17 ms·

We knew this was coming we just didn’t know when. If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it. Maybe three years ago,

• akerro 6y ago
  >If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it. There was a post about it from BackBaze. They know some people abuse it and put several Tbs on there, but they still make money on average as most people have 100s of Mb
  • klodolph 6y ago
    Aye, but the problem is the PBs, not the TBs, from what I can tell.
    • mrguyorama 6y ago
      One thing nobody really says is that backblaze actually requires everything you've backed up to be accessible to the computer at least once a month, so you can't actually delete something you've backed up unless you're willing to lose it in a month, or pay extra for the 1 year retention tier. Essentially you need to own the physical drive space to store anything on backblaze, so there's not much reason to abuse it.
      • morpheuskafka 6y ago
        Wonder how difficult it would be to patch the client or just make some sort of fake FUSE filesystem to bypass this.
        • zaarn 6y ago
          IIRC their client detects FUSE and friends. People have used iSCSI or ATAoE to bypass this, but that comes with it's own limitations. Most people don't bother.
      • SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
        I doubt $2/month is a disincentive to a hoarder whose only alternative would be to pay per GB for the storage space they are using.
        • mrguyorama 6y ago
          That only allows them to delete things for less than a year, they would still have to develop some sort of system for redownloading all their data, putting it in a backed up drive, and leaving that drive plugged in for about 2 days for backblaze to actually notice it
  • CrazyCatDog 6y ago
    This is literally the Dropbox business model—at least per the Harvard Business School case!
  • numpad0 6y ago
    Backblaze charge for egress so it makes no sense to abuse it with constant 500GiB/hour of urandom.txt or porn or Blu-ray rips or TV recordings. It’s only useful/usable for backups(as should be!)
    • Dylan16807 6y ago
      The post was about the Backblaze backup service, not B2. You can't abuse B2 by putting too much data on it! And B2 is more or less fine for streaming. The bandwidth bill will be significantly less than the storage bill.
      • ac29 6y ago
        Egress is more expensive than storage: 1c/GB vs 0.5c/GB-month (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html).
        • Dylan16807 6y ago
          Those are different units. You're making an assumption that the user watches every video in their library once per month. I doubt it. My bet is that someone with a big video library will watch significantly less than half the content each month (including repeats). Or in other words, look at it more like 1c/GB vs. 6c/GB-year.
    • maple3142 6y ago
      I thought you can combine B2 and CloudFlare to get egress for free?
  • rsync 6y ago
    "There was a post about it from BackBaze. They know some people abuse it and put several Tbs on there, but they still make money on average as most people have 100s of Mb ..." ... and this is a mistake. The issue is not whether you will tolerate loss-leaders or not. The issue is that you create an antagonistic relationship between provider and consumer. It doesn't matter how nice you are (and the backblaze folks seem very, very nice) - this is a structural reality that will produce predictable bad outcomes. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but if your organization creates opposing interests - antagonistic relationships between the consumer and the provider - someone is going to lose: "... paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions."[1] [1] https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-storage-services-vs-rsyncnet.html https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stor...
    • hellotomyrars 6y ago
      The relationship is only antagonistic if the provider isn't willing to actually commit to the product they're selling. If you sell unlimited, you're selling unlimited. It's not an antagonistic relationship. It's only antagonistic when they decide that "Unlimited" needs some asterisks behind it. The business of selling truly unlimited might not be feasible or viable, but this is more a transparency issue than anything. If you're not willing to actually provide unlimited, don't say that you are. It's that simple. It's hard for me to feel sympathetic to Google/Amazon for having to store someones 1.8 Petabyte porn collection because that's what they sold them. Clearly they've decided that selling unlimited doesn't make business sense, and that's okay. They're probably right! But if you offer a product, you should be delivering that product. Anything less is gross.
      • klodolph 6y ago
        > The relationship is only antagonistic if the provider isn't willing to actually commit to the product they're selling. I don’t think the capacity exists to continue serving “unlimited” storage long-term. Over time, the amount of free storage people use increases until you can’t sustain the practice. It’s just a matter of time. The good bed is that paid storage is ridiculously cheap.
  • devrand 6y ago
    Backblaze kind of limits this by requiring their backup client to have seen a given file in the last 30 days. Beyond that the file is eligible to be pruned. So in practice people dumping data into Backblaze can only keep it there for 30 days, or must have an equivalent amount of storage space locally.
    • teraflop 6y ago
      And they deliberately don't provide a Linux client, to deter people from backing up the entire contents of their NAS.
      • crest 6y ago
        Still some people found ways to trick the macOS client with remote block storage (iSCSI, ATA over Ethernet, USB target mode).
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
      Incorrect. For an additional $2/month Backblaze will keep one year of version history. They also have a "Forever history" offering, which is essentially a plug-and-play integration with B2, priced at $2/month + $.005/GB/month for versions deleted more than 1 year ago.
      • Dylan16807 6y ago
        30 days vs. 1 year doesn't make a big difference unless you're hardcore about cycling data around as if kiting credit cards. And the files dumped off to B2 are basically irrelevant to the "unlimited backup for $6" portion of the product.
      • devrand 6y ago
        Sure, you can up the window to a year, or pay the normal rate for B2 on top of your subscription (albeit you don't pay transfer costs). However, you still need to rotate the data and Backblaze doesn't exactly make that process easy for this use-case. You need to go into the UI and manually select the data you want, wait for it to be packaged up, and then download and restore them to the proper locations. If the files were deleted you also need to mess around with the timeframe in the UI. This sounds like a poor UI, but for their normal backup/restore users it's fine since you generally want to restore an entire device or you're picking out a particular file you need. This really only breaks down if the size of the device backup exceeds the actual storage capacity of the device, which is probably a rare-ish occurrence. But also, restoring from backup is something that should rarely have to be done anyway. My point still stands: Backblaze is able to offer "unlimited" storage by making the backup/restore use-case easy, but making the "additional cloud storage" use-case tedious. This generally puts an upper bound on that "unlimited" amount based on how much local storage users actually have.
• TillE 6y ago
  My favorite example of "unlimited storage" was Twitch's original policy of permanently storing all past broadcast VODs. Completely for free! When they changed that policy, they insisted it wasn't to save space, but I can't believe that. The mind boggles at the number of drives required (ballpark 1GB per hour, with a few million active streamers), especially with the popularity of Twitch exploding at the time.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • echelon 6y ago
    What do they do now? Only store a certain number of hours? What about their most popular / famous streamers? Why isn't YouTube buckling under the same pressure?
    • rasz 6y ago
      >Extended VOD Storage: Partners have VODs stored for 60 days, vs only 14 days for Affiliates. Youtube is riding the long tail with ads. Hardly anyone watches past VODs on Twitch.
      • echelon 6y ago
        So Twitch is 100% live content. If the technology were easy to replicate and the talent/streamers went elsewhere, Twitch would have nothing?
        • bcrosby95 6y ago
          Twitch has the audience. For that reason the talent and streamers won't go elsewhere. Unless you offer them a sweetheart deal - which other streaming services have in the past - but none of those deals have worked out favorably for those streaming services.
          • tialaramex 6y ago
• causality0 6y ago
  How is it abuse when you're using the service as advertised? Google didn't call it "a reasonably large amount of storage, sufficient for most people", they called it unlimited.
  • t-writescode 6y ago
    Tragedy of the Commons.
    • risho 6y ago
      it isn't a commons if it's owned by a corporation. there is no tragedy of the commons here, because google bears the consequences of these rules. if people try to exploit it then google will either resolve the issue or go bankrupt. either way the problem solves itself.
      • topkai22 6y ago
        Just because it’s owned by a private entity doesn’t automatically exclude it from being a common.
        • samoa42 6y ago
          yes it does
      • kortilla 6y ago
        “commons - land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community.“ It does not have to belong to the community to be a commons. It just has to affect the entire community.
        • risho 6y ago
          https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp >A common resource (or the "commons") is any scarce resource, such as water or pasture, that provides users with tangible benefits but which nobody in particular owns or has exclusive claim to. Google owns their hard drive space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons >The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. You aren't entitled to access to googles hard disk space.
• rsync 6y ago
  "If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it." This is an obvious result but I think what really precipitates this move is the creation, and maturation, of tools like 'rclone'[1] that dramatically simplify inter-cloud data transfer and treating disparate cloud platforms as "dumb storage". It's one thing to have some weird utility that nobody knows about and only runs on linux and stores your data as blobs in gmail[2] ... it's another to have a mature tool with a decent userbase and development community that you can point to actual storage ... A reminder - there's only one cloud storage platform that has 'rclone' built into the platform.[3] [1] https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/ [2] https://sr71.net/projects/gmailfs/ https://sr71.net/projects/gmailfs/ [3] ssh user@rsync.net rclone /local/file s3:bucket
• Fnoord 6y ago
  Yeah, I knew this was coming, just not when, cause this always comes with so-called unlimited services. It was never unlimited storage to begin with ie. false advertising, just like a FUP is (what is "fair"? Just define the soft and hard limit).
• woliveirajr 6y ago
  Zoolz just killed their lifetime plan some days ago. Limited space for lifetime access that, well, ended not living that long (just 1.5 years in my case). Now I learnt that it doesn't matter if you do a fair use, strictly following the rules: some companies won't keep their word even when they charge what they thought was good. And, of course, take a look at what the CEO is up next. It might be indistinguishable from a scam.
  • Talanes 6y ago
    A lighter version: I remember a lot of MMOs that offered lifetime subscriptions launching back when everyone was still trying to make the next WoW. I wonder how many of those games are even still online.
• morpheuskafka 6y ago
  I don't think this counts as abuse in and of itself--now if they were sharing the account with others or something, that's different.
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  I don't understand why datahoarders aren't using distributed storage like IPFS, TahoeLAFS or others instead of relying on centralized services. I know they have storage space themselves, but I bet they're duplicating it a lot, unknowingly (or knowingly) and if they used better storage, it would be for the good of all.
  • voltagex_ 6y ago
    Have you tried pulling a non-popular file out of IPFS? I can't find the link but an archive put up I think, BeOS ISOs - it wasn't possible to get the file back again, just like if a torrent isn't seeded.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• jolmg 6y ago
  > If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it. That reminds me of: Linus Tech Tips: I Hope Google Doesn’t Ban Us... - Abusing Unlimited Google Drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2F0wjoKEhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2F0wjoKEhg
  • seabrookmx 6y ago
    I immediately thought of the same thing. I dig their channel but if they tried this out for anything more than the views they're crazy. There's no cheap way to back up a Petabyte of data. If you find a loophole to do it, you can consider yourself one of the reasons it'll shortly be closed.
    • brnt 6y ago
      Why is storing a limited amount of data on a service selling you unlimited storage finding a loophole?
      • ddalex 6y ago
        because nothing is this world is truly unlimited - not even the universe read "unlimited" as "cover 99.999% of typical client storage needs".
        • brnt 6y ago
          Then advertise your service correctly and honestly. Please do not implicitly redefine perfectly fine dictionary words.
          • ddalex 6y ago
            One needs to do this because - should one say, for example, "100Tb" - this means very little for "regular people". If far easier to say "so much that you don't have to worry about it" " as long as you are decent about it". And then a small minority of users take to the literal dictionary definition - which one is allowed to, which gave birth to vast amounts on legalese on the wrapping bags of sandwiches - and start to scream "you're not truly >UNLIMITED< you owe me". And then the provider - which assumed common sense - sees that the common sense is not to be taken for granted, and starts to spell more legalese and then starts enforcing limits which are now laid out but perhaps not enforced from the start, because it assumed that people would know how to read between the lines. But said minority doesn't know how to read through the lines and then starts to search for workarounds around the limits, forcing the provider to drop in even harder limits, which affects EVERYBODY because some people need to go through life with a fine tooth comb that exploits each little thing that they can. So this is the difference between a high trust society and a low trust society - the level of hard enforcement of rules because people will try to exploit even the smallest thing.
• levosmetalo 6y ago
  If it's possible to abuse it then it's not unlimited. Unlimited can't be abused. If usage above certain level is not allowed, then it's not unlimited. The fault is entirely on company side that do false advertising, not on the people that actually use whatever is promised to them.
  • oblio 6y ago
    You know, in real life, if my shop offers free samples of the great homemade cookies my mom makes, and you come and take ALL of them, you're a sociopath. It's obviously a marketing ploy, but the people who use so much stuff that they have to be cut off explicitly basically don't have any human decency, in this regard.
    • Kbelicius 6y ago
      That is because your shop is offering free samples of your moms cookies and not an unlimited amount of her cookies for free.
      • oblio 6y ago
        Quoting the Big Lebowski: "you're right, but you're still a jerk" :-) Almost every time a "free plan" or an "unlimited plan" is cut off (BTW, in life there is no "unlimited" anything, just use common sense), it's not because some random person uses 10-50-100% more than what the person offering it thought everyone would use. It's more like 1000%-10000%. And that's definitely being a sociopath/jerk. Data hoarders are jerks, for example, no way around that. There's almost no rational way to explain it, it's just an addiction.
        • anoncake 6y ago
          Exactly. There is no unlimited anything, so use common sense and stop offering it. I don't pay for what you think I'll use, I pay for the thing you said you sold me. If you make an offer, it's not my job to second-guess you and evaluate if that offer makes business sense to you. It's not sociopathic to have no empathy towards a for-profit corporation. Amazon is not a person.
• samoa42 6y ago
  Why is storing a limited amount of data on a service selling unlimited storage considered abuse?