If the company was run by a hallucinating AI it couldn’t be any flakier.
I have a problem with Amazon Drive going away for non-photos on December 31st.
For a while, they had unlimited storage and you could use a Linux API to access it – I stored 8TB of data.
Then they set a quota, but for those over quota it was read-only. Oh, and Linux access no longer works.
Now they’ve set a deadline to have everything off by December 31st, but the Windows app still doesn’t work (constantly crashing) and I see no way to get my files.
Rclone?
No way in hell I’d trust just one backup method for my data.
A 6 TB drive is less than $100 on Amazon and two cloud backups is like $30 extra a year.
Goddamn hope this story gets somebody at google’s attention. Off topic, even though it was mentioned in the article, what ended up happening to the dad’s account, was it reinstated? I can’t find an update
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Maybe they’ll help him retrieve the data. Presumably the servers haven’t been used for something else yet. Then again maybe not. When you control how most people get their news who cares if one reporter gets mad?
It isnt just one that is going to have an issue with this.
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That percent probably nets them more profit than all the free accounts combined. What Google is doing is short sighted and it is going to hurt them.
But again why would Google care? They lobby like everyone else, and half the politicians don’t understand what cloud storage is. If no laws tell them they have to do something they won’t unless it benefits them.
Google cares whether people pay for and use their services. And if enough people view their products as unreliable beta software, they’re going to be less willing to use them. Especially if they have anything of importance on Google’s hardware.
I’m speechless
Googs IS the LastPass of everything!
So is the journalist, after losing all their documents.
Dark dude 🌚
Edit: also, he should not be storing private sources’ names in ANYTHING Google can axe-cess Perhaps its for the best
Damn didn’t even think about that. Do you think they at least encrypted their files?
Jesus. Even downloading at 1 Gbps, it would take a few weeks to download all that data. I don’t think Google’s Transfer Appliance works for retrieving data.
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I was just checking and it’s $1,600/mo to transfer it over to wasabi but how long would that take? I really hope Google does the right thing but that is not their MO these days.
On one hand, Google sucks. On the other, users like this are why we can’t have nice things.
Google not including an upper limit clause is why we can’t have this nice thing.
If they subscribed for unlimited, you can’t blame someone for using it.
Why not? We live in a society. Fair use and tragedy of the commons are not unknown concepts to us.
Unlimited does not mean “there’s a limit but we won’t tell you what it is until you reach it”. Corporations need to stop using it that way.
It’s really not hard to avoid false advertising. Just tell people what you’re actually prepared to offer. Figure it out before selling it.
To be fair, I would agree it was false advertising if Google was terminating accounts of large users. However, they ended the entire plan / service, with significant notice, so it’s less ‘false advertising’ and more ‘we can’t afford to do this, because jackasses’.
They put users of the entire plan in read only mode with, as far as I can tell, no deadline in sight. When a deadline was finally enforced, it was within a week, which is not significant notice at all for data deletion.
Being told “your data will be read only” and then, without notice, being given a deadline to extricate your data that is physically impossible for most users is not much different from having your account deleted. Both will inevitably have the same outcome.
I’m not sure if you’re aware that the unlimited plan was sunsetted two years ago. Two years notice seems like plenty of time to have set up a new backup system. That said, my main and original point is just that this whole incident is a classic example of a tragedy of the commons.
We’ll just roll this into the other conversation.
So what exactly is your justification for blaming someone for using a service as advertised?
According to the concept, should a number of people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to over-use it
Emphasis on bold. Seems like they shouldn’t have advertised it as unlimited and should’ve provided a finite cap.
The line shouldn’t be drawn at “wherever I arbitrarily decide due to tragedy of the commons”. If you say it’s unlimited, honor it, or at least let folks graciously exit the platform.
I wonder if the terms and conditions had such a limit tucked away.
at least let folks graciously exit the platform.
Are you aware the plan was sunsetted two years ago? How much time do you need to graciously exit?
As for finite, due to the laws of physics there’s obviously a limit. If I try backing up the entire Internet it’s obviously not gonna happen.
Are you aware the plan was sunsetted two years ago? How much time do you need to graciously exit?
Based on the article, it seems like folks were just told that their data would be put into read only. How much notice was given for data deletion?
As for finite, due to the laws of physics there’s obviously a limit. If I try backing up the entire Internet it’s obviously not gonna happen.
How’s a consumer supposed to know the limit if you advertise unlimited? Sounds like an explicit cap should’ve been written into the fine print. Why are you supporting “unlimited, but I will cut you off whenever I feel like it” versus, for example, what cellular plans typically advertise: “unlimited, but you get deprioritized after x gigs”
The former just seems to be not consumer friendly.
Guess he could make reporting on tech giants pulling this shit his new lifework.
I had this happen to me. They haven’t threated to delete my account yet. I have about 50TB. I built a 170TB (raw) NAS for $2000 and transferred it all, only took about a week or so to download everything on my gig fiber.
I’m interested in more details if you want to share. What are the other specs/components of your machine? What OS and software do you run? How do you handle backups?
I have a similar setup, but I don’t store anything crucial there, my documents and stuff are on dropbox.
I have 3 20TB drives, in what used to be my PC, running unraid on it, 1 drive is for parity, so it can tolerate 1 drive failure and I can easily add more drives down the line (I have a Be Quiet 900 Pro case or whatever with like 9 HDD slots).
CPU is like i7-8700K or something, 32GB ram (which I should upgrade) and like a GTX 1080
I got a lot of info from serverbuild.net for the build. It’s mostly old server parts. Server MB, CPU, RAM, and drives. I run unraid with tons of different media management dockers for handling downloads for plex. Not super worried about backing up all the data since I can just download it again. Unraid uses parity drives so if something happens to a drive I can put a new one in and shouldn’t lose any data.
Congratulations on having a spare $2k and access to gig fibre. We’re very proud of you.
Yo, Where do I send my resume?
tl;dr: Google fucked him proper. But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his “life’s work”, risk free.
I store my shit on Google Drive. But it’s only 2TB of offsite backups, not my primary.
Time and again I’ve learned the past 25-years, no one gives a shit about their data until they lose it all. People gotta get kicked in the fork so hard they go deaf before they’ll pay attention.
I feel like a tl;dr should mention the FBI. You summed up the headline.
Yes, this. I don’t trust ANYONE on the Internet. If you want something forever you download it yourself and back it up. Even tech giants like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit will not be here forever. YouTube will just delete your videos that have been up for 13 years without warning.
In fairness their electronics were taken by the FBI so they at least had something besides Google. In hindsight the offsite backup would of protected them from both the FBI and Google if they stored them at a trustee’s home
Or the trustee would get their home raided and devices taken, too.
Yeah that’s a possibility but that massively depends on the level of surveillance the journalist is under but lets assume moderate. With that in mind, the only method I can think of would be physically hiding the drive/s in the other house (more paperwork needed for the alphabet people) in a place that would still be accessible, with permission of the owner of course. Don’t know how thorough raids are at looking for stuff but I can think of a couple places that may be sufficient if its poor to moderate job. Be screwed if they’re combing the entire place though so the journalist would have to rely on encryption
But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his “life’s work”, risk free.
Google made a promise they didn’t keep and articles like this are the consequence of that.
It’s not ideal, but it still feels better than “let them lie and then blame their victims for believing it”.
Yes, that’s true, but it’s also true that Google has a long history of discontinuing services suddenly, so expecting them to keep this particular promise was extremely naive.
Naive, perhaps, but if a company advertises a service, they better fucking deliver on that service. Sure, I wouldn’t store all of my important documents solely on a cloud service either, but let’s not victim blame the guy here who paid for a service and was not given that service. Google’s Enterprise plan promised unlimited data; whether that’s 10 GB or 200 TB, that’s not for us nor Google to judge. Unlimited means unlimited. And in an article linked in the OP, even customer service seemed to assure them that it was indeed unlimited, with no cap. And then pulled the rug.
And on top of that, according to the article, Google emailed them saying their account would be in “read-only” mode, as in, they could download the files but not upload any. Which is fine enough-- until Google contacted them saying they were using too much space and their files would all be deleted. Space that, again, was originally unlimited.
Judge the guy all you want, but don’t blame him. Fuck Google, full stop.
The problem here is that Google’s “unlimited” plan was real, but it was for the G-Suite Enterprise product, which they discontinued. Two years ago, they started moving everything and everyone to a new product offering, Google Workspace. The Enterprise plans there have unlimited* data, and that asterisk is important, because it specifies that unlimited is no longer unlimited, which is dumb. It’s a pool of data shared between users, and each user account contributes 5TB towards the pool, capping at 300 users. From there, if I remember correctly, additional 10TB chunks cost $300/month.
I feel bad for this guy, but the writing has been on the wall for years now. Google has changed their account structure and platform costs to discourage this type of use.
I heard there was a process for requesting additional data, but you have to actually pay for the 5 users and they’ll bump it a few TB every couple months on request. That’s from people reporting their experience with support, so it might not be totally consistent.
I kind of get it though, people hear “unlimited storage” and then don’t even make an effort to be efficient with that space, and just want to keep everything forever. There’s a real cost to that storage, and it’s higher than many think since it’s not just a single HDD like many would have sitting on their desk but a series of arrays/pools and all the related systems to ensure reliability and uptime. They probably did some calculation where 99% of users would be profitable even with their “unlimited storage” and eating it on the other 1% was a reasonable advertising cost. Over time that calculation changed and they had to update the service.
He clearly cared about his data, don’t equate this man to the people who don’t really think about it and don’t actually back their stuff up (and come crying to everyone when their 10 year old disk dies)
People like to say to use the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which is really good advice, but it does NOT scale, trust me. I guarantee you I have more disposable income than this journalist (I assume that because journalists make shit money), and when I looked into a 3-2-1 solution with my meager 60TB of data, the cost starts to become astronomical (and frankly unaffordable) for individuals.
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I’m surprised they even allowed that much to be uploaded. Even if it is “unlimited”, that must be against some sort of fair usage agreement.
If you need to archive over 250TB of data, you should get a tape drive.
Come on, if it’s unlimited it’s unlimited, not “unlimited but only if you use less than limit”
Everything is limited. Even “all you can eat” restaurants.
Lot of didn’t-read-the-article-itis in here. FBI seized his physical storage, cloud was the only option for the journalist and it did not make financial sense to pay for multiple cloud backups. Google is entirely the bad guy here.
Well, he did ignore that he wasn’t paying for storage for half a year and did nothing to prevent data loss. Even ignored the grace period. That is at least negligent.
He assumed that Google assured him that his current data would be safe. But saying that your account will move into read only mode doesn’t equate to keeping those much TBs of data on server forever.
Though I have a question. Was this unlimited service that Google offered was a one time payment thing(seems unlikely, since only couple of cloud providers like pCloud do so and that too on a much lesser scale) or a recurring subscription thing? If it was the later, then it is naive to believe that a for profit corporation would keep that much data without raking in money.
Iirc it was a subscription, but I could be wrong. Having unlimited data with a one time payment doesn’t sound like a Google thing to do. There are running costs.
Presumably it was GSuite/Google Workspace. While they advertised unlimited storage if you paid for 5 accounts, it wasn’t really enforced so you could pay something like $20/month and get unlimited storage on G-drive. There was a daily cap on how much data can be moved, but that’s fine for hosting incremental backups like many that took advantage.
Well, google And the fbi
It sounds more like “Oh no, someone took your files? Well, you should upload everything you have to our server. Include anything we, I mean they, might have missed the first time. We’ll keep it safe. You can totally trust us not to send your data to anyone, just like we recently got caught doing…again.”
Man brings forth innumerable things to nurture Google Drive. Google Drive has nothing good with which to recompense Man. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.
- Zhang Xianzhong, after getting all his documents deleted
