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There was probably a lot of abuse going on with the "unlimited" disk space aspect of it. I can imagine some people backing up their entire movie collection to t

There was probably a lot of abuse going on with the "unlimited" disk space aspect of it. I can imagine some people backing up their entire movie collection to their servers.

freeone3000 9y ago
It's not "abuse" if you claim it's unlimited and people use it as if it were.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  I have a feeling (if this has not already happened) that someone is going to sue over the use of the term 'unlimited' and some court is going to rule that 'unlimited' does not mean 'without limits' but 'an reasonable amount based on the average expected use'.
  - sbarre 9y ago
    This was sorted out back in the dial-up days when providers (including the one I worked for) offered "unlimited" dial-up service. Customers sometimes argued that they should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long because that's "unlimited". Our definition (that we indicated in our terms) was "you will never be billed a surcharge for usage during a month", but there was no guarantee of being able to use a certain number of hours. So we reserved the right to de-prioritize (i.e. disconnect) high-usage users during peak times to allow other users to get on when our lines got full. I'm sure somewhere in Crash Plan's terms of service they define what the term "unlimited" means in the context of their offering, and I would bet it means "there will never be a surcharge for usage of storage". So they will never ding you for using more than X storage, but there's no guarantee that you can store a specific amount of data on the service.
- apendleton 9y ago
  Sure, this is a figure of speech -- if it were abuse in a technical sense they would be going after users for terms of use violations rather than changing their pricing. I think the intent here is that they probably predicated their pricing on a certain anticipated usage pattern where most of their users would be regular people making backups of typical hard drive sizes and contents, and that more people took advantage of the unlimited offering to do something other than that, which meant their pricing didn't cover their costs.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  It is abuse, however, if you sell a service as a backup, and people use it as primary storage (e.g, by running backup/restore cycles to store and retrieve files). I don't know if people were doing this, but given some of the silly things I've heard of happening on other backup services, I wouldn't be surprised.
  - lsaferite 9y ago
    It's not abuse if you are following the TOS though. So if you want to classify it as abuse you need some objective measurement for what is acceptable use or not. 1 restore a month? 10? 100? You have to have a documents AUP before you can call some usage pattern abuse.

There was probably a lot of abuse going on with the "unlimited" disk space aspect of it. I can imagine some people backing up their entire movie collection to their servers.

freeone3000 9y ago

It's not "abuse" if you claim it's unlimited and people use it as if it were.

cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
I have a feeling (if this has not already happened) that someone is going to sue over the use of the term 'unlimited' and some court is going to rule that 'unlimited' does not mean 'without limits' but 'an reasonable amount based on the average expected use'.
- sbarre 9y ago
  This was sorted out back in the dial-up days when providers (including the one I worked for) offered "unlimited" dial-up service. Customers sometimes argued that they should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long because that's "unlimited". Our definition (that we indicated in our terms) was "you will never be billed a surcharge for usage during a month", but there was no guarantee of being able to use a certain number of hours. So we reserved the right to de-prioritize (i.e. disconnect) high-usage users during peak times to allow other users to get on when our lines got full. I'm sure somewhere in Crash Plan's terms of service they define what the term "unlimited" means in the context of their offering, and I would bet it means "there will never be a surcharge for usage of storage". So they will never ding you for using more than X storage, but there's no guarantee that you can store a specific amount of data on the service.
apendleton 9y ago
Sure, this is a figure of speech -- if it were abuse in a technical sense they would be going after users for terms of use violations rather than changing their pricing. I think the intent here is that they probably predicated their pricing on a certain anticipated usage pattern where most of their users would be regular people making backups of typical hard drive sizes and contents, and that more people took advantage of the unlimited offering to do something other than that, which meant their pricing didn't cover their costs.
duskwuff 9y ago
It is abuse, however, if you sell a service as a backup, and people use it as primary storage (e.g, by running backup/restore cycles to store and retrieve files). I don't know if people were doing this, but given some of the silly things I've heard of happening on other backup services, I wouldn't be surprised.
- lsaferite 9y ago
  It's not abuse if you are following the TOS though. So if you want to classify it as abuse you need some objective measurement for what is acceptable use or not. 1 restore a month? 10? 100? You have to have a documents AUP before you can call some usage pattern abuse.