Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/12/google-promises-unlimited-cloud-storage-then-cancels-plan-then-tells-journalist-his-lifes-work-will-be-deleted-without-enough-time-to-transfer-the-data/

by josephcsible • 3 years ago

979 606 3 years ago

techdirt.com

wkat42424• 3 years ago

This is one of the reasons i dont like cloud.

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.

brookst• 3 years ago

I use cloud for everything, but that’s because I did some reflection and realized that I don’t actually have any digital data that would be catastrophic to lose. Annoying, sure. But whatever. I can’t think of a single digital artifact that would be so terrible to lose that it’s worth maintaining highly redundant storage at multiple locations myself.

wkat42424• 3 years ago

Oh I have a lot. All my photos for example. I have moved around so much I don't have all the hard copies anymore. And of the last 20 years there just are no hard copies.

I store them on ZFS shares at various sites and S3 glacier (not Amazon's own though).

jbaber2• 3 years ago

I thought this way until I had kids.

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

I do have code and lots of photos. And I use good old hard drives to store them. Cloud storage just for backup.

dacryn3• 3 years ago

the problem is that many people dont use it as a backup. In a backup scenario, you are immune to these things, because you still have your primary copy. It's annoying yes, but in a backup you can always afford to lose the backup with no problem.

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

throwawaaarrgh2• 3 years ago

Putting your files in a different provider is technically not a backup, it's a copy. A backup means data durability minimum requirements that most cloud file hosting does not provide without a business-level subscription. Even then it may not be replicated outside a region and not use cold storage.

The distinction is important if you want to rely on more than luck to keep your data safe.

pasttense01• 3 years ago

What is essential is to have important data stored in more than one place, something this journalist failed to do. Just storing it at home would also be a mistake--in case your house burns down.

marricks• 3 years ago

And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit.

Let's not victim blame, especially when the victim wasn't stupid.

bluish29• 3 years ago

something this journalist failed to do

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.

moduspol2• 3 years ago

I trust cloud just fine--I just don't trust unsustainable business models.

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.

AlexandrB3• 3 years ago

I trust cloud just fine--I just don't trust unsustainable business models.

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.

is_true• 3 years ago

The cloud should be treated as a cheap microSD

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

If it's Google Cloud you are talking about, then cheap as in cheap quality, yes. Cheap as in low price, no.

niceice• 3 years ago

Not your drive, not your data.

Ferret74463• 3 years ago

Until the FBI takes the drive away from you, apparently.

theandrewbailey• 3 years ago

And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit.

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.

plagiarist• 3 years ago

Seems ludicrous that they can get a warrant to take everything if he really was just hitting URLs.

deafpolygon2• 3 years ago

Worse than that- even if you are adjacent to a crime that took place and not the suspect, they can also invade your privacy - rifle through all of your private data online and so on.

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.

Anthony-G2• 3 years ago

I almost get the impression that the act of gathering of evidence for the supposed CFAA violation is intended as a form of extrajudicial punishment.

gwervc• 3 years ago

Startup idea: SaaS portal to trigger FBI raid on RAID disks, acting as a free replicated permanent archival storage. Retrieving the data is out of scope of the MVP.

martijnvds• 3 years ago

A raid-RAID?

davidmurdoch2• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the unlimited write-only cloud storage service (an April fools joke, maybe?) from a few years ago.

polygamous_bat• 3 years ago

Retrieving the data is out of scope of the MVP.

Perhaps you can eventually submit a FOIA request?

disqard• 3 years ago

"raid on RAID"

I see what you did there :)

Ferret74463• 3 years ago

And yet I see everyone here blaming Google and not the FBI. Until the day comes when Google is raiding your house and confiscating your data, it seems like the FBI is the bigger baddie here.

draugadrotten• 3 years ago

Remember, the cloud is just somebody else's computer.

This is what happens when you store 250 TB video on somebody else's computer and expect it to be free forever.

eviks• 3 years ago

This is what happens when you don't read the article:

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

jonnycomputer3• 3 years ago

He was paying, it was just an unlimited storage plan. Not free.

specto• 3 years ago

I think their point still stands, you can't trust the cloud companies for anything important.

isaacfrond• 3 years ago

According to the article

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.

slantyyz2• 3 years ago

expect it to be free forever.

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.

Sanzig4• 3 years ago

Yep, it's pretty clear that unlimited is going to have limits (250 TB is a lot of data, that'd be $1500 a month in Backblaze). However, Google should have been required to be up front about their definition of unlimited (eg: up to 10 TB), rather than leaving it as a nebulous ToS term they can arbitrarily decide upon in the future.

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.

ethbr13• 3 years ago

I try to fully read articles before I upvote.

> 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.

xyst• 3 years ago

a lesson I learned long before Google tried to “worm” itself the daily fabric of our lives: don’t trust cloud services

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.

blibble• 3 years ago

I think the best advice you can give anyone for tech in the 21st century is to never, ever rely on any Google services or products

UseStrict• 3 years ago

Agreed, I use their services, but I absolutely do not depend on them. They can't be trusted.

jonnycomputer3• 3 years ago

Well, what he needs to do is get a lawyer, though I'd expect he has one, given that he stuff has been seized by the FBI.

I bet in a week you couldn't even sync that much data tho.

WhatsName• 3 years ago

When will a regulatory entity step in and stop large corps to run services at a net loss. In essence, the whole tech industry relies heavily on venture capital supported bait&switch.

Giving services away for free or selling under value is clearly anti-competitive behavior.

AlexandrB3• 3 years ago

Yes. This approach kneecaps any startups/small businesses that try to run profitably from day 1 (i.e. without taking tons of VC money). The net effect is that VC firms get to pick winners before the market ever gets involved.

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

tedivm5• 3 years ago

People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in the startup world, and I'd rather host all my content in us-east-1 than rely on google.

* 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.

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything.

I've heard horror stories with GCP from paying customers.

matwood• 3 years ago

Yeah, say all you want about AWS pricing, but damn if Amazon doesn't go out of their way to support things for a very long time.

frognumber6• 3 years ago

What I can say about AWS pricing is that my monthly personal bill is just over $10 for all I want to do personally, and my employer's bill is... higher, but cheap compared to the cost of my time.

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.

tedivm5• 3 years ago

Not only that but they actually provide real support.

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.

oefrha2• 3 years ago

Amazon Cloud Drive used to be “unlimited”. They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google. Before Microsoft’s OneDrive too IIRC.

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.

moralestapia• 3 years ago

To add to that, and related to,

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.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

Same applies to Azure, they also have their issues, but not Google bad.

whatamidoingyo2• 3 years ago

* 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 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.

winter_blue• 3 years ago

but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic

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?

simonlc• 3 years ago

If I recall correctly, if you choose to close your adsense account send you your remaining balance even if it is below $100.

sct202• 3 years ago

As long as you don't turn on auto-ads, you can control Adsense to take up a limited amount of space as small as you'd like. Most of the users that would be offended by ads are already blocking.

datadeft2• 3 years ago

Google decided it is time to sell GA for enterprises with 3rd parties involved. One client of mine (1B+ revenue, Xth largest website in Europe where x < 10) did not sort out the 3rd party agreement on time. Google's answer: we are going delete all of your data. Have a nice day!

barbazoo• 3 years ago

this seems like there is something missing to the story though, no?

dna_polymerase• 3 years ago

Their abysmal user support is the number one complaint. How the f*ck didn't they wake up to this issue by now.

I think they are in dire need of a leadership change. If they want to serve businesses, they need to adopt actual business practices.

faeriechangling• 3 years ago

Support doesn’t scale so Google doesn’t want to do it out of greed and immaturity.

pdonis7• 3 years ago

People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything.

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.

number62• 3 years ago

Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data.

You are not paying the competition either; so you somewhat paying Google. It's not a direct payment but indirect support

smhenderson• 3 years ago

That whole "you're not paying"'thing is really a straw man at this point too. When Google was young and eager to be a good netizen I'd have agreed with that and said it was all part of helping to make the web better.

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.

wayfinder• 3 years ago

Google just spends millions of dollars building a product then dumps its own baby on the streets.

Then goes and makes new babies.

bryanrasmussen• 3 years ago

but you're not paying Google to host your data.

ok but a farmer that throws their cows down a ditch is arguably much worse than one that milks them.

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

It's always been a garage argument. If someone is offering free food, and it gives you food poisoning, on purpose, you don't say "well it was free".

sertbdfgbnfgsd4• 3 years ago

but you're not paying Google to host your data.

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?"

matkoniecz4• 3 years ago

but you're not paying Google to host your data.

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.

codedokode2• 3 years ago

company that can't be relied on for anything

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.

profunctor• 3 years ago

Aren’t the guarantees the SLA that is agreed with Amazon, Google etc?

JohnMakin3• 3 years ago

The journalist had nearly 500 TB of data to store.. getting that much local storage could be prohibitively expensive. That's sort of the whole selling point of cloud services.

iamgopal• 3 years ago

It’s ~18 years since my blogpost blog caught click fraud, I still can’t do many things related to ads because of it. That credit card is still on their record and that address on which I lived total 2 months one and half decades back, is where I live in their record. Stupid stupid company.

ExoticPearTree2• 3 years ago

Just to be put the record straight: Google is an advertising company with hobbies.

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.

danhodgins• 3 years ago

@ExoticPearTree - "Google is an advertising company with hobbies."

This should be Google's mission, purpose, values and tagline.

justin_oaks• 3 years ago

The website you're referring to: https://killedbygoogle.com/

gurchik• 3 years ago

I've always wanted to ask, how do engineers who work at Google think about this? I want to work at a company where I feel like I'm making the lives of our users better. I'm sure this is true for lots of users of Google products, but there are also thousands or tens of thousands of people who have had serious real life impacts because of it. You can see many of them in this thread: AdSense businesses getting shut down, Youtube content creators getting banned for mysterious reasons. I try to work at companies that believe these problems to be unacceptable to even 1 person. While that goal may not always be possible, I would not be comfortable with anything less than an immediate resolution and a postmortem to prevent it from happening again. Is this also true at Google? I don't know anyone at Google to ask.

thiht• 3 years ago

Damn, I've had a great time using GCP at my last job, especially coming from AWS. This disappoints me a lot but I can't say I'm surprised, I've stopped using Google services almost everywhere (I'm slowly migrating away from Gmail, and I'm still stuck with YouTube) for this very reason.

I'm very aware that cloud vendor lock-in should be avoided (or mitigated) at all cost, but PubSub was actually pretty nice.

neilv2• 3 years ago

External to Google, I think we have little data, but we've heard that much internal behavior is based on individuals making data-backed cases for positive contributions to the company.

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."

bbor• 3 years ago

  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.

If anyone’s ever been curious what working at Google is like, this sums it up perfectly…

dgellow• 3 years ago

Is it really better with other cloud providers? Genuine question. I personally never faced terrible issues like the one described, it’s always difficult to understand if it is really a GCP problem and not a general cloud problem.

kzrdude2• 3 years ago

It seems safer to not have any financial ties with google at all. Not paying for services and not being paid for services. Not publishing apps, not using ads.

-just a free user of gmail who hopes to be undisturbed.

tedivm5• 3 years ago

I'd rather be a paid user of Fastmail than a free user of GMail.

toss12• 3 years ago

1) Physical Media that YOU physically own & control.

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

xeromal• 3 years ago

He had backups. The FBI took them from multiple locations

toss12• 3 years ago

I didn't see that, but if so, then clearly more steps (i.e., more locations, hidden) were needed in that risk scenario. Plus, he had 60 days, then 7 days notice form Google.

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)?

Mashimo2• 3 years ago

I agree with having offsite backup. But for 250 TB that is not that easy or cheap.

One disk of family pictures you can give to a family member.

uxp8u61q2• 3 years ago

Storing 250 TB in a public cloud isn't going to be cheap either. Even aws glacier is going to be close to $1k/month for that amount of storage. And god help you if you actually want your files back (around $25k for retrieving the whole thing!).

mngdtt• 3 years ago

The title is wrong. He had the option of paying for the space at least for the time that it takes him to download and archive the data himself.

nhumrich• 3 years ago

Source? None of the emails shown said anything about buying additional space.

jsnell5• 3 years ago

The first email shown in the article ends with the call to action of "get more storage" and a link. Pretty obviously that would be buying additional space, not getting it for free.

(But it would cost something like $5k-10k/month, not the ~$10/month that he seems willing to pay.)

jsolson• 3 years ago

The second one has a link labeled "free up or get more storage."

I suspect it links here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/12005619?sjid=1774262812...

kristofferR• 3 years ago

Pretty clear blackmail. "We are gonna delete your data before you have a chance to download it, unless you pay us thousands of dollars"

eemil• 3 years ago

Had? He still has that option.

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.

ofrzeta2• 3 years ago

Google charges USD 0,15/GB for egress traffic out of GCP. That's USD 36864 for 240TB. Am I right?

EDIT: Actually egress seems to be 0,08. So roughly half of what I wrote.

TomK322• 3 years ago

Just looking at the cheap 20TB disk drives available here in Austria, the disks alone add just over 4000 Euros to that, and then you still need a machine to host 12 drives, I see one QNAP for 12 disk for only 1500 Euros. But it has only a 2x10Gb connection. Slimming down the data sounds like the first thing to do here.

ansible3• 3 years ago

It is likely uncompressed video, so that really means just picking and choosing what to keep. Most of it is likely trash anyway.

at_a_remove• 3 years ago

He's really at the point where owning (much less renting) a tape drive would make sense. LTO-9 is eighteen terabytes uncompressed, which I would leave it at because hey, this is video. Rent a tape drive and get a few boxes of tapes. One copy at home for the FBI to take and one copy over at a friend's place in a shoebox ...

jeremyjh2• 3 years ago

The article said it was stored in a Google Workspace account, which means it is Google Drive and there are no egress fees.

ofrzeta2• 3 years ago

Oh I see. Thanks for the information.

oefrha2• 3 years ago

No, download from Google Drive (Workspace or not) is free. They don’t promise they’ll actually let you download 240TB in 7 days, though.

Honestly, /r/datahoarder with their 240TBs or more is why we can’t have nice things…

callalex3• 3 years ago

No, Google flat out lying by calling something that is limited as “unlimited” is why we can’t have nice things. I don’t understand why anyone would go out of their way to defend blatant liars.

Nemo_bis• 3 years ago

Egress charges probably don't apply (or not directly; you might have to pay them anyway if the only way to download fast enough is to run your script in GCP), but if they did there are services which do the migration for you and take the hit on the egress. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/features/cloud-migra...

darrmit• 3 years ago

They've skated by with this sort of completely insensitive handling of customers for years and my (completely anecdotal) recent experience is that less technical people are starting to take note. I have friends who have never cared about investing their entire digital lives in Google who are suddenly asking about de-Googling. I hope it prompts a change, but in the meantime I never recommend to friends or family they put anything solely in Google they can't afford to lose.

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

Don't use Google services and you'll be a happier person. :)

TomK322• 3 years ago

250TB, does that qualify as data hoarding?

Mashimo2• 3 years ago

Probably contains unedited and maybe raw video files.

I hope he has at least the final versions of whatever he did somewhere.

stephc_int13• 3 years ago

I think that "the cloud" should not be considered to be a safe long-term storage. It can be used as redundancy backup, but if you really need to keep your data, you should take care of that yourself.

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.

miked85• 3 years ago

I honestly don't know why anyone would use Google for anything anymore.

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

Maybe someone who like losing work, like losing money, like his account being terminated for whatever puerile reason, likes being tracked and likes to see lots of ads.

Wait, I don't think such a person exists. Wrong market fit, Google!

logicchains4• 3 years ago

They're going to corner the https://www.dictionary.com/browse/masochist market.

andrewmutz• 3 years ago

The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"

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.

darkwater2• 3 years ago

Sure, let's blame the victim here!

boringg11• 3 years ago

I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Google is in the wrong on their response but, come on, let's be reasonable human beings and stop saying 'victim blaming'.

masfuerte2• 3 years ago

This is all reasonable but you missed the bit where they gave him only seven days' notice.

kotaKat• 3 years ago

They didn't; there were many emails throughout 2022 discussing "Important changes to your subscription" from the Google Workspace Team stating that unlimited storage plans were going away and that people were being moved to pooled storage across the entire account.

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.

calamari4065• 3 years ago

To download that in seven days would require something like 3gbit/s

I somehow doubt google drive would even support that level of egress.

frognumber6• 3 years ago

The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"

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.

boringg11• 3 years ago

Crisis (!?) is a bit dramatic.

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.

garblegarble• 3 years ago

He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota.

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

rsync2• 3 years ago

"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."

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

... and if you don't want to bother even installing rclone, you can run it somewhere it is already installed:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever

Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google <--> aws are capable of).

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:

https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html

lwhi• 3 years ago

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.

Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

shwouchk5• 3 years ago

Sorry, but I call FUD here;

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?

lancewiggs• 3 years ago

I'm told that Movebot can do this in time - getting the archives to s3/wasabi or Backblaze etc.

Tommstein• 3 years ago

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.

Dude uploaded over 237 TB, they must have some really long years where you live.

compsciphd4• 3 years ago

I had a business account that was told they were cancelling the service. We were given 3 months or so notice.

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.

rokkamokka• 3 years ago

The bad part is that Google announced 60+ days before the change took effect that the account would become read-only. Nowhere did they state the account would be terminated, or could not indefinitely remain in a read-only state. Then, they suddenly spring a 7 day deadline to download all your data, with no previous mention.

Very poor communication from Google.

wombat-man• 3 years ago

I'd assume it couldn't remain in read only forever. But yeah since it's data loss Google should be very loud about that eventuality. I was getting weekly emails from dropbox about my inactive account before they nuked it.

azemetre2• 3 years ago

Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it.

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.

cassac2• 3 years ago

Just like “unlimited vacation.” Whenever someone says it you know there is something going on and you aren’t going to like it.

renewiltord3• 3 years ago

I believe most companies don't offer unlimited plans anymore these days. And Google probably removed theirs because of use cases like this.

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.

gaoshan• 3 years ago

My previous comment was not as informed as it should have been (because I opined after only read the title... a mistake, to be sure). I've edited it and will leave it at this being a very unfortunate situation to be in.

boringg11• 3 years ago

Completely agree with this. If it's your "life's work" - "free tier" storage is 100% not the place to put it.

update: Not Free but feels like taking advantage of enterprise storage (0.07 $/TB) close to free.

Uehreka• 3 years ago

He can buy his own drives, with redundancy, for less than 2 months of that.

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.

that_guy_iain4• 3 years ago

The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"

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.

rkagerer3• 3 years ago

Unlimited means unlimited. Too often what gets lost in the phrase "edge case" is that there's a human being on the other end. They should do the decent thing and work with him and anyone else storing more data than can be practically downloaded to come up with a workaround or extension. Imagine if your bank closed your account and forfeited your money because they couldn't dole it out to you fast enough.

hn_throwaway_992• 3 years ago

The GP comment didn't "just expand it". There is a huge difference in the English language between "Life's Work Deleted" and "Life's Work Will Be Deleted." Past tense and future tense are very different things.

flavius296632• 3 years ago

So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.

Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

gizmo• 3 years ago

You cannot export 240TB in 7 days. And a journalist can be forgiven for not knowing what the market value of cloud storage is. Besides, Google offers many services for free (or below cost) in order to maintain their dominant market position. I don't think your take is fair to the journalist.

johnnyanmac7• 3 years ago

I think everyone is also burying the HUGE wrench in the whole idea of storage preservation:

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

bachmeier2• 3 years ago

When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan

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.

Sanzig4• 3 years ago

It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay 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.

LoganDark6• 3 years ago

you can sidestep that with something like Snowball

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...

imtringued3• 3 years ago

Deep glacier is unviable for anything except partial retrieval.

RajT883• 3 years ago

For 5k you could build a box to store that kind of data.

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.

rst• 3 years ago

The guy's boxes were confiscated by the FBI, which was why he'd been forced onto cloud storage.

xethos• 3 years ago

As noted in the article,

"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).

x0x03• 3 years ago

Because I was curious what drives cost today --

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.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

S3 is not where this belongs. Backblaze B2 would be better and cheaper (~$1428/month) and no egress fees due to Cloudflare bandwidth alliance, the Internet Archive also has a private offering [3].

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

[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

[3] https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault

stephenr2• 3 years ago

Rsync.net works out essentially the same ($6/month cheaper) on a monthly basis, but offers 10% and 15% discounts for 12 and 24 month options.

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.

hn_throwaway_992• 3 years ago

I agree, dang should fix the title, this one is falsely editorialized as saying the deletion already occured.

lolinder5• 3 years ago

When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state.

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.

[0] https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

shkkmo6• 3 years ago

Google gave him 60 days after they fired him to continue using his account for free. After that they gave him another 5 months in read only mode to find a solution.

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.

charcircuit4• 3 years ago

He already needed to have 5 users in his workspace to unlock unlimited storage.

jdross• 3 years ago

It would cost around $300 a month for archive tier storage, $5000 a month would be for standard ready access

Buying the drives would cost at least $5k

avereveard• 3 years ago

5000 a month

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.

backtoyoujim• 3 years ago

I am not a fan of "some else figured out that they could overcharge people" as a moral lesson.

toastercat3• 3 years ago

I think the bigger issue here is that 237.22TB is not trivial, yet, it is still a gargantuan task to actually get a hold of a human being at Google.

johnnyanmac7• 3 years ago

Yup. Youtubers have, are, and continue to be subjected to this. Can be booted out at a whim at anytime due to automation, with no hopes of getting any actual human to interact with unless they have dedicated line to staff (i.e. you're one of the huge 1M+ subscriber channels) or you make a big enough ruckus on social media. Your potential livelihood can be terminated by the whims of bots.

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.

andrewmcwatters• 3 years ago

For readers' reference, a "Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS 22 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive" costs $399.99.

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.

germandiago• 3 years ago

Thanks. I almost believed the headline. That looks more accurate.

dontupvoteme• 3 years ago

He was definitely pushing it, but google is being extremely aggressive with timelines just to get resources freed up.

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.

lopkeny12ko• 3 years ago

The fault here still lies with Google. Why advertise the plan as "unlimited" if it is not actually unlimited.

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.

zlg_codes6• 3 years ago

I make it a point to downvote people who think they are tone moderators. You could have submitted it yourself if you found it first.

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.

s3p• 3 years ago

Not entirely true. S3 Glacier would only come out to $830 a month.

tky• 3 years ago

It appears that he had a Workspace account which offered “unlimited” storage for a time, predicated on the account type being multiuser businesses or education, with a per-seat fee. Google phased out the unlimited storage awhile ago (over a year) after people discovered a loophole where paying for one account still provided unlimited storage. Predictable abuse followed (see /r/datahoarders).

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.

Nicksil13• 3 years ago

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”

E39M5S62• 3 years ago

"a lot of money" and "a long time" are subjective.

cedilla2• 3 years ago

Google offered "as much storage as you need" for the Workspace account, without attaching a condition on a required number of seats. It's not a loophole if a customer takes them up on the offer.

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.

justrealist2• 3 years ago

This is like getting kicked out of McDonalds for ordering a small order of french fries and instead eating 400 ketchup packets.

Things are free when people don't abuse it. Just be normal. Jesus.

amf122• 3 years ago

As with any subscription, there is a time bound to it, after which either side can refuse to renew it. The account was never "unlimited for life".

Let's assume it's AWS storage. After you stop paying (renewing) would you still expect to keep your data forever free of cost?

rvba2• 3 years ago

Their departments are so big yet they solve the problem in shittiest way using third world standards.

anthk• 3 years ago

Terabyte sized disks are dirt cheap today.

datadrivenangel• 3 years ago

Not on a per kilo or per m^3 rate compared to actual bags of dirt from the hardware store.

flibble• 3 years ago

Unicorn tech founder here. Google — if you are reading, it’s stories like this and examples where you c.10x the price of products overnight like Google Maps that I would never let our team use GCP. Your reputation is losing you business here.

TheNewsIsHere• 3 years ago

Someone else up-thread mentioned that they add Google as a risk when documenting risks.

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”.

not_your_vase• 3 years ago

You know what would be "funny"? If Google would charge him egress fees while he is moving his data, just to add insult to injury

TheCaptain4815• 3 years ago

This article convinced me to get a real backup HDD setup. Google has pretty much my entire life history in photos, documents, excel sheets, etc, and storage is dirt cheap now.

In regards to the amount of storage he was using though, 250TB of information seems insane.

game_the0ry2• 3 years ago

Out of the bug cloud providers - Google, AWS, Azure - which one has the best support and most reliable storage?

logicchains4• 3 years ago

Definitely AWS.

game_the0ry2• 3 years ago

Wondering if I should zip all the pics i save on my paid g drive and uploading to s3.

DharmaPolice• 3 years ago

"Unlimited" anything needs to be retired as an offering since we know genuinely unlimited storage would be impossible to deliver. I assume it's easier to legally weasel out of a service offering if you say "Unlimited" (but really mean 5TB) rather than say 6TB (but really mean 5TB).

katbyte2• 3 years ago

The one I hate is “unlimited bandwidth” by ISPs that then throttle and then aregue it’s unlimited because they throttled not cut off - no it’s not it’s data caps in a round about way

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

I wonder why did they not have local copy of such important data? Isn't that only safe way anyway?

notamy• 3 years ago

And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit.

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

And did that happen in December? If it is truly important data I would expect process of new backups to be started immediately. After finding new device to order some disks online when the agents left.

And then hide those very well...

tantalor• 3 years ago

cloud = somebody else's computer

dspillett3• 3 years ago

A week of notice to move ~250TByte out is definitely unreasonable. 250TiB in 7 full days is an average of over 3.6Gbit/s, assuming no transfer interruptions and that he started immediately (i.e. already had other storage options lined up, and started transferring the second the notification email was sent).

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.

petee• 3 years ago

And I'm assuming you'd get blocked before even finishing the download. I've gotten rate-limited in gmail just for deleting messages too fast

roboyoshi• 3 years ago

you can generate serviceAccounts in google cloud that act as clients for your google workspace with no additional cost. It's a neat hidden trick to circumvent the google quotas, but you need to write your own clients/wrappers to utilize that properly.

ansible3• 3 years ago

The FBI seized his computers back in August. He should have bought new hard drives and made a backup of his cloud storage starting back then, if that was so important.

dspillett3• 3 years ago

Assuming new kit would not be seized once it had data on…

Maybe looking for other online providers at that point to store secondary copies would have been an option, but not a cheap one.

aPoCoMiLogin• 3 years ago

the unlimited plan was phased 7 months ago [0] so got few notices, with the final one 7 days before termination. so the guy with 250tb of data neglected that for half a year and now is surprised.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937436

dspillett3• 3 years ago

TFA suggests that the previous communication on the matter stated that the account would go read-only, not that any data would be lost. Do you have any evidence that suggests other notifications were sent between?

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.

duxup3• 3 years ago

Title is straight up false compared to the actual story.

Nicksil13• 3 years ago

Title is straight up lies.

Enlighten us

duxup3• 3 years ago

The actual text in the story doesn't match the title. It's pretty obvious if you read it.

thih9• 3 years ago

Tangental, but I have a feeling that media size - 40MP+ raw photos, 4k videos - outpaced the storage costs.

Is there an analysis anywhere that looks into that?

cassac2• 3 years ago

They also pulled this bait and switch on Universities.

lijok• 3 years ago

I heralded this warning to many people before - doing business with Google is a liability.

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.

deadbabe• 3 years ago

250TB is a lot of data, there is a good chance a lot of that will never even be seen more than once if at all. It’s at least 15 years of straight video runtime.

ansible3• 3 years ago

Apparently the guy has some kind of video production company. It is possible that these are raw video files which will take up way more space. Even though this is his business, there's a decent chance that most of it will never be needed again.

He should have started backups back in August when the FBI seized his computers, instead of waiting until the last minute (week).

shdon• 3 years ago

Stories like these have led me to come to the conclusion that Google has literally become downright evil. Our company does basically everything in the Google cloud and if Google decides to shut us down, we're gone. Our reliance is, imho, an existential threat.

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?

logicchains4• 3 years ago

They're not downright evil, if they were downright evil they'd be doing everything they can to make money. Instead they're stupid evil: deliberately losing money and customers because they can't bring themselves to treat their customers with respect.

EnigmaFlare• 3 years ago

This video data isn't even his to have any right to keep. He took it from another company's insecure website. Even if Google kept it for him, the government could and probably should make them delete it.

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.

b8• 3 years ago

This isn't new and Aaron Swartz actually wrote a blog post back in 2006 about his gmail account being gone [1].

1. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/gmaildown

bitcharmer• 3 years ago

Classic Google

65102• 3 years ago

I think the solution is to inform and assist the FBI with seizing the rest of his data.

65102• 3 years ago

At least that way it is preserved?

Fujifilm had a "free" 500 TB trial. Maybe they can move the data fast enough.

https://channelbuzz.ca/2020/06/fujifilm-unveils-unique-prici...

avgcorrection• 3 years ago

HN comment from eight years ago: snickers serves them right for relying on some cloud company. And for relying on digital data. I have made a thrice-redundant backup system that uses a fire-etching leather-printer[1][2]. Of course there is a Python program to read it back as well. It just took me three weekends. Why didn’t they do something like that?

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.

muragekibicho• 3 years ago

Shameless plug: I make custom data compressors here : https://github.com/MurageKibicho/Middleclass-Zip/

23B1• 3 years ago

The days of looking up to SV unicorns is over. The sooner we start thinking small, building small, and ignoring the religion of hyper-growth the better.

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.

blobbers• 3 years ago

What is it about telecoms that grandfathers in customers to cell plans. Certainly it isn't the cellular provider that does it in the name of "great service".

ajhurliman• 3 years ago

I don’t understand how tech companies aren’t being sued for reneging on their promises, it seems like an announcement like “unlimited storage forever” is a unilateral contract that has been broken.

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”.

dustedcodes• 3 years ago

Can anyone recommend any good ways of migrating tons of data from Google Drive to an alternative and what alternatives do people recommend?

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?

WalterBright3• 3 years ago

The lesson, again, is never trust your life's work to some unaccountable third party that can go dark on you on purpose or by accident.

20T drives cost $300, so for around $4000 he could make his own backup copy of his life's work.

LoganDark6• 3 years ago

The FBI took all their hardware in a raid.

WalterBright3• 3 years ago

Yes, but that's a separate problem.

flerchin• 3 years ago

I guess google wouldn't charge him at all if all those videos were uploaded to youtube and set private. The disconnect is weird.

MarkusWandel• 3 years ago

Relying on a cloud account, free or otherwise, to store the only copy of your life's work is asking for disaster. If you rely on data being archived, you need to know enough to do it yourself, on redundant portable hard disks, whatever. The cloud copy may be a working copy, but it has to be backed up.

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).

LoganDark6• 3 years ago

Relying on a cloud account, free or otherwise, to store the only copy of your life's work is asking for disaster.

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.

diamondfist25• 3 years ago

What’s a good way to remove Google from my life?

I already switched most of my queries to OpenAI.

But Gmail and gcal are embedded in many of my daily life

wrboyce• 3 years ago

I can recommend Fastmail for email, they’ll even pull in all your gmail data. I use iCloud for my calendars which works well but I guess you’d need to be an Apple user.

I can also recommend Kagi as a Google Search replacement.

exabrial• 3 years ago

I don't know how many times this has to be repeated in the comments section: Don't depend on Google in production for anything.

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.

asimpletune• 3 years ago

What’s sad is how all of the prestige from late 00’s has gone down the toilet. More and more google as a brand holds less weight.

tmaly• 3 years ago

Remember Google Reader?

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.

alacode3• 3 years ago

I'm no great defender of Google but point some fallacies the article pushes:

"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.

"he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News." and "he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content."

  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".

Almondsetat• 3 years ago

The fallacy you push is that the legal process in case your child shoots someone is the same as the private and inscrutable process that Google follows to ban people, which it isn't

danpalmer• 3 years ago

Dropbox did the same thing in August: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/dropbox_ends_unlimite...

kissgyorgy• 3 years ago

This is exactly why I will NEVER host any of my data at any cloud provider and self-host Nextcloud. It's also waaaay cheaper and more convenient.

alacode3• 3 years ago

Google Bard has interesting information when asked what happens to my data if a plan is restructured and my existing data exceeds the new plan's allowance. It seems the answer is "it depends".

zaps• 3 years ago

“Google Workspace Enterprise Standard”—do they have “Enterprise Pro” and “Enterprise Enterprise” tiers?

neilv2• 3 years ago

Comments on being an enterprise provider, and on the particular examples the article used...

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.)

HarHarVeryFunny• 3 years ago

I'd love to store all my years of photos in the cloud and have someone else responsible for backups, but I just don't trust them for this sort of reason.

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!

charcircuit4• 3 years ago

Keep in mind this person was paying $100 per month to host >250 TiB (which anywhere else will cost >$1000 per month).

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.

JohnMakin3• 3 years ago

Then they shouldn't advertise it as "unlimited" if it actually isn't. This is an absurd statement on its face.

dboreham• 3 years ago

A glimpse of the future when all customer service is AI bots.

chaostheory• 3 years ago

Google spent all of their goodwill a few years ago. As more examples like this come to light, it will become much harder for Google to release new products since no one trusts them anymore

racl1012• 3 years ago

I don't wanna victim blame, but I don't understand how people could put their entire body of work on a cloud service and not make the effort to get several external drives to have some redundancy.

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.

shkkmo6• 3 years ago

Multiple backups are significantly easier with 50gb that with 250tb. Additionally, any external drives he had were seized by the FBI so he would have needed two cloud backups.

judge20202• 3 years ago

Because storing 240TB is expensive even locally. From https://diskprices.com/, if he gets a good deal of $8/tb, it's going to cost $2,000 just for the storage of his data, and getting the data onto it would require a setup that can address and power 20 drives (assuming 12TB drives), unless they use a few USB HDD Sata adapters to archive it all.

pwg• 3 years ago

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.

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")?

PeterisP• 3 years ago

All his off-cloud hardware was seized by the FBI.

matkoniecz4• 3 years ago

They had local copies. They were stolen by FBI. It is in the linked article.

diogenescynic• 3 years ago

I can't believe Google with a trillion+ dollar market cap gets away with all this. They have zero human customer support and basically enable account takeovers and identity theft. I hope someday Google gets some comeuppance for how abusive/hostile they've been to their customers forever.

therealmarv3• 3 years ago

Shocked by this and having a Workspace account in same condition (read-only state, not in deletion yet) I've deleted some terrabytes of my (redundand) backups on Google Drive with many thousands files.

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.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

You can only trash the files visible there.

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.

therealmarv3• 3 years ago

well, maybe the "empty trash" button works as intended (not sure because I see new files showing up in trash). It can be I was not patient enough. The rclone command finishes after a second but also only queues files internally at Google Drive to be fully deleted (so maybe it works the same as empty trash button)

freedomben7• 3 years ago

Google deserves some hate here, but this problem is bigger than just them, and I think by being too narrowly focused on G we're missing a systemic problem. G is one of the worst offenders, but this is a cultural attitude/approach in most of tech. The idea is to acquire users by giving stuff away or making your service cheap, lock them in, then squeeze by ratcheting up the price. It's a playbook that has worked fantastically well and made a lot of people very rich, so it's not going to change overnight and/or without some pain.

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.

thinkharderdev7• 3 years ago

What is bad about the situation exactly? You get a service for below cost for some amount of time at which point you have to start paying what it actually costs. I can understand if the company manages to corner the market by selling below cost and then jacks up the price way above cost, but cloud storage is still an extremely competitive market and generally quite a bit cheaper than the cost of storing an equivalent amount of data on your own hardware (with the same availability)

terminous3• 3 years ago

It is literally anti-competitive, bad for consumers and competitor startups. How can an average startup compete if a rich company or VC backed startup has a business model of selling below cost to get market share? The fact that the big players are doing it makes it an oligopoly not a monopoly, but that's still bad.

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.

johnnyanmac7• 3 years ago

I can understand if the company manages to corner the market by selling below cost and then jacks up the price way above cost,

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.

jjeaff• 3 years ago

unfortunately, the established players that got huge by offering free services and then raised the price would love for us to do something about this problem. it would help them widen their moat.

LoganDark6• 3 years ago

I would have strongly preferred if my reMarkable didn't come with a mandatory subscription. It's mandatory because you completely lose warranty service if you ever cancel it. The reason? I had been saving up to afford the device for five years and missed the introduction of their subscription by one. single. month. I'm stuck paying forever because I don't count as a "grandfathered" customer.

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.

noobface• 3 years ago

The Google drive unlimited policy has been predictably abused by some of the datahoarding and piracy communities. Those groups have been paranoid for[1] a[2] while[3] that this could and was likely to go away, including tracking changes in the way Google marketed this to users.

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/

crooked-v3• 3 years ago

unlimited
abused

Using the explicitly stated and loudly advertised functionality of a service isn't abuse.

thinkharderdev7• 3 years ago

It's not abuse to store the data in an unlimited plan to begin with. But once the unlimited plan is discontinued, continuing to store the data there without paying for it does seem like abuse to me.

JohnMakin3• 3 years ago

It sure is if you're a google astroturfer!

Pxtl• 3 years ago

Can anybody recommend a good solution for automated synching of photos and files between my Google Drive and my Pi NAS? Something that makes mirroring a deletion possible but not accidental, so that if the Drive loses data it won't get mirrored to my NAS?

Is rclone and rsync the way to go?

agumonkey• 3 years ago

After the recent google drive data loss, that's twice in a row. It's a long stream of Google failing users over the years it corroded all the appreciation and trust I had in anything they do. Surprising.

kbenson• 3 years ago

It's very hard for me not to initially reinterpret headlines such as these as "person stupidly doesn't take care with important personal property and loses it."

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?

dangus• 3 years ago

I think Google is in the wrong in some ways here, but someone with over 200TB of data should know what they are doing and should have a more professional solution for such an unusually large amount of data.

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.

tylervigen• 3 years ago

I find the actions of Google here are as troubling as every other commenter. However, I cannot fathom managing 200TB on Google Drive. It's just such a terrible cloud platform experience for managing that much data. It is clearly design for "typical" consumers who have a few gigabytes at most; moving, modifying, downloading, and uploading files is all bottlenecked.

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.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

We (as in us geeks) really need to be vocal about telling people that if they're storing things on someone else's server, they 100% need to keep their own local copies of that data as well.

donjorgenson• 3 years ago

As a journalist, this keeps me awake at night

HackerThemAll• 3 years ago

Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive?

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-...

kzrdude2• 3 years ago

Yes we can be that naive, people learn from what they see. And they see companies being investor funded for a decade without breaking even, offering services for free. It's not just the users who have lost the connection to reality I think.

latexr• 3 years ago

Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive?

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.

iamleppert• 3 years ago

Sundar is quickly turning Google into the equivalent of Accenture or Tata —- complete with a direct stream of obedient IIT workers.

pontifier• 3 years ago

That was about how much data Murfie had. Surprise Google cloud storage and egress costs were the final straw that broke the company 4 years ago. It wasn't economical to save the data when I took over, and Murfie still hasn't fully recovered (for multiple reasons).

sargun• 3 years ago

I’m not following how this is a google problem, and not a feds problem. It sounds like the the used their power to render his account unusable, and as a secondary effect all data was lost.

What company would preserve your data in light of finding CP?

INTPenis• 3 years ago

That headline is kinda funny because in any other context it says "A promised B the world, A lied."

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.

nXqd• 3 years ago

It's just unreliable using any of Google products, or their empire starts to crumbling

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

This is what, at least $7500 or so of hardware, to keep it local? (And without much redundancy.) Worse, Newegg has been out of stock on the 20tb golds for weeks.

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.

sitkack• 3 years ago

From a solution perspective, if you want to move 240TB of data out of google drive, spin up a bunch of VMs in us-central1 and copy it into GCS buckets (keep bandwidth to each bucket under 500Gbps). From there, one could copy it out to Backblaze or Cloudflare R2.

240TB is going to be some coin, even on R2.

inasio• 3 years ago

In another universe Google's head of crisis PR grabs the red phone and calls the Wolf. Mr Wolf becomes point for this crisis, two hours later they get Tim Burke a beta account on the new 20 Gbps internet service, a decommissioned GCP storage pod with 300 TB on RAID 10, as well as the option to keep his data on his original plan if he so wishes.

confd• 3 years ago

This is a poorly written article and for what it’s worth, I expected better data discipline from a man as aggressively online as Tim Burke.

stephenr2• 3 years ago

I do feel for someone in this scenario (whatever the specifics of it are) but this should serve as a strong reminder to anyone:

"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.

tomatotomato31• 3 years ago

It's always unreasonable to expect 230tb of data to just be save at a company who is for profit.

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.

scotty79• 3 years ago

I think Gmail started with a promise of unlimited email storage.

jsnell5• 3 years ago

No, it didn't. It started out with 1GB, and the limit increased gradually to the current 15GB.

rustymonday• 3 years ago

For a post with over 800 points posted only 6 hours ago it's remarkable this isn't in HN's top 30 posts on the front page.

davisr• 3 years ago

Welcome to mass media, everything you see is "curated" (ahem...censored by @dang).

justinclift• 3 years ago

Hmmm. You'd be able to store that qty of data across 2x storage servers on Hetzner.

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.

octacat• 3 years ago

So, google invented unlimited storage so it is easier to convince managers of small companies to use their gsuite. Once conversion is finished, they can raise prices. Cool. Making a notice 7 days before the data removal is bad. It is really bad. Next time when someone asks me: "Should we host on AWS or on Google Cloud?" I could say "Google looks marginally cheaper now, but it is not reliable partner, so they could change pricing anytime".

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.

tamimio• 3 years ago

Will people ever learn NOT to trust any cloud provider for storing their data? Especially when they have those “unlimited” and “lifetime “ deals?! Make your home NAS setup, it’s not even expensive.

fragmede• 3 years ago

Why the rush? Given the growth in hard drive space, putting off making a home NAS for as long as possible seems more economically efficient. If I'd setup a home NAS with three drives for raid5 in 2012 when Google drive was first released, I'd have on the order of 8TB + 4TB parity, assuming I bought the biggest drives available then, which wouldn't have been cheap. Instead, by waiting until this announcement, that money didn't go to depreciating hardware that's ancient by this point and instead could go into an index fund or other investment. By waiting until this year (2023), the home NAS I bought drives for this year is comprised of 18 TB drives.

Blackstrat• 3 years ago

Sooner or later, people have to realize that the cloud and subscription are not in their best interests. On the front end, perhaps, it made sense. The company from which I retired, went all in on the cloud, pointing to all the money they were saving on infrastructure. Their hosting charges have nearly doubled in less than 3 years. Further, when hosting companies are routinely scanning your private data for various reasons, ranging child porn to their own AI projects, e.g., GitHub & Microsoft, you have surrendered the keys to the kingdom with no control over anything. Google canceling the unlimited plan is a perfect example. Frankly, consumers and companies are naive to think this will benefit them in the long run.

0pteron• 3 years ago

This is tough, one could argue life's work deserved to be backed up but there was a reasonable expectation that the cloud wouldn't lose the data and that Google would be more fair when it wasn't cost effective anymore. Also, the cost of keeping 200TB on the cloud is quite a bill to maintain for rest of your life, buying the HDD space yourself is more attractive.

turquoisevar2• 3 years ago

People are genuinely breaking their backs trying to carry water for Google here, making comparisons with looting ketchup packets from McDonald’s and other stupid stuff.

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.

Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

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