a believed objective reality which just is absurd (ironically making the view less objective).
And, importantly, RTFA
[0] Obviously these two are reading between the lines. It is not a bad interpretation and we often should practice this, especially to be on the safe side, but it's clear that there is inference, so what's wrong with the comments is their strong assertions that the communication was obvious. One may also make the argument that Techdirt isn't telling the full story or timeline, but that's also a different issue and inferential.
In what world would it be reasonable to expect Google to pay thousands of dollars per year indefinitely to store your data for free?
This conversation cannot be had unless you will read the article and look at the screenshots.
> to store your data for free?
Where was it said that this was free? Per the article
> So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage
Please RTFA before responding. It really isn't that long. Maybe 1.5 TikTok videos for the attention impaired.
i.e. that support site is mostly user to user help, which is perhaps an indictment on google in general, but sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says".
I think we're looking at very different things.... there's a screenshot of a literal official email from Google, under the Google Workspace Team. Not sure where you're getting "Google product experts". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
if you're referring to something else, I missed that reference, so my apologies then.
I do think google gave sufficient time to move off. I also don't think a "workspace" being in read only mode was ever meant to be a permanent position for that google workspace. i.e. it was meant that "we weren't going to suddenly delete you data if you were over quota, but its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".
though if you can point to the official email from google (I'd have to find the ones they sent me, unsure if I kept or deleted them).
> i.e. it was meant that "...its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".
In person to person language I think we can rely on inference because there's good feedback mechanisms to resolve (like was done here). But in corporate communication I don't think you have the same luxury. Especially when you're a corporation that has no person to talk to to resolve misunderstandings. Instructions must be explicit and to such a degree that no reasonable person could misinterpret. It's why they hire all those lawyers and that's what a court of law would hold them to. I think given the emails shown that there's reason to believe his data would not be deleted until the explicit 7 day notice.
The account was given 60 days grace on May 11, 2023.
It’s currently December 15, 2023.
Google Enterprise (Unlimited) accounts are subject to the same 750GB/day limits (I have one of these accounts, my account has also gone RO).
As of today, it’s been 218 days since the notice that the account was over quota and in grace period.
In 218 days, you can download (assuming 100% efficiency) 163TB.
The user has >200TB stored in their drive.
The math doesn’t check out.
EDIT: > As of today, it’s been 218 days since the notice that the account was over quota and in grace period.
Up until that point, the user was still contracted to, and paying for, an unlimited storage solution. Any suggestions that the onus is on the user to be migrating their data out while still paying for a working solution is insane. The onus is on the provider to give the user time to migrate after the terms have changed. Unless we consider Google to be the Sith, in which case, yes, pray they don’t change the terms of the deal any more.
in about 2 months, I was able to get out over 100TB a data (using a 500mbps connection, wasn't downloading 24/7 but close to somewhere in the 25-50% of the time, and that math does check out).
If you are still “figuring this out”, I daresay it is simply because you haven’t used the paid service and seen the frequent nagging emails about the transition.
Which is entirely likely, given that Google's "Product Experts" aren't employees with access to internal communication channels, they're just volunteers working for internet points.
Did you even do the math before that tripe escaped your fingers?
I doubt he expected Google to store his data forever, and I don’t see anything indicating that this is what he expects. Forever is a straw man.
It would be reasonable to expect some kind of migration / off-boarding plan, and it’s Google’s responsibility to facilitate that after pulling the plug on services they previously committed to providing.
Google stated that it would remain in read-only mode and that’s the end of it. It’s bad enough they reneged on their agreement to store unlimited data for x amount of money, but according to you people need to be soothsayers to figure out that a company will reneg on their promise to maintain the data?
And none of that even takes into account that even 60 days wouldn’t be enough to download all that data.
Just stop it. Google is in the wrong and to add insult to injury they don’t provide any means of reaching a customer support representative to mitigate issues caused by their own incompetence.
Agreed that this is a crisis but it is not impossible.
You can use 'rclone' - running on your own system or hosted elsewhere - to move data between cloud providers.
You don't rely on your own bandwidth - they talk directly to one another:
rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever
ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever
I am, admittedly, hand-waving away the actual configuration of those "remotes" as they are called, which involve your login and/or API keys, etc. - here is an example of what that config might look like:
This guy realistically had plenty of time to figure it out without a fancy transfer method though. The real problem is they don't want to pay $$$ for somewhere else to host the files and have now reached the point it has become a problem.
Most “independent journalists” I know aren’t operating on the kind of household budget where they can handwave that kind of bill away.
You're not storing any data on rsync.net - you're just using our 'rclone' that is built into the platform.
The minimum is $9/mo. Or less if you ask about the HN discount.
That seems like incredible value for that kind of connectivity. Thank you for broadening my toolset. I can immediately think of a few little projects where such a technique will be useful.
----
Can rclone sync directly from drive to s3 Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems just fine.
Note that it effectively downloads the file and uploads it again, so the node running rclone would need to have lots of bandwidth. ----
Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.
This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.
The guy in TFA should be a warning to others: you cannot trust other machines to handle your data responsibly. They'll turn on you and demand a ransom when it's convenient. Self-host, and own your infrastructure.
Not sure if it works with the 'drive' but does with google cloud storage: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-trans...
But more importantly these devices are only for uploading to GCP, not exporting data from.
It's not clear what Google is doing here is even legal. If a company is holding my property, they're usually required to make reasonable efforts to return it.
A former employer will usually ship your things back to you, for example, or find other ways to return them. Simply tossing things you had in your office in the trash is illegal.
A lost-and-found is where there's little or no business relationship and you didn't ask for the stuff.
If we have a formal relationship where you're holding on to my stuff or vice-versa as part of that relationship, you are generally required to return my stuff and I am required to return yours when the relationship ends. If I am working for you, and you have my tools at the office, you need to return them to me. If it's impractical for me to pick them up (e.g. I left them in an office in Alaska), that means you need to ship them to me at your cost. If a contractor has your data, and you don't renew the contract, they need to reasonably provide it back to you. If you are leaving a relationship and your ex has a bunch of stuff at your house, you need to return it. Etc.
That's very different from someone losing something on your property.
I suspect, in this case, if both sides had equal legal budgets, Google would lose a court case. Now, testing that is very impractical since legal budgets aren't equal, but from a pure justice perspective, that's how it works out.
Had a very similar experience with google, except with maybe 20tb rather than 200, and no data loss.
They gave warnings at least a year in advance about the transition to google workspace from google for business or however it was called before. It was quite clear that this transition would eventually be mandatory and that it did not include unlimited space for a flat fee.
I punted on the transition for as long as possible, and when it finally arrived I temporarily added some accounts until I removed the excess data (mainly old backups I did not need anymore).
Nothing in life is unlimited and taking such a promise at face value appears to me as being willfully naive. Relying on such an offer as your main storage is begging for trouble. Expecting this to happen is precisely why I only stored backups there.
You don’t need to be an expert to do the math, consider that just to store the data, without any redundancy and without it being constantly spinning would have retailed at at ~ $4K using the cheapest drives (~25 8tb drives), and would have cost them ~$1/h or ~$700 to constantly run at CA electricity prices (~8W idle per drive). And this before redundancy, backups, bandwidth, etc. This is obviously unsustainable and will eventually end.
Same goes eg for dropbox, who offered “unlimited” storage for their business plan until fairly recently but now have the same limit of 5tb/acct as Google.
Who in their right mind would rely on such an obvious abuse of what was meant by “unlimited” to store the only copy of their life’s work?
Also apparently it wasn't his only copy - his others were taken, and now he's about to lose the last one.
I agree it would have been nicer of them to store an archive after they stop paying. I disagree that they reneged on their offer - despite being disappointed that the deal ended, would I expect it to be offered forever, especially given the potential for abuse? Of course not. Frankly I’m surprised it lasted this long.
I'm getting my information from here though. If you don't mind linking to the relevant part about him getting a year's warning about deletion...
What are your thoughts on false advertising? What part of "unlimited" in the advertisement should be allowed, if the resource itself is not unlimited?
However, advertising is not contract, and I wouldn’t want to hear the legalese of a contract whenever someone tries to sell me something (actually perhaps I would, maybe it would reduce the amount of ads One has to endure, but that’s beside the point as it isn’t a norm outside, perhaps, the medical industry).
I don’t consider this to be such a case. Was he capped at how much he would be able to store (other than by allowed bandwidth/traffic)? Was he promised this would last forever? Was he not given a warning a year in advance that this is ending?
No resource in this universe is unlimited, so your choice is either to be a pedant about what that means and then raise an uproar when your deliberate misunderstanding of colloquial language breaks, or attempt to understand specifically what is implied by the promise.
Dude uploaded over 237 TB, they must have some really long years where you live.
What I believe happened (as happened to many other people as can see from rclone forum) is that some people decided that they were going to simply go into "overage" mode, as that assumed that google would keep their data around when over quota, just it be locked into read only mode (so the data would remain, but just be readable, they couldn't add anything to it).
Google decided that this wasn't something they were going to support, so people who went into read only mode, have now been getting the letters that their data is going to be deleted.
i.e. they have been for months paying google for an account that they knew is over quota.
200TB is fairly easily extractable over 3 months from google drive if one plans correctly. You have a 10TB download quota a day, which one would need a gigabit/s connection to hit. If you have only 250megabit connection, it will take 80 days. Bumping up on the 3 month warning I had, but still doable especially if one filters out unnecessary things.
Very poor communication from Google.
I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court.
It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.
Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time.
Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.
Obviously the cellular provider hates this but they can’t remove something I’m paying for and haven’t broken the contract. They do try to get me off the plan several times a year offering new phones fully paid if I switched.
Fuck them, I paid for it and I’m not going to leave. It’s not my fault a multi billion dollar corporation didn’t get one over me.
I’m glad I live in an area with good protections against this corporate abuse.
Absolutely disgusting what Google has done. I’ll keep this in mind 5 years from now when I have the power to spend real money on budgets and ensure that I never give Google a cent of it.
It takes decades to build a reputation and minutes to destroy it. Google has destroyed theirs.
We use Alibaba Cloud, GCP, and most of all AWS. About December last year, Alibaba Cloud had a full zone outage as their datacenter provider had complete air-conditioning failure. One of the first things to go were the switches plugged into Express Connect (their feature to allow you to have direct links to their cloud through your network provider) and we had backup access set. We didn't get all of our stuff shut down but it helped.
But developing and maintaining backup access costs something. When we egress from S3 to our on-prem cluster, that's a cost. Vendor continuity and substitutability is just a cost like that. It's up to the guy managing this to model each of these risks and no enterprise vendor will sign an unlimited liability contract so you're going to have to land somewhere reasonable here. I always make sure to have exit clauses for us, and I try to ensure vendor exit clauses are what I'm comfortable with and appropriately priced.
Ultimately, you'll just have to read what you sign and have good counsel. But that's just what's worked for me. If you find the blacklist model more successful, more power to you.
update: Not Free but feels like taking advantage of enterprise storage (0.07 $/TB) close to free.
> Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.
It's curious how hard you keep pushing in this flagrant lie in this thread when the article explicitly and repeatedly makes clear that he was paying Google for Enterprise level storage and on top of that did indeed have local first, except all that got taken from him by the FBI. Yet for some reason you insist on claiming he wasn't paying and was somehow abusing cloud-only. Why?
https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/942777-no-more-unlimit...
He did do that. The FBI raided his house and took all the drives. In the middle of trying to get them back (it’s unclear if he’ll be able to), Google terminated his storage. If this had happened at a different time he could’ve just backed up to a different (likely more expensive) service. But that’s not an option that’s open at the moment or possibly ever.
You just expanded it. It's still basically the same.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.
230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore.
Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.
But if its your "lifes work" i would assume the value there is more than just the cost of storage. That the person storing it would have thought about ownership and egress options a bit further out.
Like i use workspace for all sorts of stuff. But its google, they can and may just axe your account for any reason. So i have backups of all things at all times and worst case, i just move my email/drive whatever to another service along with the domain, which I own (and he appears to as well)
Im not excusing google at all. But at some point you have to take some accountability. Not having a backup plan and just trusting google or ANY company to faithfully keep your lifes work for you seems slightly....naive.
>We’ve written a few times about independent journalist Tim Burke. Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News.
It just says his electronic devices were seized. Not that backups were included here, though it is implied.
Event still the FBI raid occured in July [1]. Backups are N-1. So he was down to nill back in July and didnt seem to act from there.
Also based on the dates in the screenshots provided, he went into grace period on the Google Drive data ALSO in July..
So I say again....its his lifes work. Its invaluable to him but its just data to anyone else. Its incumbent on him to make sure this doesnt occur some how, some way. Even on backblaze that would be 20k/year. I would be having that on multiple disks at multiple sites that I control. But that is just me.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/27/journalist-tells-fbi-to-...
Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.
No, the morale of my story is not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people.
> Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.
That isn't an edge case thought, was it?
But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse.
> That isn't an edge case thought, was it?
If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.
I might be, but I am not going to be flaming the shit out of Google about it. I've been the edge case many times in scenarios just like this and I knew I was taking full advantage and eventually it would have to stop. And there was plenty of notice about the rule change.
> If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.
Lots of people were in roughly the same boat during COVID. There would have been thousands of people taking pictures of their child to send to doctors every day. People need non-urgent medical attention every day, that is not an edge case. Taking pics to send to your doctor during covid was not an edge case.
>And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. And finding (and paying for) multiple backup services that can handle 250 TBs of data is likely pretty cost prohibitive.
This was a pretty big story back then: https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2023/08/10/tim-burke-fbi...
though the names in that URL probably gives the real reason behind this "investigation". Rich people got caught with their pants down and we know laws don't apply to them
Sure, but you're missing the main point of the story, which is the seven days they gave him to download everything.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3
According to the S3 Glacier pricing I see, it would be less than $900/month. It would cost less than a $5000 one-time payment to buy enough USB storage for the full 237 TB.
> and he doesn't want to pay that
No, the story doesn't say that.
The standard S3 tier, sure, but Deep Glacier would be about $250/month. Retrieval can be up to 12 hours but that shouldn't really be a problem for long term archiving. As with anything AWS, egress can kill you, but you can sidestep that with something like Snowball, and really that's only an issue if you need to egress everything to migrate the archive.
Going by AWS's website[0], a 50 TB Snowball is $200, so you'd need to drop $1000 for five Snowballs to hold that data.
[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-peta...
Throw in a case of beer, and maid services to clean up your living room afterward, and you'd still make budget.
ETA: OK maybe more like 10-12k it would be.
And he has made no attempts to fix that.
> "Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News. As we noted, this seemed like a pretty big 1st Amendment issue. Burke is also facing bogus CFAA charges because he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content."
Even if Burke had built a box, the maid service and beer would be the most helpful (but would not solve his actual issue).
20 TB drives on newegg seems to be available for $310 to $360. If you use erasure coding w/ 30% overhead that's 18 +3 drives or $7.5k in drives alone, pre chassis.
Having a DR replica living somewhere outside your house probably gets this well over $12k, even if that replica is glacier or similar.
But yes - I realized my mistake in tossing off that comment offhand.
If the journalist in question sees this, or someone knows them, I am happy to assist in a migration at no cost. If someone from Google sees this (HN Google support), it would be swell if the delete lifecycle could be paused while this migration is facilitated.
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing
B2 does mention a "capacity bundle", saying 250TB/year is $19.5K - but that's $1.5K more than the monthly pricing for the same capacity so it doesn't seem like they have any meaningful long-term pricing discounts.
You make it sound like he could have chosen to keep paying Google under a different plan, but I can't find any way for him to pay Google to keep the data for him short of creating 100+ dummy "users" in his workspace to get their 2TB each (which I'm sure Google would totally be okay with) [0].
Google is firing him as a customer, which is their prerogative, but they're doing it on a timeframe that means he can't actually get the data out in time. That's what the (actual) headline says, and those are the facts.
The short timeframe now is because the user did nothing in over half a year to resolve the problem.
Google could have more clearly communicated that read-only state was temporary, but assuming it was permanent seems wildly optimistic and naive.
Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data.
Google makes plenty of bad choices, but this seems like a problem that Burke made entirely for himself.
That's not clear at all.
> If he continues to do nothing
What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a technical data migration.
At this point, all he can probably do is start deleting files to avoid account cancellation. If he wanted to move all the data elsewhere, he had over half a year to do that.
How can you possibly think that over half a year of free service isn't enough of an accommodation? In what world does it make sense to assume that having your subscription terminated and you storage put into read only mode means it is OK to just leave it there and do nothing if you want to keep it?
He took full advantage of an amazingly good deal on a unlimited storage plan, then when it was cancelled, continued to assume he could just leave the data there for free. Google could legally just have pulled the plug on him for continuing to abuse a service he wasn't paying for.
Buying the drives would cost at least $5k
assuming it all goes into frequent access tier, which this shouldn't as this is an archive. just by enabling the automatic tiering is going to be more like 1000/month
and if it's would instead end up organized into glacier as it should it's gonna be more like 300$/m
which is not dirt cheap, but still. it start giving the prospect of maintaining a home archive with manual disk rotation and scheduled data verification some second thought.
Ofc you can argue that a Youtuber goes into such a contract willingly. This case is much more egregious as a series of "I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.
You would need at least 11 or 12 of these, running you $4,799.88 for the latter, plus tax and shipping, or one month of S3 storage in storage hardware alone.
For instance, suddenly out of nowhere they are only telling people with a 7 day heads up that they will reclaim google voice numbers, and only with a single email.
I've used the service for over a decade and they never bothered to "monitor usage" or anything like this.
Thankfully I think due to US law they can't immediately re-issue them, but you have to claim them under a new phone number or such.
Very disturbing policy shifts at the company.
I was in a similar boat a few years ago. Had about 70 TB of archives and backups on Google Drive and was forced to scramble to move these somewhere else when they terminated the unlimited plan.
I don't see how it's less of a concern that he has 200+ TB of video. Perhaps don't advertise a limited resource as unlimited; then you won't get people like this guy.
He deserves the ability to get the data off his account. Google acting like their hands are tied are simply being malicious.
I've started refusing business with these types of companies, and I tell them why. I'm sure none of it matters, but if I do it then I know that at least somebody is saying something.
An example: I would be one of the biggest buyer of Kindle books on the planet if they were DRM free. I'd still buy some things if I could use software to read it that wasn't invasively spying on me. It's nice that they make stuff cheaper by putting some of the data revenue into it (and even subsidizing it in some cases), but I'd much rather pay for something like Remarkable more but get a respectful product.
This is a 100+ year old problem and has already been solved in other industries, but tech likes to think it is unique. It's a bad pattern to sell below cost to gain market share. Oil and steel companies were selling below cost to undercut competing startups in the 1900s, then raised prices when those competitors folded. It wasn't good for anyone other than the robber barons then either.
This part only works if you don't have other large competitors. But this obviously not the case for cloud storage. It is an extremely competitive commodity product.
> bad for consumers
How exactly is it bad for consumers to get products below cost?
The argument is that amortized over the lifetime of the business, the prices are actually significantly higher because they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business, and then immediately break the low-priced agreements with their customers.
Sure, they may be a commodity product now. That shouldn't exempt them from holding up their agreements from when they were still competing for market space.
It's also bad for consumers because they then have to migrate existing data to some new service (which is far from trivial for most consumers who don't know how to use rclone), and potentially face steep egress fees. Remember we're talking about the industry not just G. G doesn't charge egress fees for Drive, but many cloud storage providers do.
The strategy is "lock-in" and it's a primary part of the "go cheap or free to get customers" part, and it's bad for consumers. I'd much rather pay more in the short-term for cloud storage and not have to migrate later. Thank God for Back Blaze
What agreement? They offered a service with no guarantees that it would be provided in perpetuity. If they offered "free unlimited storage for life" and then backed out of that based on some legalese on page 75 of their EULA then I agree that would be slimy. But that is not what happened here.
> they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business
This can happen and when it does it is anti-competitive. But that is not what happened in this case. Do you really think that Google thought they could drive AWS and Microsoft out of business with below cost storage on Google Drive? Seems unlikely. And even if they somehow managed to do that, they would immediately have competitors undercutting them on price again as soon as they raised prices enough.
What seems much more likely to me is they offered unlimited storage as a competitive feature of Google Workspace thinking it would still be profitable even with some customers using much more storage. But because we can't have nice things a bunch of people realized they could essentially use the unlimited plan as an ultra-cheap object storage service and were storing 100s of TB of data. Rather than raise everyone's prices to subsidize bad actors, it seems much more reasonable to just discontinue unlimited storage.
This is the internet. Google has been around since the dawn of the popular internet. At this point, no one should be naive to the abuses that internet-facing services regularly encounter.
The correct thing to do here is not offer a fantasy service to customers. Now that they've offered a fantasy service, they should be on the hook for actually assisting the customers that have been locked into their service.
Admittedly, there's naiveté on both sides here. There difference is that the company is the one with the money and power, and they instigated this relationship by offering the service in the first place. They should shoulder the burden of fixing the problems they have created by attempting to undercut the market when it was beneficial to them.
Because it is necessarily a short term strategy, and when the subsidy ends, it is incredibly disruptive (in the bad way).
It is good in the short term for those consumers who get in early and get their consumption subsided by VC funds or FAANG profits from another subsector. But it is bad in the long term for everyone when firms try to compete by selling below cost. Consumers usually win when companies have to compete with each other. But selling below cost is a strategy that only very rich or entrenched players can do. It means you have to play the VC unicorn game as a startup. It sets unrealistic price expectations for consumers. It leads to situations like this when the rug is pulled.
Look what has happened with ride sharing and delivery apps. A few rich VC backed firms took over the market and subsidized cheap rides. Entire industries were transformed, and most restaurants stopped offering delivery themselves. Now, it is becoming clear that those $5-7 rides actually cost 2-3x that, and that's not what people are willing to pay.
That's usually what happens. And Google is no stranger to it given Youtube and to some extent Chrome (which is "free" but also being molded to more or less have DRM on the browser level).
Cloud is fortunatly still competitive, but I can't say the same for many other tech markets.
What's worse is that their customer service told me I'm eligible for unlimited free service, got me to cancel (and lose my warranty), then backpedaled and told me that I'm not actually eligible and on top of that I just lost my warranty.
I managed to get them to un-cancel it but that entire ordeal is just even fucking worse. I never want to deal with that company again, and will not be recommending their products.
I was about to say 'you should have other backups', but the FBI is a very powerful persistent threat, and might be the more important problem.
I had a friend who owns a PC repair shop who bought a laptop from another 'friend' that was sold to him illegally. (He did not know it was illegally stolen from the next state over) The state police came in (with FBI in tow) and seized all of his equipment. Every last computer (all of his own, as well as customers that had their pc in for repair) in the shop was checked over.
They held onto his equipment (along with 3 other customers) for 6 months, and he had to make do with a laptop to keep his business running. Fortunately, he had backed up his PC repair software to another location. Or he would have been out of business.
All because the FBI wanted to be thorough. Not because he was on suspicion of a crime.
Then again I remember a story about a tire storage facility in Norway that went bankrupt and no one could get their winter tires out. Doing a bit of research on this it actually looks like it happened at least two times once in 2019 [1] and previously in 2011 [2]. Looks like all the customers eventually got their tires back, but in Norway we have deadlines for when you need to change from summer tires to winter tires and if you have studded tires then you have to change back by a week or so after end of easter. So customers were in a bit of a pickle.
1: https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/bilverksted-har-stengt-dorene-_... 2: https://www.rb.no/lokale-nyheter/kunder-fortviler-over-dekkh...
Wish it were. There's more to the story that I'm not permitted to discuss. But the brush strokes are there, and all true. Unfortunately.
I didn't receive my computer equipment back until literally last year: 2022. And they shipped them back in two large thin cardboard box with computer parts sliding around freely inside. Literally it arrived at my house with a video card poking half out through the box side. Obviously non-functional. One last "fuck you" from the FBI for doing nothing but being politically active.
Were you uploading stuff to wikileaks? If so, what kind of stuff?
Were you donating to WL?
Did you have any "classified" data in your posession?
What did the warrant say about the target, the reasonable suspicion, etc?
Do you have a copy of the warrant you'd be willing to share?
You're a guilty criminal, so why wouldn't they trash your stuff just for being who you are?
And who is with them who's going to tell them not to do that?
It's also especially ridiculous behavior in the context of CFAA raids (compared to drug or armed robbery), where the most lethal thing on the premises is likely to be old pizza.
Also, isn't there a legal duration for how long the FBI could keep the evidence/equipment they gathered in the investigation? Ten years seems to be too long for that.
kids these days…
Perhaps you can eventually submit a FOIA request?
I see what you did there :)
While I’m sympathetic to the user and skeptical of Google’s commitment to their customers, this doesn’t appear to be a straightforward case of someone getting Scroogled. If he were paying for the consumed storage as a standard Drive customer, this wouldn’t be happening.
>Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time”
You've missed the point. It's the fact that this guy did pay for the services.
Why do you think he thought this?
Why would this be considered? What if he didn't want to migrate 200+ TB of data and just decided to stay where he's at, continuing to pay Google a lot of money?
>expected for it to be retained indefinitely?
For as long as he pays for the service, right?
And he was never paying "a lot of money" for this. He was paying like 1% the going rate, and for every month that he paid that he did get the promised unlimited storage.
You're being obtuse: "a lot of money" in this context is a relative amount and you know that.
It seems odd that after underpaying by a lot for a long time, that the user would complain that they were given 2 months of free service and then 5 more months of read-only access to get their stuff off. Sure, Google should have communicated more clearly but Burke's expectations here are also entirely unreasonable.
The real villain of this story is the FBI and how computer seizures are handled. The FBI still hasn't charged Tim Burke with anything and are holding his MFA devices hostage trying to get him to unlock his phone for them.
This is a common problem and it has screwed over many other people. we can't just leave livlihoods to the whimsy of automated bots without some human to contact.
Agreed. It's always better to make things as clear as possible for the slow and deliberately obtuse. However, that doesn't excuse the user here from having completely unreasonable expectations.
> You don't give a business (since this was an enterprise account) a week to take action. That's unacceptable.
They were given over half a year and did nothing.
> we can't just leave livlihoods to the whimsy of automated bots without some human to contact.
I agree and support a law that creates a standardized dispute/appeal process for customers of large companies. I don't think that would have directly helped in this case as no such system should force a company to continue offer a product at a loss or offer more than 6 months of migration time. Perhaps the threat of appeals through such a system would have incentivized clearer communication though
Because whatever he was paying Google wasn't enough, so they removed the "unlimited storage for $12/month or officially $60/month" offering.
There was another option - pay for enough Business Plus seats to reach the pooled storage requirement. At 240tb that means he needs 48 seats, and at $18/month that's $864/month. Not bad for cloud storage geo-replicated on at least 2 continents at any time.
He already did have data backed up, and it was seized by the government because Fox News or Kayne West really didn't want that news page (live on a URL already) "leaked" or whatever.
The concept of counterparty risk strikes again.
I'm usually sympathetic with businesses who failed to appreciate how much power very few power users really have, but this is Google we're talking about. Their sales and legal department is larger than 90% of tech companies. This was their mistake and their mistake only.
Things are free when people don't abuse it. Just be normal. Jesus.
Well, no, things are free until they stop being free.
Who gets to decide what "normal" means.
Why do you want everything to be financialized? The world works better when people can use small conveniences non-abusively.
OK
>Why do you want everything to be financialized?
Where did I say this?
>The world works better when people can use small conveniences non-abusively.
OK
Did you just not want to address anything in the comment you replied to?
Every unlimited plan simply means, "we won't tell you the limits."
Go to the Internet Archive and look at the Workspace pricing page of two years ago. They put it front and center that you would get "as much storage as you need". They also made you go through sales, so if they only intended to sell the product to people buying hundreds of seats, that would have been totally possible. They didn't.
Would they be reasonable to kick you after eating 5 pounds?
In that case they would be indisputably unreasonable, in its dictionary definition of “having no basis in reason or fact”, where reason and fact are that they offered unlimited — not 5 pounds — but unlimited fries with any hamburger.
Condiment dispensing appear to be left to franchisees, but clear you only get up to 5 packets for free here: https://www.grubhub.com/food/mcdonalds/menu
Homer: But the sign said "All you can eat!"
Let's assume it's AWS storage. After you stop paying (renewing) would you still expect to keep your data forever free of cost?
The difference here is that Google was the one who fired him as a customer, and did so on a timeframe tight enough to make it functionally impossible to actually get all his data back.
around the same time the FBI raided him. I imagine he was quite busy as is.
And there's a difference between "he should have seen this coming" and "he should have seen his data being deleted coming a week after the grace period with no wrning until the week before."
For a company like Google several Gbit/s constantly over a week, or even the tens of Gbit/s needed to finish in one day, is not troublesome, but for most other people/entities it is completely unrealistic. Getting that much storage with that much bandwidth to it is far from impossible, but it won't be cheap, especially given he'd need it right this second.
Maybe looking for other online providers at that point to store secondary copies would have been an option, but not a cheap one.
The thread you link to above says “People using anywhere from 5.??TB all the way to 152TB … got the email” but I assume that email is the one already mentioned which states large accounts are going read-only.
The problem stems around that their culture is to break all existing backwards compatibility at any moments notice (You know, ""innovating""), their politics is to rapidly cancel projects and products due to infighting and power struggles, software development leadership is make things as expensive to maintain as possible by using the most impractical of languages and frameworks, and budgets are rarely given until a project gains executive attention, which is usually too late.
Personal anecdote: Once I was using Google Collab to process a few thousand images. I needed to move the photos (less than one GB) to a new folder. It took over an hour, and appeared to process the moves in JavaScript in my web browser.
But the emptying the trash/bin is horrible UX wise. You can only trash the files visible there. It seems the easiest way to empty the trash completely is to configure rclone and run this command (so emptying trash with API):
https://rclone.org/drive/#emptying-trash
Hope this is helpful for anybody else here.
There's a dedicated "empty trash" button at the top of the web interface. I've successfully emptied the trash of many thousands of files using it -- it doesn't have anything to do with visibility.
A couple times I had to use it twice to fully empty, but it still deleted way more than anything visible. Massive bulk operations just sometimes seem to get killed (timeouts?), same as producing massive zip archives of thousands of files for download.
But I can imagine rclone might work more consistently by performing tons of individual delete operations instead of Drive performing a single massive operation.
I only use it for (encrypted) backups and temporary sharing. Not for important stuff.
Also i dont want my account or data to be randomly deleted due to vague terms and conditions or policies.
I store them on ZFS shares at various sites and S3 glacier (not Amazon's own though).
It started as a gift to my girlfriend, but now every year we take our best pictures of the year and put it in a photobook. Cant be deleted that way. All the other photos are less important indeed.
I store about 20gig of important photos on my laptop (weddings, events, ... the really important stuff) and everything else is just dumped into google photos. We'll see how that works out in 20 years. But I feel at ease
It is like saying losing electricity forever should not be catastrophic event, people were living happily without it for 1000s of years.
It was a common trope in Holland when I was young. When people were asked what they'd bring if the house were on fire... The photos.
There are many people I know alive today (including myself) that don’t obsess over a day by day photo chronology of their children that you will probably never look at 90% of. Yet we all use electricity significantly every day.
Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?
That’s some addict logic right there.
It is not. Electricity is just an example, probably a bad one. I would take it over photos any day.
But I am sure there are some modern conveniences that are really important to you while for others they are not as important. If you lose access to those conveniences, you will feel greatly emotional whether anger, sadness or some other emotion. And most people will sympathize with you and a few people will think that it is pathetic to obsess over whatever it is. And they will repeat same old cliche, "back in the days".
Just because it is not important to you, it does not mean it is "pathetic" if it is important to someone else.
I used to work in consumer-facing tech support shop where we mostly troubleshoot computers. I saw too many people crying in public because they lost all their data including photos of their kids. And only thing they cared about was for us to recover the photos. And if we recovered photos even if only a few, people would cry with joy. They brought us cakes, cookies, and other things as gifts. And if we failed, some people had almost mental breakdown.
Based on while probably small sample size, I do think feeling distress over loss of photos would be a normal reaction for majority of humans.
The risk of losing all your pictures in 30 years is probably like 50%.
The digital photo generations gonna have a void of childhood pictures when they get old.
An annual “print-a-thon” is a good way to capture those things that still matter after a year onto a more robust, albeit less flexible, medium.
But many people treat these solutions as an extension of their hard drive. A physical analogy is putting your books into a Shurguard/self storage. Thats not a backup, that's just storage. You should make a photocopy instead
The distinction is important if you want to rely on more than luck to keep your data safe.
If you just keep your second copy on some hard drive collecting dust next to your wireless router, eventually that drive is going to die. But you might not realize it until the next time you try to retrieve your "backup", or power off/on the drive. then you don't have the backup when you need it.
People just assume anything in "the cloud" is redundant or has high durability, but it's not. When you finally need that second copy, it might be gone.
Let's not victim blame, especially when the victim wasn't stupid.
Given that, the reason he doesn't have local copies are the FBI going after him and seizing all of his stuff. Even if you have them in a safe deposit in a bank, they will get it.
You can store data on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure and pay per GB per month. They price it at a level that's profitable to them, and I pay for it.
"Unlimited, at fixed (or no) cost, forever" is not a sustainable business model. If you're one of the outliers, you risk issues like in OP. If enough people are outliers, then they'll eventually have to pull the rug out.
You never know what some beancounter at a megacorp thinks is "sustainable". Putting your data in the hands of a third party is certainly convenient, but shouldn't be relied on if you care about the data sticking around.
Giving services away for free or selling under value is clearly anti-competitive behavior.
Hopefully there will be more pushback on this practice now that Bork's ideas[1] about antitrust are falling out of favour.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork#Academic_career
I have run a 100+ user non-profit on Google Workspace. I’ve used it for many clients over the years.
There’s a reason Azure and AWS get my spend these days.
One of the biggest liabilities GCP has is that “G”.
All my work is probably like 50GB, but I have it backed up on an external drive AND the cloud.
It's like self preservation instinct is missing. 3rd party services are fallible, even when they don't make business decisions that screw with you, and nobody is gonna care about your livelihood more than yourself.
> It's like self preservation instinct is missing.
And if, as happened in TFA, you are raided by the FBI and all your local computer hardware (which includes your external drive) is confiscated as evidence and hauled away to an FBI warehouse somewhere, you will have only that cloud backup left. This is where the journalist found themselves.
And then, after the FBI raid, if the cloud then says they are dropping you and deleting your cloud data, what backups do you now have (remember, your external drive is still in the FBI warehouse somewhere as "evidence")?
personally, during college had work stored on cloud storage provided by uni. All is fine until one day I can’t access or find my docs I have been working on. Turns out the idiot sys admin purged the wrong data as part of some clean up effort and cost reduction.
I never keep anything of importance on these cloud services. Everything is duplicated/replicated to servers I own. Nightly backups taken.
And, did the author forget that Microsoft had done the same couple of times already?
It's easy and trendy to bitch on Google.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/microsoft-onedrive-unlimi...
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-has-removed-unlimited-...
Do companies really believe they can promise untenable amounts of free stuff indefinitely and not have upset customers when they take it away? Can they be that naive? Google isn’t the victim here.
> It's easy and trendy to bitch on Google.
Maybe they should stop screwing people all the time if they don’t want to be constantly criticised.
People with pirated movie collections took this risk more seriously than a guy whose livelihood appears to be inexorably linked with the policy.
[1]https://forum.rclone.org/t/any-unlimited-alternative-to-goog... [2]https://forum.rclone.org/t/google-drive-unlimited-alternativ... [3]https://www.seedboxexpert.com/end-of-unlimited-google-drive/
> abused
Using the explicitly stated and loudly advertised functionality of a service isn't abuse.
That doesn't mean the other party in these stories isn't at fault in some way, but we're about a decade past the point where anyone should consider a single online copy of something, regardless of where it is, as safe from problems (of which there are many possible).
That probably marks me as jaded. I know it's just the journalist reframing the story in a way to draw the interest of the average reader and the underlying problem is still relevant, but I think it actually does the opposite for me. I wonder how many others feel the same?
This isn't at the level of "I backed up my 8TB consumer-grade hard drive to Google Drive," this is "I used a low cost small business service to store data center scale amounts of information."
Storing this amount of data on raw drives alone before even buying the server and paying the electric bill costs over $2,000, and that's before you add any redundancy. This person thought that it was realistic for them to pay $30/month and expect Google to be fine losing money forever? They can't even theoretically break even before factoring in other costs besides raw hard drives given the limited lifespan of disks in a data center.
Like the person who got an unlimited food/drink annual pass to Six Flags and went there for lunch every day, it should be common sense that any time you are getting a deal that's way better than it should be that it won't last. You should be ready with a backup plan.
As soon as this person's storage was placed in read-only mode they should have been downloading a copy, but they just sort of trusted Google to never want to clean house, and as a result ended up with an impossible 7 day deadline.
That deadline isn't impossible if you were using it as a small business service like Google intended. It's unfortunate that "Unlimited" was used to market the service but I think someone with 200TB of stuff should know what Google Drive is designed to be.
I have brought this up with management several times and they are not concerned... after all, we pay Google a lot of money every month and we're doing nothing wrong. Yeah, tell that to those dumb algorithms, and when (not if) they misfire, try to get to talk to an actual human being with any influence and willing to help in a thoroughly evil company?
I bet in a week you couldn't even sync that much data tho.
EDIT: Actually egress seems to be 0,08. So roughly half of what I wrote.
Honestly, /r/datahoarder with their 240TBs or more is why we can’t have nice things…
As for Google accounts being nuked for inappropriate pictures: Whoa. You buy a cheap Android tablet, never really use it for photography. Then one day you grab some quick pix with it, not even realizing the default installed Google Photos app is going to upload them to the cloud by default. And then see them pop up on your other devices! This happened. Of course I instantly vaporized the Google Photos app on all my devices and installed Gallery Go instead. No cloud! And of course an alternate scheme for backing up the camera roll on my phone (I already remembered to set it not to sync photos to the cloud - I just forgot to check the tablet).
They didn't. All their equipment was taken in an FBI raid. They only backed it up to the cloud, never intended for the cloud to be the only copy.
This is not a technical issue, but an ownership issue. Google is mostly an ad company and as such they don't really treat you as users but as a product.
240TB is going to be some coin, even on R2.
> plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers [...] phased out [...] since he’s using too much storage, they’re going to delete his entire account in seven days (later this week).
First, an enterprise service provider who disrupts your operations in any way should probably be penalized, such as when evaluating future spending.
But an enterprise service provider who gives you seven days before they willfully delete your data... I guess you'd activate the lawyers immediately, to give the incompetent provider's bureaucracy enough time to halt the deletion... before it gets dramatically more expensive for both companies.
(And in parallel, throw money at the problem of racing to migrate to a different vendor, or at least get backups. You can try to recover the cost from the incompetent 'enterprise' vendor later.)
That said (and also acknowledging the HN memes that Google doesn't do customer service, and that Google will probably shut down most services of theirs upon which you might depend)... there's an obvious pattern in the 3 examples that the article gave.
In each example, the account had come under US law enforcement scrutiny. HN has heard other anecdata, but someone reading only this article would reasonably suspect that law enforcement action was a factor: maybe the company simply doesn't want to deal with that headache, either specifically or as a general policy; or it's conceivable that in some cases they might be asked to cripple/disrupt a user. Neither would be great, for a massive sometimes-monopoly for often crucial services, in a country with a legal standard of innocent unless&until proven guilty.
There are some interesting questions around those few examples of how customers under LE scrutiny are treated, but also questions around the various other examples HN hears of from time to time. And the article using only examples of the former might make the reader not as sympathetic as they should be, to a more general problem.
(Though occasionally some of the latter "Dear HN, company ___ cut me off!" examples sound like they could conceivably belong to the former category, without the complainer mentioning that factor. Even when a company makes it clear they're too big to care about a small percentage of users/customers, that's not necessarily the only reason a particular one gets stomped.)
I figure 14 x 20tb = 280tb or so for $5600. Then you could get the 8 bay from Synology for $1000ish, and another $600 or so for the expansion bay. Is there a cheaper setup than this? You can get a better price-per-terabyte sometimes, but it's bay-prohibitive. And oh god... the time to silver that, I don't even want to know.
I don't know how to transfer that either... if it were on Amazon, didn't they have a service where they'll 1-day ship you all the data on a suitcase full of drives?
As always, the cloud is someone else's computer.
In regards to the amount of storage he was using though, 250TB of information seems insane.
People who say "oh, but it is a loophole". Not really. Google saved a lot of money on marketing by making storage unlimited, comparing to onsite hosting, which was still popular 10 years ago.
What if I failed to make cloud storage payments due to sickness or credit card being denied/whatever .. how long will they keep stuff before just deleting it?
This is just another possible cloud failure mode - the unreachable/unreasonable cloud provider just deciding to delete your account due to some error on their part.
So, it's multiple hard drives for me. I guess I should really put one in a fire-proof safe or something ... It really would be convenient to be able to trust Google/whoever with them!
20T drives cost $300, so for around $4000 he could make his own backup copy of his life's work.
BTW, one can go directly to a store and buy a new computer and start downloading.
Not two hundred terabytes in a week. A week is 168 hours, and a gigabit network connection can only theoretically transfer 450 gigabytes per hour, or 75,600 gigabytes in 168 hours, still a far cry from over 200,000 gigabytes of content to download. Try getting more than a gigabit from anything other than custom fiber installations from a very limited selection of ISPs from a very limited subset of countries.
That's even assuming they're able to just buy a new computer with over 200 terabytes of storage, set it up with a gigabit network connection, and somehow convince google to use a gigabit of upload bandwidth for a week straight, which they definitely will not do for a single customer, considering they already just got cut off for using too much resources.
And that's also assuming the FBI didn't bar them from buying more computers somehow, and that computers are easily available / affordable in their country (including the said over 200 terabytes of storage).
The lowest price-per-gigabyte listed on PC Part Picker (which doesn't have every product ever made, but is still useful) is $0.012, or 6 TB for $71.45[0]. You'd need about 40 of them to hold this data (237.22 TB), which works out to about $2,858 for just the drives.
[0]: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/kXXfrH/seagate-internal-har...
Grabbing ones already available from Hetzner's "server auction" means they'd be fairly cheap (comparatively) compared to ordering brand new ones.
Something like the ones with 10 x 16TB drives for €260/mo.
Not sure if Hetzner would upgrade the network interface to 10GbE though, as that would be a requirement.
That's just the hardware too. He'd need someone technical enough to set it up for him (and keep it running), and there'd need to be some way to download the data to it from Google.
If this is how they are going to treat customers, it is probably not a good strategy to build a business around any of their products including their new AI stuff.
He should have started backups back in August when the FBI seized his computers, instead of waiting until the last minute (week).
"Cloud sync" services ARE NOT A BACKUP.
You want to use cloud sync for convenience? Great. It works well (mileage may vary by provider). Just don't expect it to be any safer than just having a single copy of those files on your PC or thumb drive or iPad or whatever.
Everyone in society needs basic IT training, everyone, from journalists to doctors. Among other things they need to understand that there is no such thing as unlimited.
And of course, lesson #2, it's always just someone's computer.
Last lesson for today, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
The moral of the story is that if your usage of an unlimited plan costs the company more than what you are paying, then you shouldn't be surprised when you get kicked off.
Is rclone and rsync the way to go?
Every company I've ever had any pull in, using Gsuite or GCP was marked as a risk in the risk register, and mitigations were put in place to manage that risk.
What company would preserve your data in light of finding CP?
None of it changes the simple facts of this matter:
Google sold an unlimited storage plan, not unlimited with a big asterisk but unlimited with terminology such as “as much storage as you need.”
Google then decided they didn’t like that anymore, so they retired that plan and told people that they needed to either free up storage or upgrade within 60 days or else it would switch to read-only mode.
Two things are essential here: 1) 60 days was not enough to download all the data this person had stored, and 2) it said nothing explicitly about deleting data; instead, the heavy implication was that the data would remain stored with the caveat that nothing could be added or edited.
Then suddenly, Google informed the user that they’d delete his data within seven days.
That’s it, no “loophole,” no “ketchup packets,” no nothing.
A promise to be able to use as much storage as you needed in exchange for payment, an implicit promise that the data would be safe, and then a rug pull.
No amount of Olympic levels of mental gymnastics will change these facts.
If Google wanted to renege on its promises, it should’ve provided ample time to download the data. In a general sense, Google, one of the wealthiest companies in the world, needs to stop being a cheapskate and stop refusing to provide basic customer service on their consumer services.
The fact that their “Contact Us” option keeps sending people to a forum for most of their products, which customer service agents don’t regularly frequent, is pathetic.
And I would definitely like to know what he stored.
But using a Google cloud VM might work to get the data out in time.
Not sure how well my setup works with binary files. My files are mostly org and source code. YMMV.
[1] Ibex leather is the most durable.
[2] You can find it second-hand on https://amazon.kz/ pretty easily.
Enlighten us
I did read it. Title is definitely reflective of the articles content.
Did you read it?
Where and what is obviously not matching?
Is there an analysis anywhere that looks into that?
I already switched most of my queries to OpenAI.
But Gmail and gcal are embedded in many of my daily life
I can also recommend Kagi as a Google Search replacement.
If someone puts up a reward sign for a lost dog and a stranger finds and returns your dog, you can’t just say “actually the terms have changed”.
I hope he has at least the final versions of whatever he did somewhere.
Yeah you might only be a decamillionaire instead of a billionaire but that's okay, you can die happy with the respect of your peers and family.
And then hide those very well...
* I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error,
* I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and suddenly stop getting their ads shown,
* I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen,
* I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview.
One of my more recent startups was actually funded by a Google based venture firm, and they wanted to know why we refused to use GCP. My answer is that I wanted the startup to actually succeed, and it wasn't worth the risk of dealing with Google's horrible support.
I've heard horror stories with GCP from paying customers.
If I had to lose one bit of data or port one platform due to Google's !@#$%^&, it would more than pay my lifetime personal Google expenses many times over, as well as of the lifetime expenses of my current employer.
Former employer bubbled up to millions of dollars, and it was still worth it. Former employer got screwed over by Google to a greater tune, despite having a dedicated engineering support team at Google.
The math starts to work out differently for some of the PaaS providers, where costs are several times higher than AWS, and my time is cheaper despite the (rather impressive) time savings. However, having a reliable cloud provider pays for itself many times over.
I've lost had serious unexpected expenses literally every time I've been in any business setting which did business with Google. That's quite a few times. Literally the only time I'll do business with Google is:
- Free tier, quick one-off hack
- Legacy
- Literally no other options
Even the legacy, I'm working to port away since it's cheaper to do on my timeline than Google's.
I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day.
In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools so I was unable to use the domain with GCP Cloud Run. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the product manager reached out to lecture me about how I shouldn't be using Cloud Run with domain mapping because that's in "preview". He then pointed me to another method to point a domain at cloud run, which it turned out was also in preview. All of this was because Google Webmaster Tools validated the domain but GCP wasn't able to get that information. I ended up cancelling the GCP project and just using AWS (as I should have from the start).
It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.
I will say though that companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well.
Very much this. At my company we have many other means of support readily available, but some people instinctively reach for Twitter for peer support. Being active on Twitter means our support team can help even those people who don't think to use our official channels, which is good for the customer and good for our image.
I think that parent post was just implying that AWS cares about it's image and will provide support even if you don't go down the correct channels.
Google doesn't give a shit regardless of the method of request.
They even go into your cloud architecture and tell you where you fucked up.
And yes, they have made their money back off me in the 10 years since (average $100-200 a month).
[0]: https://vertis.io/2013/12/16/unauthorised-litecoin-mining/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911908
And yes,it's bad practice putting the keys in code to begin with, and I knew better.
Won't save some of it if you're sleeping, but can definitely reduce the time someone has to run up bills.
Also to the users of their open source software, as many people who used Tensorflow 1.x can attest to.
This feels like the crux of the difference between Google and Microsoft/Amazon.
Google product culture seems to assume they built everything correctly, so if there's an issue, you're questioning their competency.
Microsoft/Amazon product culture seems to start with "weird things will constantly go wrong", so support is viewed as an opportunity to figure out how things can be made better, based on real world experience.
For most Google products, what seems to be missing is a link between customer support and SRE. I.e. "We're Google, we can't do customer support at our scale. SRE is a superior way of keeping services reliable."
Fair... but SRE doesn't handle "the real world is messy, and here's a situation a product manager never thought of."
Out of the big three, Google Drive had an insanely good run as unlimited. (Even non-enterprise business plans with caps in theory were unlimited in practice until this year.)
- Former ACD customer who got burned.
I assume this means they look at your photos and other data.
You can "compress" anything, if one of the modes of your compressor is simply to store the data "as is", but generally speaking encrypted data is indistinguishable from a random bit stream and cannot be compressed.
If you think about it, one of the ways that compressors and attacks on encryption work is by looking for structure in the data. If you still have that after encryption, you don't have a good algorithm.
Due to the pigeonhole principle, to be able to make some inputs shorter you have to make some inputs longer. The way compression works is by making more likely inputs shorter, while making unlikely inputs longer. But for encrypted data, if your encryption method is good (that is, not ECB mode), all possible values are equally likely (unless you known the secret key).
Mostly it's photos, pdfs, word documents, executables, videos, etc.
Aside from that there are mathematical tools you can use to detect whether a binary blob is compressed/encrypted or not, like entropy calculation.
That gives me an idea. Might be fun to write a tool that will encrypt a file but make it look like a valid .zip file that just unpacks to meaningless noise. There's gotta be something like that already out there... Although you could recursively unpack/evaluate and eventually you should get to the point where it's non-random data. If you never do, then it's encrypted.
There are some academic papers (I think one by Ross Anderson) which state that steganography relies on there being some randomness in the data you are hiding the message inside. So, to make the bandwidth available for for steganographic data hiding as large as possible, those needing to conceal data need incentives for innocents to publish files constructed using as large as possible quantities of random bits. It looks like Stable Diffusion is providing this incentive!
I used to use Amazon stuff but it has really become such insane spyware. There is no data collection/analytics that goes too far for Amazon. It's really appalling, no less so that they use their near monopoly on using Kindles to deeply mine for data on exactly what people are reading, how long on each page, etc. Really gross.
>I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error
I once just stopped paying an AWS bill on a small website I abandoned (few USD/month), came back to check after a long while and I was surprised to find out how long does it take for AWS to actually shut you down.
Also on AWS, on two different occasions I screwed up and got a high ticket bill:
* Got a lot of data out of Glacier and bill spiked to a couple thousand $$$ (this one'e explicitly mentioned several times in their docs but my mind just didn't register it).
* Forgot to turn off some expensive spot instances and left them running for ~2 days (where it should've been minutes). Again, some thousand $$$.
Both times I opened tickets, told them it was an honest mistake and they just wrote them off, :O.
I reached out to our account rep at AWS and asked if we could delay our bills for three months. They laughed and said that if we didn't pay our bill for three months their system would just send us a bunch of emails, but that they wouldn't even start the process of closing the account until at least three months had passed- and even then they'd delay it further for us.
We got a new funding round and paid all of our bills, but we would not have been able to make payroll if AWS wasn't so lenient about it. That was 2020, so almost three years ago, and that company is still regularly featured at AWS talks and product announcements.
I've heard of this happening to a lot of people. I hate using Adsense, and have mainly disabled it in the past, but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic and always think, "darn, I should have kept Adsense running".
I'm wondering if it's worth slowing down my sites and annoying users to eventually get to $100 to see if I'll be able to cash it out. It's getting close to $100, so it's hard to deactivate.
Do you mean you get more traffic when Google Ads are active/present on your website?
I.e. that the google search ranking algorithm prioritizes websites running Google ads?
So, it's like... wow, I should have kept adsense on (although I probably wouldn't have the same traffic if it was).
I think they are in dire need of a leadership change. If they want to serve businesses, they need to adopt actual business practices.
I guess as you scale up a business you want to get leaner and you accept lower margins, hoping to make it back by volume? Maybe that's what you mean?
Otherwise, each support request linearly requires human time.
This is a pernicious usage of "scale" that has crept into tech-speak, because it makes the term strictly less useful.
Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data.
However, it looks like this journalist did pay Google to host his data. So this immediately puts it in a worse category.
You are not paying the competition either; so you somewhat paying Google. It's not a direct payment but indirect support
Competition for what? Here we're talking about data hosting. There are plenty of companies that will host huge amounts of data for reasonable prices. And unlike Google, they actually have reasonable terms of service and customer support.
But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users.
Given their size and stranglehold on just about everything, pulling an "oops, sorry, I guess you get what you pay for" is just ludicrous at this point.
And sorry if it seems like I'm arguing directly with you, that's not my intention. But I see this a lot and have gone from saying it myself to vehemently disagreeing with it over the last decade or so.
However, as you note, they have been entrenched for years now, and it has been obvious for that same amount of time that they have long since dropped "don't be evil". So while it certainly sucks that they do the things they do, acting surprised when it happens is not a reasonable position at this point. Anyone who expects Google to honor any kind of commitment is simply asking for trouble. I don't trust them for anything.
And if widespread realization of that fact gets people to stop using Google services, so much the better: maybe that would actually get their attention.
Yes, I know about microG, Graphene, F-Droid and the like, but the average person is not going to flash their phone. They will inevitably hit a wall that says "you need to login with Google," create a Google account, and won't ask questions.
Just as an example, my mother-in-law couldn't find her contacts when she bought a new phone. Why? Because she was unknowingly saving her contacts to a Google account she forgot she made.
To the extent this is true, it's not just Google, it's also the phone manufacturers and service providers (like Verizon).
And you don't need to be hackerman to do this, I told my retired parents "you should check out F-Droid" and they did. Now they recommend F-Droid apps to me.
That's why I store only 1 file on my Google Drive - a 10 GB encrypted blob (TrueCrypt partition).
In some cases this kind of relationship auto-regulates itself (e.g., taking a small vs large credit in a bank): at larger scale, both parties are invested into maintaining a good relationship. The problem in this case is, any individual investment into any relationship with Google is just a drop in the ocean.
Then goes and makes new babies.
ok but a farmer that throws their cows down a ditch is arguably much worse than one that milks them.
That's not a suitable analogy for users of Google's free services. A suitable analogy would be, someone is offering free food, but (a) its quality sucks, and (b) they arbitrarily withdraw it from a significant number of people for no good reason. Yes, that's unpleasant, but "well it was free" is a suitable response in that case.
The issue in this particular case, though, is that the journalist was using paid Google services--which is a very different situation.
Funny, because they never seen to have problems hosting the advertising/surveillance data they collect on me. They never went "sorry we can't track you any more for free, will you type in you card number so we can keep surveilling you?"
Google does that by storing my data, many kinds of my data. You making the distinction between data that "the user knows and understands" versus data that "is obscure to the user but advertisers care about" is a matter of marketing, in that as the former is easier to charge the user for.
My point is that the argument of "you're not paying for storing data X therefore fuck you" is a silly one, because you're also not paying for storing data Y, and neither are the advertisers.
That's like saying you don't pay the restaurant for the chef, you pay the restaurant for the food. It's a level of semantics that rises to being simply disingenuous. It's a restaurant, not a grocery.
You can sell ads without targeting. In fact you can even sell ads without users.
Source: I worked years buying and selling online ads.
You can, but that's not really what Google is selling anymore. It's certainly not the only thing Google is selling.
Unless you're making the claim that the data storage that Google uses for their data tracking isn't paid for by the targeted ad service? That if Google suddenly couldn't use that data for targeted advertising anymore that they'd still keep it around, or that none of their other services would raise in price?
> You can, but that's not really what Google is selling anymore.
Wrong again. Google's thing is search ads. Those target keywords, not user data. User data is a side-gig for Google, mostly thru youtube, maps, and gmail.
My organisation (OpenStreetMap) is paying Google to host our emails.
They silently delete random ones, they never arrive at inbox.
(we are preparing migration to competing provider)
Paying does not help.
As I pointed out in the very next sentence of my previous post, yes, in this particular case the journalist was paying.
Any cloud service can't be relied on for anything. There is no law for mandatory backing up cloud content and no guarantees your data will not be lost. Buy HDDs while they still are available and do the back up yourself.
And like for many of us hobbies change over time, so do Google's hobbies.
There's somewhere a website with all the products killed by Google for various reasons, some even after a few months.
This should be Google's mission, purpose, values and tagline.
I'm very aware that cloud vendor lock-in should be avoided (or mitigated) at all cost, but PubSub was actually pretty nice.
Which prompts the idea: does Google have a data-backed adversarial operation, as a check on all that activity and biased analysis?
For example, when someone says "I did X, which resulted in a Y% positive impact to Z, so pls gimme dat sweet promo yo"... there's another function of the company that can say, "It was actually only 0.2 that positive impact, in that isolated regard; but more importantly, it had costs to A and B, which our current strategy model suggests resulted in substantial net harm to the company. Please tell all your colleagues that disregarding A and B is not the way to get a promotion."
I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview.
-just a free user of gmail who hopes to be undisturbed.
I can't stand OneDrive, I find it is a complete shitshow. I am a heavy Apple user so wondering if iCloud is maybe a worthwhile option or shall I use DropBox?
Wait, I don't think such a person exists. Wrong market fit, Google!
(But it would cost something like $5k-10k/month, not the ~$10/month that he seems willing to pay.)
I suspect it links here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/12005619?sjid=1774262812...
Just buy 48 seats of Google Workspace Business Plus to get 240 TB pooled storage.
237 TB is a lot of storage, 864 USD/month is actually pretty cheap to store it all in the cloud. For comparizon, Backblaze B2 costs 6 USD/TB which works out to 1422 USD/month.
As much as I despise Google, this is simply a case of RTFM.
Fujifilm had a "free" 500 TB trial. Maybe they can move the data fast enough.
https://channelbuzz.ca/2020/06/fujifilm-unveils-unique-prici...
>> Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over.
... but the first sentence sold me.
This is what happens when you store 250 TB video on somebody else's computer and expect it to be free forever.
> Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.
"free forever." indeed
Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.
So he wasn't expecting it to be free forever at all.
Where does it say he expected it to be free? In the article, there's a tweet that says "So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage"
To me, the bigger problem is that companies are allowed to offer "unlimited" anything in their marketing copy.
This is actually a good use case for something like AWS Deep Glacier or Azure Archive Storage: data that needs to be saved and accessed infrequently if at all. It'd be around $250/mo, but as a business expense for a professional journalist that seems reasonable. Amazon or Microsoft could of course turf those services in the future, but considering the number of large companies that use them for long-term archiving I would expect that there would be a lot of notice before taking that step.
Well, unless the definition of unlimited is actually unlimited as in "no limits", you shouldn't be allowed to use the word in any marketing material.
If a company can go around saying "Unlimited means there's a limit", then that's just nuts.
2) Off-Site Backups
Regardless of the threat, whether it is just bad media, house fire, ordinary thieves, or the FBI, relying on some cloud service as your only backup is a plan to fail.
If it is a threat if someone reads the backups, encrypt.
Sure, as a supplemental convenience, use Google or something. But as the only backup of your life's work? I feel really bad for them, they're obviously gutted. But at the same time, Google has been so publicly unreliable and high-handed for so many years (decades, really), that it's hard not to also feel some, 'whelp, what did you expect, doing something like leaving your valuables out on the sidewalk?'.
Edit: And test your backups
I'm not saying I don't feel bad for the guy, but can you really say that it was smart to rely on even a paid Google account, considering how often Google randomly drop entire product lines, or nuke individual accounts for random reasons with zero recourse (e.g., the screw-up of a 7-year-old kid described in the same article)?
2023/05/26 News about FBI seizure
10 July 2023 End of grace period
16 December 2023 closure of account
So there would have been plenty of time for new backups... Between July and December.
One disk of family pictures you can give to a family member.
As for the parts of it that really are his, he'll probably get that back from the FBI when they eventually return his equipment so I don't think his life's work is lost.
"regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, that’s a problem"
If a 7 year old found a parent's gun, walked into the street and shot a neighbor to death accidentally; the parent is also still responsible and accountable.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/website-permissions/websites/
"As a general rule, it is wise to operate under the assumption that all works are protected by either copyright or trademark law unless conclusive information indicates otherwise. A work is not in the public domain simply because it has been posted on the Internet (a popular fallacy) or because it lacks a copyright notice (another myth). For information on these and other public domain issues, see the section, “The Public Domain.”"
Related, search for "OpenAI lawsuits over copyrighted materials it uses to train ChatGPT".