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?
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.
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