Google is force canceling gsuite because I used unlimited storage as unlimited | Hacker News Reader

Google is force canceling gsuite because I used unlimited storage as unlimited

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91 pointslopkeny12ko100 comments

I sincerely wish that any company that advertised unlimited and didn't actually allow unlimited X was penalized because it is straight up false advertising.

unlimited data (but after 5tb we throttle you to 100kpbs) is not unlimited it is 5tb + 100k * 30 * 24 * 60 * 60

Google was unlimited with 5 users. Then they rug pulled and it was "as much as you need" + "you can request increases every 3 months". then prices went way up. now its "you are only allowed 3 increases"

its fine to have limits but businesses should be forced to disclose them upfront

Same for unlimited vacation.

Yup. This should be considered bait and switch. It's fraud plain and simple and they should be severely penalized for lying about the services because "it's too expensive".

I would love to see this happen. How do we actually bring a class action or some other thing that effectively means they can't do this anymore?

This is something that should be under the purview of an agency like the FTC. If you are affected by this you could file a complaint with them.

Why do you need a class action lawsuit? Simply sue the company in small claims court. Why give money to useless lawyer? You can put more money in your own pocket.

$5k isn’t going to get Google to stop lying. A class action settlement might.

OP was storing 400TB of data. I think Google charges like $100 / 2 TB so that's $20,000 /yr. Wondering if that would go outside small claims since small claims is up to €5000

The type of marketer or program manager who comes up with an “unlimited” offering usually has a very limited imagination for exactly how much of something a customer could really use.

These types usually have no sense for what limits their business could actually handle, because none of their current customers are using their service to anything approaching its operational capacity. And they probably don’t have any SREs to ask for stress-test data, either. So “unlimited” for them, just means “use it like everyone has already been using it and it’ll be flat-rate instead of PAYGO. Or go wild and use 10x or 100x that.” It doesn’t even occur to them that it’s possible that someone could use e.g. 10000x existing usage.

Part of the problem is the definition has drifted, and the cell carriers want to (understandably) keep using the old definition, and the tech geeks (understandably) want the new one. When "unlimited" data became a thing, it was in a world where data for your phone was sold in bundles of hundreds of MB, and when you hit your cap, you had no more data at all, or were charged quite a bit of money per extra MB. In that world, it was possible to turn a $60 phone bill into a $600 phone bill doing less data traffic in a month than most smart phone users will use in a day. And so in that world, "unlimited" data was clearly and well understood to mean "no hard cutoff and no overage charges". Maybe "unmetered" would have been a better term, but "unlimited" was something of a term of art already in the cell industry as applied to voice minutes (see "unlimited nights and weekends") and to text messages, where in both of those cases this was also understood to refer to a no hard cutoff or overage charges. For most consumers, the "limits" of their cell service has always been the line before they had to start paying more. And a throttled data pipe is well within that understanding.

If it's always a certain speed, that's pretty reasonable.

If the speed drops a lot after a certain number of bytes, calling that unlimited is deceptive. And that behavior is not unmetered either.

So what word should they use for such a plan that distinguishes it from the plans where going over your allocated data amount starts racking up data charges at $1 / MB? And would you really be satisfied if the company advertised the plans as "unlimited 3G data with 5G SpeedBoost™ for the first 50GB"? After all, if it's "always" 3G then it's always a certain speed, and surely its not deceptive to give better service than paid for from time to time.

That would be a fine description for it. I approve of this answer for your question of how to word it. Why do you think I wouldn't be satisfied? The big problem is that the 50GB cutoff is hidden. A cutoff like that is better than a hidden extra charge, but not a lot better.

Also, if they had to directly mention the speed they probably would use 3G and that would be a big improvement over the status quo where lots of carriers go down to 256kbps or 128kbps.

> surely its not deceptive to give better service than paid for from time to time

It's fine as long as you don't give a false impression to someone trying the service. Calling out the 50GB as a different speed avoids that pretty well.

> any company that advertised unlimited and didn't actually allow unlimited X was penalized

This pretty much happens in Australia. Almost every telco had been fined by the ACCC for some version of this. They keep trying it though, every couple of years. Just like the airlines and ticket companies keep trying drip pricing, and keep getting caught and warned or fined. The incentives are just too much to stop them.

We need a better stick.

The better stick is escalating fines for repeat offenses. I’m fine letting a company off easy for their first offense. But that second one they should know better.

Sure, but I kind of think fines might be the wrong kind of disincentive for businesses. This breeds a cost-of-doing-business mentality. Lying to customers and breaking the law should be existentially dangerous to them.

Perhaps some of the many privileges we afford big businesses should be clawed back once they show they are not trustworthy. Things which make it more difficult for the executives to do their jobs, easier for regulators to catch them if they do it again, and easier for the competitors to eat their lunch.

Jail time for egregious offences is not a bad idea either. In AU, in the lead up to passing a bill to make wage theft a criminal offence, a lot of big companies magically reimbursed workers tens of millions of dollars for 'accidental' underpayment going back 10yrs or more. All of a sudden it wasn't just other peoples money they were playing with.

I agree with you, and I'd like to offer two additional thoughts.

Firstly, I believe that one of the reasons these large companies have moved to arbitration is that it lets them get away with more, even if they lose.

If they lose, they only lose money, but the case is sealed, and the judge can't issue an injunction.

If it goes to court, a judge can award more than just money- they can order the business to stop making certain claims. If they continue despite the order, they could be found in contempt of court, and that would be serious.

Secondly, I believe that only criminal liability when there is willful misconduct will deter white collar criminals.

In practice, that means if a company does something bad, their CEO or other board members may go to jail.

I believe this could be a huge deterrent.

they generally did disclose them. I think what you're arguing is that they shouldn't be allowed to ever change the terms, even with significant warning.

One should view it as a monthly (even for those that paid yearly) recurring contract. Just like you can opt out of the contract at the end of each contract term, so can google (they just have to define what that means for those that got a discount by paying a year up front). Every month, the contract can change and the users can say its no longer valuable to them.

Its not fundamentally different than those who "buy" licensed DRM content in the cloud (which can go away). We like to say its not buying, you're just "long term" renting. Guess what, that's exactly what this is, except that's the entire point here, to not buy and simply rent, so there should be no confusion.

I’m even ok with them changing terms, things happen. I just think companies should not be allowed to say “unlimited” unless it is actually 100% unlimited

In practice, it was unlimited before the original change. many people had 100s of TBs and never had any issue until the policy change requiring them to move to a different product that clearly had a limit stated.

The story here is that Google used to have unlimited storage, and now they don't (for the obvious reason that it was a bad idea), and are enforcing 5TB/user limits on enterprise accounts. This was announced well in advance with plenty of warning.

How much adv. warning makes up for making a promise you (should have known you) couldn't keep?

However much was specified in the contract.

If you used a service you pay month-to-month, you explicitly agreed that, just like you can cancel w/ a month's notice, the counterparty can change terms with the same 30d notice.

A reasonable amount which they did. There was nothing bad faith about this. Google did offer unlimited space, people abused the crap out of it, they changed it. This is literally just childish behavior.

Unlimited offers have always implicit limits which every adult understands. When you go to the all you can eat buffet there's a common sense understanding that you can't literally fill your pockets with a thousand bucks worth of food.

> abused

used

> Unlimited offers have always implicit limits which every adult understands.

No, you're defending straightforward lying. Why should people have to figure out there's an "implicit limit" when they see the word "unlimited" with no asterisk/qualifier?

Companies have the option to not lie about this. There is no need for them to use the word unlimited. If it's truly impossible them to offer anything as truly unlimited, then OK, in that case the word "unlimited" should not appear on anyone's advertising (at least not without an asterisk). What's the problem with that?

No, I'm defending common sense. If you're going to insist they technically said 'unlimited' they're going to insist they technically didn't say 'forever', so what indeed is the problem? There's a letter and a spirit of a contract and everyone who isn't intentionally trying to be petulant understands the difference or is going to be treated in the same way.

99% sure gmail used to say Unlimited, Forever, waaaayyyyyyyy back

That was unlimited in the sense that you got more storage every day.

Since they jumped to 15GB over a decade ago they're still ahead of schedule, because the amount you got per day was not much.

And Oracle Cloud says the kinda beefy VM (4 cores of an ARM thing and 24 GB of RAM) on the free tier is free forever. Sounds reasonable to me. I mean, would Oracle really do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies? Surely they have bigger fish to fry, and a legal department that doesn't let them do stupid things. Besides, they even give you a bunch of free data egress, like it would cost almost $1k/mo on AWS! Man, this Larry Ellison guy sure is starting to seem like someone I could have a beer with.

That is a goddamn stupid way to run a business. It's fine for personal agreements, but you need to be absolutely specific when dealing business-to-business, for your protection and theirs. Leaving things unspecified is just asking for loophole formation that leads to unexpected expense.

I think you're mixing up two different arguments. One is about whether it's unwise to believe tech companies when they say "unlimited". I would agree it's unwise to believe them, because I have insider knowledge (that this word tends to be a lie in the tech industry). The other argument is about whether companies should be allowed to tell this lie without being penalised. These are completely separate things.

Note the word "unlimited" sometimes really does mean unlimited. For example, "unlimited train travel for a month" – there really is no limit to how much you can travel on that ticket. So it's not as if this word is always false by its very nature. It can be true, and it can be false. For some reason, in the tech world, we often encounter people like you defending this particular lie, apparently on the grounds that you personally have learned to see it as a lie so everyone else should just learn this too. It's a contemptible position. And you have the gall to call people "petulant" and "childish" for asking not to be lied to.

Though if we're going to make implicit-limit buffet comparisons, 5TB isn't even enough to mirror one hard drive. And the better comparison to what used to be unlimited is the "business standard" plan which only allows 2TB. That's a lot stricter than simply stopping "abuse" of the unlimited storage.

I didn't abuse it.

How does my contract change, again?

There was nothing saying that unlimited was forever. Usually if there is some guaranteed time period it should be documented as such in the contract. It's Google's right to change the product they are offering and it's your right to decide it's no longer the product you want to use as a result. The only thing you can ask for is ample notice so that you have to adjust to change if need be (which I guess is more of a courtesy and show of good faith).

> When you go to the all you can eat buffet there's a common sense understanding that you can't literally fill your pockets with a thousand bucks worth of food.

The name “all you can eat” suggests that you have to eat the food while you’re there, which naturally limits the amount.

Microsoft too: https://www.techradar.com/pro/exclusive-microsoft-quietly-en...

It's bitten a team I work with pretty hard, who for some inexplicable reason decided to store everything on OneDrive instead of our enormous on-prem NAS. Even more fun; all of their accounts still say "XTB of unlimited", the new data caps seem to be different for every user (everyone gets cut off at different amounts), and IT can't even get a straight answer about what the new caps are.

The new default is that everything goes to OneDrive. If you have data on your hard disk in regular Documents folders, it will move it to OneDrive without asking you.

No, this was a conscious decision on their part that they would store X00GB phsyics simulation results on OneDrive instead of the on-prem system that every other department uses. They've even written it up that its considered their "standard practice".

OneDrive has been worse in just about every possible benchmark so no one is sure why they did it. Best guess is it was some HPPO decision, who may or may not still be with the company.

Both of you are correct; it may have been an intentional choice by your team (since, otherwise it would go to a private onedrive, not a shared OneDrive).

It's also true that Documents are linked to OneDrive now in corp environments.

I think there's a way to disable it, but of course there's a different setting for the Office Suite, they also default to OneDrive.

I don't think this is restricted to corp environments anymore. I did a personal Windows 11 install and it started moving all of my stuff to OneDrive, and the way it did it (move instead of copy, across drives) caused me data loss. :(

They must have terrific Internet, or the data is never read

My company is going through that with Google Workspace. In most cases the teams who take that decision do so because they don’t like to have project files spread over 2 locations (code and simulations on a network drive, documents on the cloud). It doesn’t have anything to do with available storage.

You get to define plenty of warning?

Accurate, but that last sentence frames the behaviour as acceptable?

I have nothing against them for reversing a previous decision, but then they should admit the mistake and make amends — some kind of compensation? They way they've chosen to handle it makes them liars.

Google is also revoking the unlimited storage they granted to universities in the US. Many of my colleagues have terabytes (and 1-2 PB for some) of research data or lab backups on Drive that IT is having a hard time relocating.

This being a thing should have been pretty obvious. “Unlimited” never means unlimited in a literal sense. Even if phrased like so.

And loosing actual backup files a whole different story…

Saying something and then pretending you actually meant a different thing is lying. It shouldn't be up to the consumer to understand the minutia of an industry and intuit whether "unlimited" actually means "unlimited".

Unlimited has never meant unlimited in its truest sense. It’s just that the consumer tends to have their own natural limits, whether that’s time, or attention span, or the human body’s ability to ingest liquid.

Well the public at large seems to disagree with the corporate definition of unlimited. Also these unlimited storage accounts of consumers are stacked so high with data they are taxing the physical limits of google's storage pools?

Methinks someone at google is angling for a promotion behind a good ole rug pull knowing people will pay rather than have to shift that data around.

Consumers don't need langauge lessons they need to learn business is not to ever to be taken at their word without contracts & legal counsel involved. They are zero-trust players.

While your response is sincerely appreciated, it entirely misses the point. I'm not arguing definitions or "language lessons". I'm saying that any reasonable person understands that every single instance of "unlimited" with respect to the definition of a product or service is, with few if any exceptions, are not actually unlimited.

Unlimited Coke refills at a soda fountain aren't unlimited. The human body is naturally limited by how much it can drink. Elide that natural limit and you still butt up against a person's stamina for doing objectively stupid things. Elide that limit and you're still limited by the amount of syrup on hand at that location.

There is a commonly and widespread accepted definition of the term "unlimited" If anyone uses it outside of that definition, it needs to be disclosed upfront. If that didn't happen, then it's "unlimited" as in the common widespread definition of the term.

If you change the definition later, then you have changed your mind and look for a loophole to f people over.

That's all there is to it.

They said unlimited and now they're not keeping their word.

Sure, but if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. As an academic with hundreds of TB of data, I personally wouldn’t assume that some company would actually provide unlimited storage in perpetuity when the costs are clear and obvious.

Of course I would. It's Google! They can do it! And obviously they did.

How else do we explain people with petabytes of data on Google's drives when the term "unlimited" meant "30GB"?

My main point is that the costs of storage are fairly well known. One can estimate the cost to google of provisioning the datacenter class storage that a user with PB of data is using, and if your estimate of the situation is that it seems like that arrangement is likely to continue, then great. In my estimate, that seems unlikely unless there's a business case to be made for google (there certainly are some, like building familiarity in the system for academic trainees who may then go start startups or purchase storage from positions in industry).

If there's a place in the world I would expect to not have capacity issue, that's Google. If I were a judge, I wouldn't rule it's unreasonable for users to assume that it can store as many data as they produce, after having committed and advertised to do so.

Any idea what approach they're going to take? I wonder if Gsuite have an unpunished ability to do a snowball type export as a one-off.

For those university accounts they did much worse than revoke "unlimited". They were making a big effort of cutting down to 100TB per university. With a moderate amount of students, that's less than the 15GB a random free personal account gets. A single SSD server (plus replicas) can hold much more than 100TB.

You can get 500TB+ NAS appliances on ebay for 10k. Universities outsourcing this stuff WHILE STILL HAVING IT support staff at the same or higher levels is insane.

Run your own schtuff people! At least when you outsource your supposed core competence, then cull your infra and your staff.

Why do you assume universities didn't have fewer server admins while Google was actually delivering unlimited?

Though one person can manage a lot of storage, and you still need to support all the users. So even if you don't get rid of people, you save a lot of money when you don't need to store petabytes. Moreso with every year you look back.

I am just getting butt hurt about how universities are wasting so much on administrators of all types while making services worse. Looking at you University of Washington! This is a systemic problem in our civilization right now.

IT departments outsource their core competency to a vendor, spending more to deliver less while trumpeting new operational synergies only to have vendor fuck them over again, so instead of paying 2x for less, they are now paying 3.14x for 1.44x more less.

Some USA universities literally have endowments in billions/year. Universities were the places where Unix and Internet thrived back. And now? Uh-oh hosting our own data is very hard problem. Ridiculous!

Why would they host their own data it Google said they would do it for free? If you’re in IT, how do you even get support for on prem storage if Google has used its monopoly position to provide that service for free?

Privacy, long term access being two reasons. I’d hate to see you and your sloppy way of doing things running an IT dept, you would probably just upload all your data to torrent sites and archive.org as it’s easier

WTF that was uncalled for.

This is silly. The email in the screenshot shows the Google Workspace Enterprise Standard package, which is clearly documented as 5 TB/user limit.

If the complaint is that at some point in the past it was unlimited and Google switched it to have limits, then we can talk about that (and we have in numerous other threads over the last 2+ years).

It's pretty clear from the tone of his comments that he's not complaining, knows he was being unreasonable, and is treating this whole thing as a joke already.

It really isn't

she* When I first signed up (years ago, even before "Google Workspace Enterprise Standard", I got further grandfathered in from a GSuite plan) they were promising unlimited storage. I don't have any ready proof for this (except screenshots of gdrive etc saying I have unlimited data), but if I had a 5TB limit this whole time, I clearly wouldn't be able to upload 400TB to gdrive through mostly conventional means.

They changed from unlimited to 5TB/seat years ago (but they rolled out the enforcement very gradually: I heard that several friends got hit by this last year) and I was given notification to cut down my use 2 months ago (with threats of making it read-only), but one does not simply go from 400TB to 5TB. I wanted to try my chances on it staying read-only and google stopping nagging me about it.

Chances were not in my favor, and the read-only deadline was yesterday, and it changed instead to "we'll delete all your data in a month".

I'm not complaining (if anything I'm happy that I got a mad deal on storage for years), but it is indeed a matter of "unlimited" does not mean "unlimited forever".

I hope whoever that is has a really fast Internet connection, because 400TB is too much to download in 30 days even with a 1Gbps connection.

Thats just over 88 hours.

~400,000 GB * 8 bits/Byte = 3,200,000 Gb at 1Gbps that's 3,200,000 seconds or about 888 hours or about 37 days. If that's 400TB * 1024, instead of 1000, then it's a bit longer, pushing 38 days.

Sheesh, the TCP and whatever else overhead is probably more than the 24 byte difference of 1024 vs 1000..

Did you ever try and calculate the difference?

1TiB = 1024GiB = 10241024MiB = 102410241024KiB = 1024102410241024 bytes...

1024^4 is 1099511627776 bytes...

So it's 1099 GB vs 1000 GB which is a solid 10% difference. Your TCP overhead is not anywhere close to 10% unless you are sending with an MTU of 240...

88 hours would be at 1 GB/sec = 8 Gbps, not 1 Gbps.

400 TB over 30 days is about 1.23 Gbps.

ChatGPT and Wolfram Alpha confirmed to me that it's about 37 days, which is 888 hours, not 88 :)

Wolfram Alpha: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=400tb+at+1gbps ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/4ddd464a-dabd-4c12-9cc4-e8271a51a6...

(ChatGPT did a great job at breaking down the problem)

So did your sibling comments and I imagine anyone with very basic maths skills could.

And most likely burning a lot less carbon than ChatGPT.

Except everyone is forgetting the TCP/IP overhead. I also asked ChatGPT, and 400TB of data creates a 10.7TB overhead, which adds ~5 days...

if you had done the math yourself you would have arrived at a different number....

How so, care to educate the lazy?

It's all theoretical anyway, if it's 400TB split into individual files, and I'm using millions of HTTPS GET's, that's also overhead...

Gotta love nerds spending their Saturday (nights) arguing about some simple maths...

It’s ~888 hours, or 37 days.

You dropped a 0 somewhere.

37 days: https://chatgpt.com/share/bff87762-664e-4350-abf9-54be80064b...

1Gbps is 1 gigaBIT per second.

I wonder if they'll give the option for them to move to a paid storage option, at least temporarily, for them to have enough time to download everything.

I have the option to use the google workspace data export option to export the data to a google-owned gcloud storage bucket for 30 days. I'm sure given sufficient bandwidth on your end you could pull 400TB in a month from gcloud.

This does mean all the data is zipped tho, so you cannot be selective on what gets saved and what not, and I will have to use conventional gdrive methods (rclone etc) to download selectively instead.

Generally, services like Google Drive can't even max out a 1Gbps connection.

And then you'll get into trouble with your provider. While they promised you unlimited, it's only unlimited at full speed for the first xGB and then they reduce you to dial-up speeds. Or you cannot surpass 3* the average in your neighborhood.

Hello, I am "whoever that is".

I got a couple gigabit lines at my disposal and for this one I'll be using our local hackerspace's gigabit line, which is going through freifunk[1]. I'm also only planning on saving 20TB or so at most, which is definitely more reasonable with a gigabit line with a month to spare. (and to not bother everyone else, I'll limit the bandwidth use)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk

Without telling us how much storage he was actually using, this post is worthless. I could trivially abuse any "unlimited" storage plan to make the provider renege on their claims.

Read the comments, 400TB, and he's not bitter, but expected this to happen. Seems to be posting it because it's entertaining more than anything.

She hasn't replied to the tweet directly, but I haven't poked around her profile because Twitter it's behind the sign-in wall. The only thing her tweet showed was that she was previously notified and that she presumably hasn't taken action.

I replied to the tweet directly. Twitter hides anything but the direct tweet you were linked to these days if you're not logged in. I have 402TB on google drive.

I was told 2 months ago (and since, every morning at 9:23 -a good ritual-) that unless I go down to 5TB they will make my data read-only in 2 months.

I ignored this as it's hard to get rid of so much data, and hoped they'd let me stay read-only. Deadline elapsed yesterday and they told me they're going to nuke my account in a month. I'm okay with this outcome.

Can't tell how much exactly I'm actually using across my private groups+channels on Telegram (decent number of TBs), but their free and unlimited storage has been going well for me for the past 5+ years. Although arguably a significant chunk is actually shared (forwarded files).

I found references on Google's pages still that said "as much as you need" or whatever, even after they were actively shutting things down and enforcing limits.

"Unlimited" and "For lifetime" are two biggest lies services are using to sell their products.

I cannot read X/Twitter. Exactly what did this person waste our valuable earthly limited resources on?

Im just surprised google let that fly for years.

Half a petabyte of triple redundant storage ain’t cheap. Esp couple years back.

Tangentenly related, I thought my Google personal storage for photos and emails was unlimited for free but I've been getting nagging stuff about their 15gb limit now and shutting off my Gmail. Frustrating and feels like I'm being forced into it where the other option is to set up and manage my own photo back ups and hard drives...

Photos can be uploaded up to 16MP resolution in Google Photos "High Quality" option and will not be counted towards storage space, but that was before June 2021. After that date, Photos, emails and even Google Docs files are counted.

The count made me shift my storage provider to OneDrive, which I opted not to have my storage reduced (from 30GB) at the time they changed policy and reduced free storage to 5GB. I still retain backup in my own drive, though.

So, like Homer Simpson kicked out when he hadn't had all he could eat? There's always someone.

Looks like it is across-the-board or something.

I thought Google was a real billionaire not a fake billionaire like some of them are.

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