19 ms·

Amazon Drive removing unlimited storage plan

352 points by some-guy 9y ago

jetsnoc 9y ago
Amazon recently disabled acd-cli and rclone from accessing their services "for security reasons." I see that acd-cli is back while rclone remains effectively banned. Acd-cli and rclone truly had poor implementations. Though, the timing is suspicious for them not to allow rclone again if they implemented the service securely again. My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users and so the low-volume users didn't outweigh or pay for the heavy users like they originally estimated when they set the price for the service. It was good while it lasted.
- tribby 9y ago
  > My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users I would further speculate that plex users were the largest single group of offenders. seemed like a cat and mouse game for a while -- amazon started comparing hashes of files to known bootlegs and banning accounts, so everyone started using encfs, and later migrated to the unlimited plan from google apps. I guess google's the only game in town, now.
  - derimagia 9y ago
    I don't think Plex ever really worked with amazon. Plex advertised it at first but it didn't end up working out, sadly. See https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/02/amazon-isnt-playing-nice-with-plexs-new-cloud-service/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/02/amazon-isnt-playing-nice-w...
    - tribby 9y ago
      this is incorrect, plex works fine with amazon.[1][2][more on request] the issues being described in the link you posted may refer to early-release bugs, users who were getting throttled or nuked due to the anti-piracy efforts I referred to earlier, or any number of things (certain kinds of transcoding, maybe?) -- it's a pretty vague article! but plex and amazon can definitely be integrated. 1. https://amc.ovh/2015/08/13/infinite-media-server.html https://amc.ovh/2015/08/13/infinite-media-server.html 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using_amazon_cloud_drive_and_encfs_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...
      - derimagia 9y ago
        Those links are from a while ago. You linked to a FUSE solution, which isn't first-class and you need a computer for it. You're right, it probably would "work" with that, but I would say that's an outlier solution. It doesn't work with plex's cloud feature: https://www.plex.tv/features/cloud/ https://www.plex.tv/features/cloud/ - they removed it from the list there. This would have gotten a lot more users
        9935c101ab17a66 9y ago
        I used acd_cli to mount an ENCFS store that I decrypted on the server and used it successfully to play media back (files as large as 18gb) for 18 months. So, yes it was possible. You need a computer for any reasonable Plex transcoding. Just because it wasn't supported by Plex cloud doesn't mean it didn't work. Lots of people were doing it.
        tribby 9y ago
        that is correct, plex cloud is not the preferred solution for data hoarders using plex. plex cloud only supported amazon drive until jan 1st of this year[1] and all existing accounts were grandfathered in. that was a pretty short period of time but probably enough to create a problem. plex cloud is beside the point, though, because it isn't what people use for this. they used amazon cloud drive with fuse. regarding fuse: > you need a computer for it well, not really, only to the extent that a VPS is a computer. > I would say that's an outlier solution an outlier solution for an outlier problem (can we agree to call that people storing 100+ TB of files?). except the problem was seemingly large enough that they had to get rid of it, so maybe it's not fair to call it an outlier. I don't think "first class" is a concern for people with such ridiculous amounts of data. plex cloud just makes things simpler, but running plex on a VPS takes two commands and there are some pretty detailed guides out there for people who don't know what ssh or digitalocean is. it's at a point now where there's even a platform for automating this stuff, complete with fancy dashboard etc.[2] needing to use things like fuse and encfs is hardly a barrier. people talk about this stuff a lot more publicly than I would have thought, in places like /r/datahoarders, /r/plex, as well as the lowendbox, quickbox, and torrent tracker forums. 1. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/203082447-Supported-Cloud-Storage-Providers https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/203082447-Supporte... 2. https://quickbox.io/ https://quickbox.io/
  - gechr 9y ago
    > [...] everyone started using encfs Interesting. I wonder if this indirectly expedited the price hike? Encryption would make it (practically) impossible for Amazon to deduplicate people's data and store it more cost efficiently.
- simcop2387 9y ago
  Yea it's been great for my family. We've been backing up family photos and movies to it with acdcli. Close to 1TB of all that content there, so we're fine for now but I'm probably going to end up doing something else for the longer term.
- WaxProlix 9y ago
  There was a thread recently around how acd-cli users were gaining access to other peoples' data - it was a legit concern, I think.
  - johnpowell 9y ago
    Amazon was completely right for banning acd_cli. What they were doing is using a server in the middle for auth. But oh god the server started handing out the wrong keys so you might end up having total control of another acd_cli users account. And when acd_cli got banned they (not acd_cli themself but users that modified the source) just used rclones app ID and keys to trick Amazon into thinking acd_cli was rclone. Then rclone got banned. They (amazon) did say the problem with rclone was the keys were public since it is open source.
    - awirth 9y ago
      Ooops, missed this thread. I did a little mini-writeup of what happened on a different branch if anyone is curious on the details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14512598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14512598
- puzzlingcaptcha 9y ago
  As anectodal information: I know a community of people who share movies. In the past few months, abusing ACD to move their personal, encrypted movie collections (which go up to many terabytes) was definitely a fad. There was automation written to allow for streaming movies directly from ACD. A popular resource point was https://www.reddit.com/r/PlexACD/comments/6bmt9s/a_framework_and_tutorial_for_configuring_your_own/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PlexACD/comments/6bmt9s/a_framework... As long as Amazon's API could allow for accessing the storage space in a drive-like manner, they were open for abuse. For me the writing was on the wall.
chinhodado 9y ago
So Amazon has followed the footstep of Microsoft. I wonder if Google will ever do the same to Google Drive (unlimited storage for Google Apps users)
- pkaye 9y ago
  Are you referring to G-Suite business plans which require 5 users minimum to get unlimited storage which works out to $600/year.
  - johnpowell 9y ago
    This isn't actually enforced. I have about 3TB on there and I am a single user.
    - copperx 9y ago
      The 5 user minimum is not enforced? Are you effectively paying $5/mo for GSuite?
      - dawnerd 9y ago
        It's 10 a month for unlimited. But to answer your question yes. I have three accounts on my business plan and it's been unlimited from the start when I was just a single user.
    - _pmf_ 9y ago
      > This isn't actually enforced. Until it is. Then we have exactly the same situation.
      - johnpowell 9y ago
        With amazon doing this I am sure now all those people will be frantically signing up for Google. I am sure it will eventually happen that Google enforces the limit. And I would bet sooner rather then latter. For my personal use case it isn't a huge deal since I just use it as a back-up for work stuff, music and pictures. It is nice to know that if I am at Taco Bell and my apartment burns down I am not totally screwed. And even if the limit is enforced I will get my mom and my sister and my sisters kids accounts and call it a Christmas present. They are always running low on storage.
thebspatrol 9y ago
Ah, the old "give them a bunch of storage and then ask for more money to keep storing it" meme.
- selckin 9y ago
  Not entirely fair, there are whole communities around storing 100s of TB on amazon
  - vitalysh 9y ago
    I'm not even mad. /r/datahoarders brought this on themselves. Who in their right mind expects to upload 100s of TBs of data, encrypted and pay 59.99?
    - ghughes 9y ago
      People who understand the literal meaning of the word "unlimited"?
      - vitalysh 9y ago
        Yes, Amazon is to blame here as well. They shouldn't have offered unlimited service. At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy.
        cf 9y ago
        I don't get why if they don't mean unlimited just say up to 20TB/mo.
        chc 9y ago
        Possibly because there actually wasn't any limit. Maybe if a handful people were exceeding $LOTS TB, they don't care, but if 60% of users exceed $LOTS TB, the service becomes unsustainable. In this case, the service really is unlimited (there genuinely is no limit that you're not allowed to go over), and if you wanted that effect, advertising a limit would be net negative — a high limit would encourage the "too many users use a lot" case and lead to the same result we get now where the plan has to be canceled for unsustainability, and a low limit would defeat the purpose.
IBM 9y ago
>Amazon will no longer offer an unlimited storage plan. Instead, we'll offer storage plans of 100 GB for $11.99 and 1 TB for $59.99, up to 30 TB for an additional $59.99 per TB. What? How is Amazon less competitive on storage than iCloud when they're one of the biggest scale players in cloud computing? They also don't have to deal with the load of a trillion iPhone photos taken per year. iCloud gives you 2TB for $9.99 per month. And the ironic thing is that Apple pays to use AWS and Google Cloud. EDIT: My mistake, the comments below are correct. Amazon's prices are yearly.
- venins 9y ago
  $59.99 per TB is for year not for month.
- aaronbee 9y ago
  Amazon's pricing is yearly.
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  It's crazy that they didn't clarify that in the text you quoted. It's at the beginning of the page with no context and I assumed it was monthly, too, since every other service charges monthly.
  - IBM 9y ago
    That's certainly my defense. But those prices are definitely much more reasonable given the scale of AWS.
nodesocket 9y ago
I just got bitten by this. Changed plan to 1TB from unlimited for the same price. :-(
LAMike 9y ago
Filecoin.io might be a solution/competitor to S3
rdtsc 9y ago
>> Do Prime members still get unlimited photo storage? > Yes. Heh. Anyone tried writing an encoder to make files look like photos, and upload them to any of these "unlimited photo" services. I am sure they are probably watching for it and will close the account. Then what if it there is a way to gradually mix in data with actual photos, a bit like in steganography. But more aggressive. And create what still looks photos, just like really noisy.
- tribby 9y ago
  not sure if anyone ever formalized it in some sort of library, but yes, it's been done! people were using flickr for storage years ago.[1] I have no idea if it's still possible. https://digiwonk.gadgethacks.com/how-to/use-your-new-terabyte-free-flickr-storage-for-more-than-just-photos-using-hack-0147022/ https://digiwonk.gadgethacks.com/how-to/use-your-new-terabyt...
- lorenzhs 9y ago
  Dropbox did a thing a few years back where they gave you permanent additional storage for uploading photos. A jpeg header followed by gigabytes of zeroes supposedly worked just fine. This is very easy to catch, though. Abusing comment fields might be more interesting. Use a small valid image, and insert 4MB of data into a comment field. It would be a fun project to implement this as a FUSE file system. I'm not sure whether any of the popular formats support arbitrary-length comments, and whether or not Amazon strips such data (it's image storage, after all, not file storage).
  - iso-8859-1 9y ago
    Already exists, see StegFS: https://albinoloverats.net/projects/stegfs https://albinoloverats.net/projects/stegfs
    - lorenzhs 9y ago
      I wouldn't use steganography (it's not normally very space-efficient), just dump the payload data into a PNG's comment field. You can do this with exiftool "-Comment<=/path/to/inputfile" dummy.png and re-extract it with exiftool -b -Comment dummy.png > recovered_file. Of course you'd use libpng directly in a FUSE filesystem, but this shows that it's easy enough. Use a 20kB cat picture and 2 MB payload and you achieve 99% space efficiency. It's probably inconvenient enough for most data hoarders for Amazon not to care. You can still switch to encoding it in the pixel values in case they do. I'm not familiar enough with PNG to comment on the space-efficiency of that.
msravi 9y ago
Amazon has been de-emphasizing their unlimited plan since the end of April, and the writing has literally been on the clouddrive landing page - I wrote about it here: http://swirlingtea.blogspot.in/2017/05/amazon-de-emphasizing-unlimited-storage.html http://swirlingtea.blogspot.in/2017/05/amazon-de-emphasizing...
AriaMinaei 9y ago
I've been meaning to get my data out of ACD anyway. I only use it for average-joe's needs, and for that, it's not up to the task. The Prime Photos app is slow (even thumbnails load slowly). Videos take time to buffer, even on a 400mbps connection. Navigating the library is difficult. Uploads (photos or not) clearly take much longer than uploading to, say, YouTube. And I've also seen that their iOS app misses uploading some files too, saying "0 items remaining to upload" when clearly many items aren't uploaded yet. Lost some memory-worthy videos that way. Of course, bugs can be found in any product and that's okay. But sometimes you can tell that it's because the product is neglected. I'm now surveying the alternatives again. Any recommendations? Edit: Rephrasing "product is neglected"
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- msh 9y ago
  Google photos, fast Food and free
dewiz 9y ago
considering they give unlimited photo storage to Prime users, can one store data inside these images and get unlimited storage that way?
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 9y ago
  Yes, at least as of ~2 months ago[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998534
manojlds 9y ago
I didn't realize that things I send to my kindle (via email) are in my Amazon Drive. Logged in after seeing this post, and there they are.
firmgently 9y ago
"we'll offer storage plans of 100 GB for $11.99 and 1 TB for $59.99, up to 30 TB for an additional $59.99 per TB"..."At the end of their existing subscription, customers with auto-renew turned on and 1TB or less of data stored will be renewed into the 1 TB plan for $59.99 per year." So if someone is using eg. 50GB of storage Amazon is going to sign them up for the 1TB/$59.99 tier rather than the 100GB/$11.99 tier? Yes it can be changed, but also inertia affects these things, many people don't check or can't be bothered (same psychology as cashback offers). Judging from the sneaky pushy way they try to get everyone signed up for Prime (the button to not sign up is practically invisible compared to the 'yes' button and I know of several people who signed up unknowingly and got charged) I wouldn't be surprised if they are acting darkly on this.
nickcw 9y ago
This is probably not surprising; given the way they've been treating rclone and its users it is clear that they don't like heavy users. On the plus side (now that they are charging a sustainable amount for it) perhaps they will reopen the developer API and I'll be able to get some new keys for rclone...
ktta 9y ago
Well, people might be interested to know that one person has managed to use 1.73 PB+ of the unlimited plan. Looks like that's the highest anyone's managed as far as I know. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6583s2/the_petabyte_porn_problem_public_webcam_social/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6583s2/the_pet... Check out the first comment
tlightsky 9y ago
Check out http://sia.tech http://sia.tech this tech provide less than $10/TB by blockchain storage hosting
klodolph 9y ago
If you're cynical you'd think "of course they'd offer a free version and then make you pay for it." But that's basically the cloud storage market in a nutshell. All the cloud storage providers are in a race to the bottom, and once they have your data they want to upsell you on other cloud technologies. If you just need to store data, that's actually great news, because these providers are working hard on the optimizations that make it possible to give you storage as cheap as they can. Cheap options are Glacier at $0.004/GB, Backblaze at $0.005/GB, GCS Coldline at $0.007/GB. That's the monthly cost for bare cloud storage with no egress. Anything cheaper than about $50/year for 1TB will fall in one of two categories: 1. Subsidized by the provider, but probably not for long. This has happened so many times I can't even remember them all, Amazon is just the most recent. 2. Strictly DIY, probably with a much higher chance of data loss than you realize.
- cm2187 9y ago
  If it is backup, it doesn't need to be super safe. The risk that you lose both your primary data, (optionally your local backup) and your online backup at the same time is pretty insignificant, given that the online backup will be uncorrelated as in a different physical location (primary and local backup very correlated I agree).
  - himlion 9y ago
    The problem is sometimes you only find out your backup is corrupted when you need it.
    - cm2187 9y ago
      Yeah, agree. And I am not talking about enterprise level of reliability. More like personnal / small office. But for anything above a few TB, running your own hardware will be way cheaper if you take say a 5y horizon. Disks are so large today that you don't need a big config. In fact you might even keep two copies to reduce the risk. Of course there is the occasional trip to the datacentre. I made that mistake. I pay more in uber than I saved by picking a datacentre far away.
Matrixik 9y ago
Object Store comparison Compare cost, durability, and region support of public cloud object stores, e.g., Amazon S3: http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/ http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/ And source repo: https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-comparison https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-comparison
ForHackernews 9y ago
I hope this means they'll at least re-open the Amazon Drive API: https://developer.amazon.com/amazon-drive https://developer.amazon.com/amazon-drive There are no Amazon-provided Linux solutions to connect with their Drive (except uploading through a web browser), and they are actively shutting down third-party solutions: https://forum.rclone.org/t/my-response-to-amazon-banning-rclone/2696 https://forum.rclone.org/t/my-response-to-amazon-banning-rcl... https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/572 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/572 To any Amazon managers reading this: many of the developers who you want using AWS also use Linux on their personal machines.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
andlier 9y ago
I'm trying https://www.jottacloud.com https://www.jottacloud.com now, they have an unlimited plan for ~$70/year. Funny story; They previously had a clause in the terms about restricting storage space for users with abnormal usage patterns. A friend of mine sent a complaint to the norwegian consumer ombudsman about this based on the fact that if you advertise with unlimited, all users should get unlimited. Half year later they've changed the terms to be less suggestive on possible restrictions (https://blog.jottacloud.com/updated-terms-conditions-63f4ba28d4d4 https://blog.jottacloud.com/updated-terms-conditions-63f4ba2...).
- ogrim 9y ago
  I think the new wording is more uncertain, since we now don't know at what time Jottacloud will claim unlimited storage has been exceeded. They say that "in some cases where the total storage- and network use significantly exceeds the average use of a Jottacloud user, [we] can deem this use as excessive". Before I had a hard limit to stay under, now I cannot know anymore. This was the reason I stopped using Jottacloud, going all in on ACD..
rubenbe 9y ago
I've been looking into trying Hubic [0] or OVH cloud archive [1] in combination with duplicity [2]. They are both implemented on Openstack Swift. But on Hubic I haven't found any data integrity guarantee. [0] http://hubic.com http://hubic.com [1] https://www.ovh.co.uk/public-cloud/storage/cloud-archive/ https://www.ovh.co.uk/public-cloud/storage/cloud-archive/ [2] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
- mwambua 9y ago
  To my knowledge, ACD never provided any SLAs either.
- squaresmile 9y ago
  Hubic is quite slow at around 1-3 MB/s and that's from a server in OVH's datacenter.
smoyer 9y ago
I think I'll just encrypt my backups and give them a JPEG wrapper and file extension.
- rrggrr 9y ago
  Genius. Have an upvote.
almostdigital 9y ago
I'm a customer and they didn't even send out an email about it. And no grace period? Effective today and you'll loose your data if you don't pay up? This should be illegal, I'm never trusting Amazon with my business again.
- comboy 9y ago
  I also didn't get any e-mail. I recently started using it as my backup solution with duplicity. Feels good not to be worried about TBs stored. I thought that while random backup company may not understand full implications of offering a free unlimited storage, Amazon is the one that should, and that worst case I'll get my upload throttled. Well I guess it was a bit too good to be true.
- morganvachon 9y ago
  You don't lose your data, you just lose the ability to upload more. You can still view, download, and delete your data. 8) What happens to my content if I choose not to renew into one of the new storage plans? When your paid storage subscription expires, your account will be considered in an over-quota status if your content stored is greater than the free storage quota on your account. If your account is in an over-quota status, you will not be able to upload additional files, and can only view, download, and delete content.
  - almostdigital 9y ago
    Ah, missed that part, maybe I flew off the handle a little then. Still really scummy not to alert their customers about a big change like this. Looks like I have 180 days to move before getting deleted, guess I'd better pray they don't decide to cap download speeds...
    - smnscu 9y ago
      I don't think you should worry about overreacting. I'm working on an e2e encrypted sync/backup service right now and I would never dream about pulling off such a move. But I'm a pussy and not a "fierce businessperson". Long story short, Amazon can afford to not give a fuck about losing the trust of the users of one of their small sattelite services, maybe you should consider a business whose trustworthiness affects their bottom line.
planetjones 9y ago
It's bait and switch. I know in /r/DataHoarder some people have uploaded (allegedly) 1PB of data, which is excessive. However given the growth of 4K video 1TB as a basis does seem low when the whole selling point of ACD was unlimited storage. Also very unimpressed that they banned rclone's usage of the ACD API and then flat out refused to re-allow the app if the developer changed to not include the secret key in the source code.
koolba 9y ago
> Any customer that signs up for storage with Amazon automatically gets 5 GB for free, and Prime members receive free unlimited photo storage. Do they compress your photos further or save them byte for byte? If not, you can upload arbitrary data in many image formats. Even if they recompress them, you could put a QR code as the image to encode the data. I bet someone is trying this...
dsacco 9y ago
Well, I saw this coming. /r/DataHoarder is going to lose their shit today. It had become pretty vogue to store tens or hundreds of TBs of encrypted data on Amazon Cloud Drive. This became kind of inevitable. One person even had a petabyte stored there: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/?st=J3OD0CTJ&sh=933c6a01 https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a... Guess I'll be using Backblaze B2 entirely on Linux and macOS now.
neogodless 9y ago
I found it noteworthy that Amazon Drive announced their unlimited plan on the very same day that Microsoft announced that they were discontinuing their own on OneDrive. Now, I don't know how many people picked up their "unlimited data" and migrated it from OneDrive to Amazon Drive during that transition, but imagine where they stand now.
jasonsync 9y ago
It's frustrating to watch cloud companies subsidize their storage, in order to break into the market with a product that is too good to be true. This strategy is the worst possible scenario for our entire industry. Users feel slighted, and the trustworthiness of the cloud in general is gradually eroded, as the scenario plays itself out over and over. It feels like ransomware. Pay more or we'll delete your files. When Dropbox for Business launched, it was $12.50 / user / month for "all the storage you need". Just recently Dropbox announced pricing changes, which will take effect in 2018. The new unlimited plan is $20.00 / user / month. And for those unwilling to pay, there's now a fixed storage tier, which is slightly cheaper than the original price, but it's capped at 1 TB. Microsoft OneDrive included unlimited storage with any Office 365 subscription. After millions of users bought in, Microsoft dropped the maximum storage to 1 TB. Users were then given the choice of deleting their files, or moving elsewhere. Mozy had an unlimited plan, and then dropped it and raised prices. SugarSync had an unlimited plan, but eventually dropped it. Barracuda offered virtually unlimited cloud storage with their Copy.com service. A few years in and Barracuda shut down the entire service. Users were given very little notice, and had to move elsewhere. Bitcasa, one of the original "unlimited" cloud storage providers (and a TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist) crashed and burned three years in. Again, users were given very little notice, and there was talk of a class-action lawsuit. Time and time again we're seeing startups burn through their capital subsidizing the storage as some sort of brilliant marketing plan. It's not. Disclaimer, I work at https://www.sync.com https://www.sync.com
- illumin8 9y ago
  To be fair, this is not "pay more or we'll delete your files." That would be a terrible way to treat customers. Customers will simply lose the ability to upload new files. All their existing content will still be there.
  - panopticon 9y ago
    > You have a 180-day grace period to either delete content to bring your total content within the free quota, or to sign up for a paid storage plan. After 180 days in an over-quota status, content will be deleted (starting with the most recent uploads first) until your account is no longer over quota. Looks like that's not the route Amazon took.
hysan 9y ago
> Amazon is now providing options for customers to choose the storage plan that is right for them. Something about that wording really irks me for some reason.
- biesnecker 9y ago
  It's a line out of the current administration's "we're [slashing this important program so as to benefit the few] to give people more choice over [healthcare / education / etc]."
Qub3d 9y ago
/r/datahoarder will be devastated. Actually, they are devastated [0]. Where are they going to put all of their Linux ISOs? In all seriousness, this move is another example of why I don't trust cloud storage. I use cloud storage, both GDrive and OneDrive, but never for mission-critical data, and especially never as a complete replacement for a good old JBOD in the basement. Building Servers doesn't have to be difficult or complex [1]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6fydbz/looks_like_amazon_is_pulling_the_plug_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6fydbz/looks_l... [1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-prof-ok-maybe-just-for-fun/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-p...
- vosper 9y ago
  From that reddit thread there's a link to this guy [0], storing on Amazon Drive 1 PB of what the poster referred to as webcam recordings, which I think (from skimming the thread) is a euphemism for porn. As one commenter pointed out "this guy upload $40,000 of hard drives". I find myself fairly sympathetic with companies removing their unlimited policies, when this kind of thing goes on. I doubt that in practice it will effect more than a tiny number of people. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...
Corrado 9y ago
I just realized that I have an unlimited Amazon Drive subscription that I've been paying $59.99/year for and not using. Thanks to this announcement I'm canceling my subscription and saving $60 next year. :)
- scrollaway 9y ago
  If you've actually never used it, you can probably ask for a refund.
ghshephard 9y ago
I'm guessing Arq using them as a backup destination might be one of the major motivators behind this decision. I was wondering how long it would take. About 6 months to a year longer than I predicted.
- ArlenBales 9y ago
  Yep! I also use ACD for my Arq back ups, although I'm below 1TB.
trentmb 9y ago
This is an outrage! > 254 GB Used | Unlimited Never mind. I've got 'til the end of March to find a 'better' provider, but probably won't bother.
giarc 9y ago
I think this is a good news bad news announcement. Sure, losing the unlimited option isn't great, but the additional storage level is good. For light users having a cheap 100gb option is great. I was on the unlimited plan with about 150gb and will continue with the $60/yr plan for the foreseeable future.
gigatexal 9y ago
Bait and switch much?
gumby 9y ago
As long as you have another reason for subscribing to Prime, it looks like you can still get unlimited storage. You just have to put everything into one of the approved container formats (like JPEG). I assume someone will implement a FUSE package to do just that.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
The 'Cloud storage' business model is simply a) get all your data b) make it hard to move it elsewhere c) profit! Operating a large storage infrastructure is not free of course so it almost cannot be any other way unless everyone decided all at once "hey I'm going to charge what I need to stay in business forever right from the start." Which no one ever does because who signs up for such an expensive cloud storage plan where there are so many cheaper ones to choose from? I pitched a psuedo peer to peer storage plan to some investors once (feel free to pick up the torch and keep running :-) where the company would 'sell' a NAS box to customers that they put on their network and the Internet. 50% of the available storage would be theirs to use, 50% would be used by people off site. The NAS box would encrypt peer-to-peer erasure coded copies of the local storage. If you're allocation of storage was 10TB you "got" 10TB of which the most up to date copy was on your 'home' NAS but it kept the 'cloud view' consistent within a few seconds if you had a decent network. There was a variant where you took less than 50% of the storage and the company would sell the extra to people on a subscription basis and offset the cost of the NAS appliance you had in your house/apt whatever. The 'key value' of the company was this virtual datacenter where all of its gear was distributed amongst all of these individual installations. That needed some interesting capabilities like ship on warn replacement drives to owners etc. As the available bandwidth to individual houses increases it gets to be a better idea.
- fuzzybeard 9y ago
  Symform is the company that did this and I loved their model. Sadly, they went out of business. The idea of backing up your data across 38 peers, encrypted, instead of a central cloud storage service was enticing. Especially nice was that you didn't need to pay because you "paid" by also donating local storage. It's a great idea that hasn't taken off yet, not in any way comparable to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and others. It's frustrating because "paying" for cloud storage by giving up unused local storage seems like a great alternative.
akeck 9y ago
Unlimited is a disaster because of media horders, but 1TB is slightly too small for me (I'm a serious photographer off hours and work from RAW files). I would love a metered plan, a la S3 but for consumers, that comes out to about $60/y for 2TB for moderate data transfer rates. Then, at the very least, Amazon can do power law scaling for higher users (3TB meters out to $70/y, but 20TB with high transfer comes out to $5000+/year). Then they can slide the metering as storage gets incrementally cheaper. In fact, I would pay $120-$200/y for 2TB if they had a well-supported Linux client.
- Antrikshy 9y ago
  Dropbox Business does 2TB for $12.50/user/month and does have a Linux client, right?
  - akeck 9y ago
    Dropbox says: "starting at 3 users"
- ValentineC 9y ago
  > Unlimited is a disaster because of media horders, but 1TB is slightly too small for me (I'm a serious photographer off hours and work from RAW files). Amazon Cloud Drive's (still-available) Unlimited Photos plan includes RAW files.
  - akeck 9y ago
    Thanks for the tip!
Dimi9909 9y ago
lesson learnt, there is no free lunch. Eating free lunch means you pay back later essentially.
hedora 9y ago
This sucks. I have about 3TB in there, which is a money loser for them in 2016, and probably a money maker by 2018. That seems like a reasonable loss leader arrangement to me. Instead, I need to find a new offsite backup solution ASAP. Every single time i have trusted a consumer cloud service I have been burned. Grr
- cjensen 9y ago
  You've gotten burned by consumer cloud services, but there is an easy solution: before using the service, ask yourself "is this business charging enough money to run the service at a profit?" Services like S3, Glacier, and B2 have sensible business models so you can count on them being there tomorrow. "Unlimited" makes no financial sense because it will be abused, and one by one the unlimited services have ceased to exist. BackBlaze is still unlimited because they are careful to limit the promise to drives powered up and attached to your computer and require you to use their own client.
  - hedora 9y ago
    I did, and concluded it was sustainable for my use case. Apparently I was off by a factor of 4. Each time a consumer cloud service has burnt me, it has been for a different reason (security, privacy, and reliability were some other reasons in the past)
tambourine_man 9y ago
First they ban rclone, now this. https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/1417 https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/1417 So long. I'll be looking into Google Cloud Platform with a lot more interest. If only they had more zones.
jerrac 9y ago
I just spent the last couple months working on getting my 2-3TB of backups uploaded to ACD. I had to spend a lot of time fighting with Comcast's slow upload speeds and their 1TB/month data limit. ACD was awesome because I could actually afford it. And now I probably can't. Wouldn't making the plans in 5-10TB increments have also stopped most of the abuse?
hendersoon 9y ago
The problem is that pirates started encrypting their data, which breaks deduplication. Deduplication saves a TREMENDOUS amount of storage. The pirates store all the same stuff; "scene" releases of movies and TV shows and porn ripped from web sites. I would be very surprised if they got less than a 1000:1 duplicate ratio on accounts with over 1TB of unencrypted data. It's completely viable to offer truly unlimited storage for $60/year as long as pirates don't encrypt. Once they encrypt, that business model collapses.
ojr 9y ago
“There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” -Milton Friedman, New York Times Magazine, September 1970
d2p 9y ago
Prime members still get unlimited photo space. Just find a way to embed all your files inside photo metadata? :-)
- d2p 9y ago
  Unsurprisingly this was already mentioned a million times =D
jvreyes30 9y ago
Sia.tech is good to use than this amazon drive. Sia is cheap and not governed or no one controls your data as its a decentralized network.
jvreyes30 9y ago
Best to use is sia.tech they are much cheaper from amazon drive and dropbox. Also they are decentralized which is no one controls or governed your files means 100% safe from them. Sia.tech :)
greedo 9y ago
They should have just shadow-throttled transfer speeds for hoarders...
touchofevil 9y ago
Do these companies that keep offering unlimited plans not know about reddit.com/r/datahoarder? I feel like the users of that subreddit alone will crush pretty much any cloud service offering unlimited storage plans.
gwerks 9y ago
God damn it. There goes 9 months of continuous uploading for nothing. Bastards.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
xiloid 9y ago
Moving from Amazon to Hubic (https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=LCUAXF https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=LCUAXF) - 10TB for ~$55/year

352 points by some-guy 9y ago

Amazon recently disabled acd-cli and rclone from accessing their services "for security reasons." I see that acd-cli is back while rclone remains effectively banned. Acd-cli and rclone truly had poor implementations. Though, the timing is suspicious for them not to allow rclone again if they implemented the service securely again. My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users and so the low-volume users didn't outweigh or pay for the heavy users like they originally estimated when they set the price for the service. It was good while it lasted.

tribby 9y ago
> My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users I would further speculate that plex users were the largest single group of offenders. seemed like a cat and mouse game for a while -- amazon started comparing hashes of files to known bootlegs and banning accounts, so everyone started using encfs, and later migrated to the unlimited plan from google apps. I guess google's the only game in town, now.
- derimagia 9y ago
  I don't think Plex ever really worked with amazon. Plex advertised it at first but it didn't end up working out, sadly. See https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/02/amazon-isnt-playing-nice-with-plexs-new-cloud-service/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/02/amazon-isnt-playing-nice-w...
  - tribby 9y ago
    this is incorrect, plex works fine with amazon.[1][2][more on request] the issues being described in the link you posted may refer to early-release bugs, users who were getting throttled or nuked due to the anti-piracy efforts I referred to earlier, or any number of things (certain kinds of transcoding, maybe?) -- it's a pretty vague article! but plex and amazon can definitely be integrated. 1. https://amc.ovh/2015/08/13/infinite-media-server.html https://amc.ovh/2015/08/13/infinite-media-server.html 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using_amazon_cloud_drive_and_encfs_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...
    - derimagia 9y ago
      Those links are from a while ago. You linked to a FUSE solution, which isn't first-class and you need a computer for it. You're right, it probably would "work" with that, but I would say that's an outlier solution. It doesn't work with plex's cloud feature: https://www.plex.tv/features/cloud/ https://www.plex.tv/features/cloud/ - they removed it from the list there. This would have gotten a lot more users
      - 9935c101ab17a66 9y ago
        I used acd_cli to mount an ENCFS store that I decrypted on the server and used it successfully to play media back (files as large as 18gb) for 18 months. So, yes it was possible. You need a computer for any reasonable Plex transcoding. Just because it wasn't supported by Plex cloud doesn't mean it didn't work. Lots of people were doing it.
      - tribby 9y ago
        that is correct, plex cloud is not the preferred solution for data hoarders using plex. plex cloud only supported amazon drive until jan 1st of this year[1] and all existing accounts were grandfathered in. that was a pretty short period of time but probably enough to create a problem. plex cloud is beside the point, though, because it isn't what people use for this. they used amazon cloud drive with fuse. regarding fuse: > you need a computer for it well, not really, only to the extent that a VPS is a computer. > I would say that's an outlier solution an outlier solution for an outlier problem (can we agree to call that people storing 100+ TB of files?). except the problem was seemingly large enough that they had to get rid of it, so maybe it's not fair to call it an outlier. I don't think "first class" is a concern for people with such ridiculous amounts of data. plex cloud just makes things simpler, but running plex on a VPS takes two commands and there are some pretty detailed guides out there for people who don't know what ssh or digitalocean is. it's at a point now where there's even a platform for automating this stuff, complete with fancy dashboard etc.[2] needing to use things like fuse and encfs is hardly a barrier. people talk about this stuff a lot more publicly than I would have thought, in places like /r/datahoarders, /r/plex, as well as the lowendbox, quickbox, and torrent tracker forums. 1. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/203082447-Supported-Cloud-Storage-Providers https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/203082447-Supporte... 2. https://quickbox.io/ https://quickbox.io/
- gechr 9y ago
  > [...] everyone started using encfs Interesting. I wonder if this indirectly expedited the price hike? Encryption would make it (practically) impossible for Amazon to deduplicate people's data and store it more cost efficiently.
simcop2387 9y ago
Yea it's been great for my family. We've been backing up family photos and movies to it with acdcli. Close to 1TB of all that content there, so we're fine for now but I'm probably going to end up doing something else for the longer term.
WaxProlix 9y ago
There was a thread recently around how acd-cli users were gaining access to other peoples' data - it was a legit concern, I think.
- johnpowell 9y ago
  Amazon was completely right for banning acd_cli. What they were doing is using a server in the middle for auth. But oh god the server started handing out the wrong keys so you might end up having total control of another acd_cli users account. And when acd_cli got banned they (not acd_cli themself but users that modified the source) just used rclones app ID and keys to trick Amazon into thinking acd_cli was rclone. Then rclone got banned. They (amazon) did say the problem with rclone was the keys were public since it is open source.
  - awirth 9y ago
    Ooops, missed this thread. I did a little mini-writeup of what happened on a different branch if anyone is curious on the details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14512598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14512598
puzzlingcaptcha 9y ago
As anectodal information: I know a community of people who share movies. In the past few months, abusing ACD to move their personal, encrypted movie collections (which go up to many terabytes) was definitely a fad. There was automation written to allow for streaming movies directly from ACD. A popular resource point was https://www.reddit.com/r/PlexACD/comments/6bmt9s/a_framework_and_tutorial_for_configuring_your_own/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PlexACD/comments/6bmt9s/a_framework... As long as Amazon's API could allow for accessing the storage space in a drive-like manner, they were open for abuse. For me the writing was on the wall.

chinhodado 9y ago

So Amazon has followed the footstep of Microsoft. I wonder if Google will ever do the same to Google Drive (unlimited storage for Google Apps users)

pkaye 9y ago
Are you referring to G-Suite business plans which require 5 users minimum to get unlimited storage which works out to $600/year.
- johnpowell 9y ago
  This isn't actually enforced. I have about 3TB on there and I am a single user.
  - copperx 9y ago
    The 5 user minimum is not enforced? Are you effectively paying $5/mo for GSuite?
    - dawnerd 9y ago
      It's 10 a month for unlimited. But to answer your question yes. I have three accounts on my business plan and it's been unlimited from the start when I was just a single user.
  - _pmf_ 9y ago
    > This isn't actually enforced. Until it is. Then we have exactly the same situation.
    - johnpowell 9y ago
      With amazon doing this I am sure now all those people will be frantically signing up for Google. I am sure it will eventually happen that Google enforces the limit. And I would bet sooner rather then latter. For my personal use case it isn't a huge deal since I just use it as a back-up for work stuff, music and pictures. It is nice to know that if I am at Taco Bell and my apartment burns down I am not totally screwed. And even if the limit is enforced I will get my mom and my sister and my sisters kids accounts and call it a Christmas present. They are always running low on storage.

thebspatrol 9y ago

Ah, the old "give them a bunch of storage and then ask for more money to keep storing it" meme.

selckin 9y ago
Not entirely fair, there are whole communities around storing 100s of TB on amazon
- vitalysh 9y ago
  I'm not even mad. /r/datahoarders brought this on themselves. Who in their right mind expects to upload 100s of TBs of data, encrypted and pay 59.99?
  - ghughes 9y ago
    People who understand the literal meaning of the word "unlimited"?
    - vitalysh 9y ago
      Yes, Amazon is to blame here as well. They shouldn't have offered unlimited service. At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy.
      - cf 9y ago
        I don't get why if they don't mean unlimited just say up to 20TB/mo.
        chc 9y ago
        Possibly because there actually wasn't any limit. Maybe if a handful people were exceeding $LOTS TB, they don't care, but if 60% of users exceed $LOTS TB, the service becomes unsustainable. In this case, the service really is unlimited (there genuinely is no limit that you're not allowed to go over), and if you wanted that effect, advertising a limit would be net negative — a high limit would encourage the "too many users use a lot" case and lead to the same result we get now where the plan has to be canceled for unsustainability, and a low limit would defeat the purpose.

IBM 9y ago

>Amazon will no longer offer an unlimited storage plan. Instead, we'll offer storage plans of 100 GB for $11.99 and 1 TB for $59.99, up to 30 TB for an additional $59.99 per TB. What? How is Amazon less competitive on storage than iCloud when they're one of the biggest scale players in cloud computing? They also don't have to deal with the load of a trillion iPhone photos taken per year. iCloud gives you 2TB for $9.99 per month. And the ironic thing is that Apple pays to use AWS and Google Cloud. EDIT: My mistake, the comments below are correct. Amazon's prices are yearly.

venins 9y ago
$59.99 per TB is for year not for month.
aaronbee 9y ago
Amazon's pricing is yearly.
ClassyJacket 9y ago
It's crazy that they didn't clarify that in the text you quoted. It's at the beginning of the page with no context and I assumed it was monthly, too, since every other service charges monthly.
- IBM 9y ago
  That's certainly my defense. But those prices are definitely much more reasonable given the scale of AWS.

nodesocket 9y ago

I just got bitten by this. Changed plan to 1TB from unlimited for the same price. :-(

LAMike 9y ago

Filecoin.io might be a solution/competitor to S3

rdtsc 9y ago

>> Do Prime members still get unlimited photo storage? > Yes. Heh. Anyone tried writing an encoder to make files look like photos, and upload them to any of these "unlimited photo" services. I am sure they are probably watching for it and will close the account. Then what if it there is a way to gradually mix in data with actual photos, a bit like in steganography. But more aggressive. And create what still looks photos, just like really noisy.

tribby 9y ago
not sure if anyone ever formalized it in some sort of library, but yes, it's been done! people were using flickr for storage years ago.[1] I have no idea if it's still possible. https://digiwonk.gadgethacks.com/how-to/use-your-new-terabyte-free-flickr-storage-for-more-than-just-photos-using-hack-0147022/ https://digiwonk.gadgethacks.com/how-to/use-your-new-terabyt...
lorenzhs 9y ago
Dropbox did a thing a few years back where they gave you permanent additional storage for uploading photos. A jpeg header followed by gigabytes of zeroes supposedly worked just fine. This is very easy to catch, though. Abusing comment fields might be more interesting. Use a small valid image, and insert 4MB of data into a comment field. It would be a fun project to implement this as a FUSE file system. I'm not sure whether any of the popular formats support arbitrary-length comments, and whether or not Amazon strips such data (it's image storage, after all, not file storage).
- iso-8859-1 9y ago
  Already exists, see StegFS: https://albinoloverats.net/projects/stegfs https://albinoloverats.net/projects/stegfs
  - lorenzhs 9y ago
    I wouldn't use steganography (it's not normally very space-efficient), just dump the payload data into a PNG's comment field. You can do this with exiftool "-Comment<=/path/to/inputfile" dummy.png and re-extract it with exiftool -b -Comment dummy.png > recovered_file. Of course you'd use libpng directly in a FUSE filesystem, but this shows that it's easy enough. Use a 20kB cat picture and 2 MB payload and you achieve 99% space efficiency. It's probably inconvenient enough for most data hoarders for Amazon not to care. You can still switch to encoding it in the pixel values in case they do. I'm not familiar enough with PNG to comment on the space-efficiency of that.

msravi 9y ago

Amazon has been de-emphasizing their unlimited plan since the end of April, and the writing has literally been on the clouddrive landing page - I wrote about it here: http://swirlingtea.blogspot.in/2017/05/amazon-de-emphasizing-unlimited-storage.html http://swirlingtea.blogspot.in/2017/05/amazon-de-emphasizing...

AriaMinaei 9y ago

I've been meaning to get my data out of ACD anyway. I only use it for average-joe's needs, and for that, it's not up to the task. The Prime Photos app is slow (even thumbnails load slowly). Videos take time to buffer, even on a 400mbps connection. Navigating the library is difficult. Uploads (photos or not) clearly take much longer than uploading to, say, YouTube. And I've also seen that their iOS app misses uploading some files too, saying "0 items remaining to upload" when clearly many items aren't uploaded yet. Lost some memory-worthy videos that way. Of course, bugs can be found in any product and that's okay. But sometimes you can tell that it's because the product is neglected. I'm now surveying the alternatives again. Any recommendations? Edit: Rephrasing "product is neglected"

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
msh 9y ago
Google photos, fast Food and free

dewiz 9y ago

considering they give unlimited photo storage to Prime users, can one store data inside these images and get unlimited storage that way?

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 9y ago
Yes, at least as of ~2 months ago[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998534

manojlds 9y ago

I didn't realize that things I send to my kindle (via email) are in my Amazon Drive. Logged in after seeing this post, and there they are.

firmgently 9y ago

"we'll offer storage plans of 100 GB for $11.99 and 1 TB for $59.99, up to 30 TB for an additional $59.99 per TB"..."At the end of their existing subscription, customers with auto-renew turned on and 1TB or less of data stored will be renewed into the 1 TB plan for $59.99 per year." So if someone is using eg. 50GB of storage Amazon is going to sign them up for the 1TB/$59.99 tier rather than the 100GB/$11.99 tier? Yes it can be changed, but also inertia affects these things, many people don't check or can't be bothered (same psychology as cashback offers). Judging from the sneaky pushy way they try to get everyone signed up for Prime (the button to not sign up is practically invisible compared to the 'yes' button and I know of several people who signed up unknowingly and got charged) I wouldn't be surprised if they are acting darkly on this.

nickcw 9y ago

This is probably not surprising; given the way they've been treating rclone and its users it is clear that they don't like heavy users. On the plus side (now that they are charging a sustainable amount for it) perhaps they will reopen the developer API and I'll be able to get some new keys for rclone...

ktta 9y ago

Well, people might be interested to know that one person has managed to use 1.73 PB+ of the unlimited plan. Looks like that's the highest anyone's managed as far as I know. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6583s2/the_petabyte_porn_problem_public_webcam_social/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6583s2/the_pet... Check out the first comment

tlightsky 9y ago

Check out http://sia.tech http://sia.tech this tech provide less than $10/TB by blockchain storage hosting

klodolph 9y ago

If you're cynical you'd think "of course they'd offer a free version and then make you pay for it." But that's basically the cloud storage market in a nutshell. All the cloud storage providers are in a race to the bottom, and once they have your data they want to upsell you on other cloud technologies. If you just need to store data, that's actually great news, because these providers are working hard on the optimizations that make it possible to give you storage as cheap as they can. Cheap options are Glacier at $0.004/GB, Backblaze at $0.005/GB, GCS Coldline at $0.007/GB. That's the monthly cost for bare cloud storage with no egress. Anything cheaper than about $50/year for 1TB will fall in one of two categories: 1. Subsidized by the provider, but probably not for long. This has happened so many times I can't even remember them all, Amazon is just the most recent. 2. Strictly DIY, probably with a much higher chance of data loss than you realize.

cm2187 9y ago
If it is backup, it doesn't need to be super safe. The risk that you lose both your primary data, (optionally your local backup) and your online backup at the same time is pretty insignificant, given that the online backup will be uncorrelated as in a different physical location (primary and local backup very correlated I agree).
- himlion 9y ago
  The problem is sometimes you only find out your backup is corrupted when you need it.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Yeah, agree. And I am not talking about enterprise level of reliability. More like personnal / small office. But for anything above a few TB, running your own hardware will be way cheaper if you take say a 5y horizon. Disks are so large today that you don't need a big config. In fact you might even keep two copies to reduce the risk. Of course there is the occasional trip to the datacentre. I made that mistake. I pay more in uber than I saved by picking a datacentre far away.

Matrixik 9y ago

Object Store comparison Compare cost, durability, and region support of public cloud object stores, e.g., Amazon S3: http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/ http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/ And source repo: https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-comparison https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-comparison

ForHackernews 9y ago

I hope this means they'll at least re-open the Amazon Drive API: https://developer.amazon.com/amazon-drive https://developer.amazon.com/amazon-drive There are no Amazon-provided Linux solutions to connect with their Drive (except uploading through a web browser), and they are actively shutting down third-party solutions: https://forum.rclone.org/t/my-response-to-amazon-banning-rclone/2696 https://forum.rclone.org/t/my-response-to-amazon-banning-rcl... https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/572 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/572 To any Amazon managers reading this: many of the developers who you want using AWS also use Linux on their personal machines.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

andlier 9y ago

I'm trying https://www.jottacloud.com https://www.jottacloud.com now, they have an unlimited plan for ~$70/year. Funny story; They previously had a clause in the terms about restricting storage space for users with abnormal usage patterns. A friend of mine sent a complaint to the norwegian consumer ombudsman about this based on the fact that if you advertise with unlimited, all users should get unlimited. Half year later they've changed the terms to be less suggestive on possible restrictions (https://blog.jottacloud.com/updated-terms-conditions-63f4ba28d4d4 https://blog.jottacloud.com/updated-terms-conditions-63f4ba2...).

ogrim 9y ago
I think the new wording is more uncertain, since we now don't know at what time Jottacloud will claim unlimited storage has been exceeded. They say that "in some cases where the total storage- and network use significantly exceeds the average use of a Jottacloud user, [we] can deem this use as excessive". Before I had a hard limit to stay under, now I cannot know anymore. This was the reason I stopped using Jottacloud, going all in on ACD..

rubenbe 9y ago

I've been looking into trying Hubic [0] or OVH cloud archive [1] in combination with duplicity [2]. They are both implemented on Openstack Swift. But on Hubic I haven't found any data integrity guarantee. [0] http://hubic.com http://hubic.com [1] https://www.ovh.co.uk/public-cloud/storage/cloud-archive/ https://www.ovh.co.uk/public-cloud/storage/cloud-archive/ [2] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

mwambua 9y ago
To my knowledge, ACD never provided any SLAs either.
squaresmile 9y ago
Hubic is quite slow at around 1-3 MB/s and that's from a server in OVH's datacenter.

smoyer 9y ago

I think I'll just encrypt my backups and give them a JPEG wrapper and file extension.

rrggrr 9y ago
Genius. Have an upvote.

almostdigital 9y ago

I'm a customer and they didn't even send out an email about it. And no grace period? Effective today and you'll loose your data if you don't pay up? This should be illegal, I'm never trusting Amazon with my business again.

comboy 9y ago
I also didn't get any e-mail. I recently started using it as my backup solution with duplicity. Feels good not to be worried about TBs stored. I thought that while random backup company may not understand full implications of offering a free unlimited storage, Amazon is the one that should, and that worst case I'll get my upload throttled. Well I guess it was a bit too good to be true.
morganvachon 9y ago
You don't lose your data, you just lose the ability to upload more. You can still view, download, and delete your data. 8) What happens to my content if I choose not to renew into one of the new storage plans? When your paid storage subscription expires, your account will be considered in an over-quota status if your content stored is greater than the free storage quota on your account. If your account is in an over-quota status, you will not be able to upload additional files, and can only view, download, and delete content.
- almostdigital 9y ago
  Ah, missed that part, maybe I flew off the handle a little then. Still really scummy not to alert their customers about a big change like this. Looks like I have 180 days to move before getting deleted, guess I'd better pray they don't decide to cap download speeds...
  - smnscu 9y ago
    I don't think you should worry about overreacting. I'm working on an e2e encrypted sync/backup service right now and I would never dream about pulling off such a move. But I'm a pussy and not a "fierce businessperson". Long story short, Amazon can afford to not give a fuck about losing the trust of the users of one of their small sattelite services, maybe you should consider a business whose trustworthiness affects their bottom line.

planetjones 9y ago

It's bait and switch. I know in /r/DataHoarder some people have uploaded (allegedly) 1PB of data, which is excessive. However given the growth of 4K video 1TB as a basis does seem low when the whole selling point of ACD was unlimited storage. Also very unimpressed that they banned rclone's usage of the ACD API and then flat out refused to re-allow the app if the developer changed to not include the secret key in the source code.

koolba 9y ago

> Any customer that signs up for storage with Amazon automatically gets 5 GB for free, and Prime members receive free unlimited photo storage. Do they compress your photos further or save them byte for byte? If not, you can upload arbitrary data in many image formats. Even if they recompress them, you could put a QR code as the image to encode the data. I bet someone is trying this...

dsacco 9y ago

Well, I saw this coming. /r/DataHoarder is going to lose their shit today. It had become pretty vogue to store tens or hundreds of TBs of encrypted data on Amazon Cloud Drive. This became kind of inevitable. One person even had a petabyte stored there: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/?st=J3OD0CTJ&sh=933c6a01 https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a... Guess I'll be using Backblaze B2 entirely on Linux and macOS now.

neogodless 9y ago

I found it noteworthy that Amazon Drive announced their unlimited plan on the very same day that Microsoft announced that they were discontinuing their own on OneDrive. Now, I don't know how many people picked up their "unlimited data" and migrated it from OneDrive to Amazon Drive during that transition, but imagine where they stand now.

jasonsync 9y ago

It's frustrating to watch cloud companies subsidize their storage, in order to break into the market with a product that is too good to be true. This strategy is the worst possible scenario for our entire industry. Users feel slighted, and the trustworthiness of the cloud in general is gradually eroded, as the scenario plays itself out over and over. It feels like ransomware. Pay more or we'll delete your files. When Dropbox for Business launched, it was $12.50 / user / month for "all the storage you need". Just recently Dropbox announced pricing changes, which will take effect in 2018. The new unlimited plan is $20.00 / user / month. And for those unwilling to pay, there's now a fixed storage tier, which is slightly cheaper than the original price, but it's capped at 1 TB. Microsoft OneDrive included unlimited storage with any Office 365 subscription. After millions of users bought in, Microsoft dropped the maximum storage to 1 TB. Users were then given the choice of deleting their files, or moving elsewhere. Mozy had an unlimited plan, and then dropped it and raised prices. SugarSync had an unlimited plan, but eventually dropped it. Barracuda offered virtually unlimited cloud storage with their Copy.com service. A few years in and Barracuda shut down the entire service. Users were given very little notice, and had to move elsewhere. Bitcasa, one of the original "unlimited" cloud storage providers (and a TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist) crashed and burned three years in. Again, users were given very little notice, and there was talk of a class-action lawsuit. Time and time again we're seeing startups burn through their capital subsidizing the storage as some sort of brilliant marketing plan. It's not. Disclaimer, I work at https://www.sync.com https://www.sync.com

illumin8 9y ago
To be fair, this is not "pay more or we'll delete your files." That would be a terrible way to treat customers. Customers will simply lose the ability to upload new files. All their existing content will still be there.
- panopticon 9y ago
  > You have a 180-day grace period to either delete content to bring your total content within the free quota, or to sign up for a paid storage plan. After 180 days in an over-quota status, content will be deleted (starting with the most recent uploads first) until your account is no longer over quota. Looks like that's not the route Amazon took.

hysan 9y ago

> Amazon is now providing options for customers to choose the storage plan that is right for them. Something about that wording really irks me for some reason.

biesnecker 9y ago
It's a line out of the current administration's "we're [slashing this important program so as to benefit the few] to give people more choice over [healthcare / education / etc]."

Qub3d 9y ago

/r/datahoarder will be devastated. Actually, they are devastated [0]. Where are they going to put all of their Linux ISOs? In all seriousness, this move is another example of why I don't trust cloud storage. I use cloud storage, both GDrive and OneDrive, but never for mission-critical data, and especially never as a complete replacement for a good old JBOD in the basement. Building Servers doesn't have to be difficult or complex [1]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6fydbz/looks_like_amazon_is_pulling_the_plug_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6fydbz/looks_l... [1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-prof-ok-maybe-just-for-fun/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-p...

vosper 9y ago
From that reddit thread there's a link to this guy [0], storing on Amazon Drive 1 PB of what the poster referred to as webcam recordings, which I think (from skimming the thread) is a euphemism for porn. As one commenter pointed out "this guy upload $40,000 of hard drives". I find myself fairly sympathetic with companies removing their unlimited policies, when this kind of thing goes on. I doubt that in practice it will effect more than a tiny number of people. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...

Corrado 9y ago

I just realized that I have an unlimited Amazon Drive subscription that I've been paying $59.99/year for and not using. Thanks to this announcement I'm canceling my subscription and saving $60 next year. :)

scrollaway 9y ago
If you've actually never used it, you can probably ask for a refund.

ghshephard 9y ago

I'm guessing Arq using them as a backup destination might be one of the major motivators behind this decision. I was wondering how long it would take. About 6 months to a year longer than I predicted.

ArlenBales 9y ago
Yep! I also use ACD for my Arq back ups, although I'm below 1TB.

trentmb 9y ago

This is an outrage! > 254 GB Used | Unlimited Never mind. I've got 'til the end of March to find a 'better' provider, but probably won't bother.

giarc 9y ago

I think this is a good news bad news announcement. Sure, losing the unlimited option isn't great, but the additional storage level is good. For light users having a cheap 100gb option is great. I was on the unlimited plan with about 150gb and will continue with the $60/yr plan for the foreseeable future.

gigatexal 9y ago

Bait and switch much?

gumby 9y ago

As long as you have another reason for subscribing to Prime, it looks like you can still get unlimited storage. You just have to put everything into one of the approved container formats (like JPEG). I assume someone will implement a FUSE package to do just that.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

The 'Cloud storage' business model is simply a) get all your data b) make it hard to move it elsewhere c) profit! Operating a large storage infrastructure is not free of course so it almost cannot be any other way unless everyone decided all at once "hey I'm going to charge what I need to stay in business forever right from the start." Which no one ever does because who signs up for such an expensive cloud storage plan where there are so many cheaper ones to choose from? I pitched a psuedo peer to peer storage plan to some investors once (feel free to pick up the torch and keep running :-) where the company would 'sell' a NAS box to customers that they put on their network and the Internet. 50% of the available storage would be theirs to use, 50% would be used by people off site. The NAS box would encrypt peer-to-peer erasure coded copies of the local storage. If you're allocation of storage was 10TB you "got" 10TB of which the most up to date copy was on your 'home' NAS but it kept the 'cloud view' consistent within a few seconds if you had a decent network. There was a variant where you took less than 50% of the storage and the company would sell the extra to people on a subscription basis and offset the cost of the NAS appliance you had in your house/apt whatever. The 'key value' of the company was this virtual datacenter where all of its gear was distributed amongst all of these individual installations. That needed some interesting capabilities like ship on warn replacement drives to owners etc. As the available bandwidth to individual houses increases it gets to be a better idea.

fuzzybeard 9y ago
Symform is the company that did this and I loved their model. Sadly, they went out of business. The idea of backing up your data across 38 peers, encrypted, instead of a central cloud storage service was enticing. Especially nice was that you didn't need to pay because you "paid" by also donating local storage. It's a great idea that hasn't taken off yet, not in any way comparable to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and others. It's frustrating because "paying" for cloud storage by giving up unused local storage seems like a great alternative.

akeck 9y ago

Unlimited is a disaster because of media horders, but 1TB is slightly too small for me (I'm a serious photographer off hours and work from RAW files). I would love a metered plan, a la S3 but for consumers, that comes out to about $60/y for 2TB for moderate data transfer rates. Then, at the very least, Amazon can do power law scaling for higher users (3TB meters out to $70/y, but 20TB with high transfer comes out to $5000+/year). Then they can slide the metering as storage gets incrementally cheaper. In fact, I would pay $120-$200/y for 2TB if they had a well-supported Linux client.

Antrikshy 9y ago
Dropbox Business does 2TB for $12.50/user/month and does have a Linux client, right?
- akeck 9y ago
  Dropbox says: "starting at 3 users"
ValentineC 9y ago
> Unlimited is a disaster because of media horders, but 1TB is slightly too small for me (I'm a serious photographer off hours and work from RAW files). Amazon Cloud Drive's (still-available) Unlimited Photos plan includes RAW files.
- akeck 9y ago
  Thanks for the tip!

Dimi9909 9y ago

lesson learnt, there is no free lunch. Eating free lunch means you pay back later essentially.

hedora 9y ago

This sucks. I have about 3TB in there, which is a money loser for them in 2016, and probably a money maker by 2018. That seems like a reasonable loss leader arrangement to me. Instead, I need to find a new offsite backup solution ASAP. Every single time i have trusted a consumer cloud service I have been burned. Grr

cjensen 9y ago
You've gotten burned by consumer cloud services, but there is an easy solution: before using the service, ask yourself "is this business charging enough money to run the service at a profit?" Services like S3, Glacier, and B2 have sensible business models so you can count on them being there tomorrow. "Unlimited" makes no financial sense because it will be abused, and one by one the unlimited services have ceased to exist. BackBlaze is still unlimited because they are careful to limit the promise to drives powered up and attached to your computer and require you to use their own client.
- hedora 9y ago
  I did, and concluded it was sustainable for my use case. Apparently I was off by a factor of 4. Each time a consumer cloud service has burnt me, it has been for a different reason (security, privacy, and reliability were some other reasons in the past)

tambourine_man 9y ago

First they ban rclone, now this. https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/1417 https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/1417 So long. I'll be looking into Google Cloud Platform with a lot more interest. If only they had more zones.

jerrac 9y ago

I just spent the last couple months working on getting my 2-3TB of backups uploaded to ACD. I had to spend a lot of time fighting with Comcast's slow upload speeds and their 1TB/month data limit. ACD was awesome because I could actually afford it. And now I probably can't. Wouldn't making the plans in 5-10TB increments have also stopped most of the abuse?

hendersoon 9y ago

The problem is that pirates started encrypting their data, which breaks deduplication. Deduplication saves a TREMENDOUS amount of storage. The pirates store all the same stuff; "scene" releases of movies and TV shows and porn ripped from web sites. I would be very surprised if they got less than a 1000:1 duplicate ratio on accounts with over 1TB of unencrypted data. It's completely viable to offer truly unlimited storage for $60/year as long as pirates don't encrypt. Once they encrypt, that business model collapses.

ojr 9y ago

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” -Milton Friedman, New York Times Magazine, September 1970

d2p 9y ago

Prime members still get unlimited photo space. Just find a way to embed all your files inside photo metadata? :-)

d2p 9y ago
Unsurprisingly this was already mentioned a million times =D

jvreyes30 9y ago

Sia.tech is good to use than this amazon drive. Sia is cheap and not governed or no one controls your data as its a decentralized network.

jvreyes30 9y ago

Best to use is sia.tech they are much cheaper from amazon drive and dropbox. Also they are decentralized which is no one controls or governed your files means 100% safe from them. Sia.tech :)

greedo 9y ago

They should have just shadow-throttled transfer speeds for hoarders...

touchofevil 9y ago

Do these companies that keep offering unlimited plans not know about reddit.com/r/datahoarder? I feel like the users of that subreddit alone will crush pretty much any cloud service offering unlimited storage plans.

gwerks 9y ago

God damn it. There goes 9 months of continuous uploading for nothing. Bastards.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

xiloid 9y ago

Moving from Amazon to Hubic (https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=LCUAXF https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=LCUAXF) - 10TB for ~$55/year