15 ms·
Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
- bravetraveler 5y agoI guess 8 exabytes doesn't get the same number of clicks Edit: Not really trying to be facetious, but come on. Apple using a lot of storage at a lot of places isn't too surprising
- daxfohl 5y agoIronically, yes: I missed the M in the title, first thought was "isn't that a single hard drive?" and read the article to see why anyone cared. If it was exabytes I doubt I would have looked.
- purplecats 5y agosame here. seems misleading to use a not-as-appropriate unit. I navigated away and I was like.. wait 8TB.. I have more in my closet.
- SilverRed 5y agoAre petabytes a unit people are familiar yet? 8000 petabytes might be more readable.
- hinkley 5y agoI’m only here because I don’t understand why you would say 8 million terabytes instead of 8 exabytes.
- SilasX 5y agoPeople use "terabytes" a lot (on the order of the size of a desktop hard drive), they don't use petabytes or exabytes.
- SilverRed 5y agoPetabytes is a common unit for company scale data but I guess people reading random tech news aren't familiar with it yet. It's also way beyond what we use in other units. Gigalitre is the biggest SI prefix I have seen outside of bytes.
- Robotbeat 5y agoI’ve seen Terawatt and Petawatt.
- hanche 5y agoPetagrams (Pg) is commonly used in climate science. I always wondered why they don’t write it as Gt instead. But gigalitre? Surely, calling them cubic kilometres (edit: should be hm³, see followup comments) would be preferable?
- nlclimber 5y agoNo, a gigalitre equals a cubic hectometer.
- hanche 5y agoOops, you’re right. I think I accidentally squared 1000 instead of cubing it when converting between km³ and m³. Which only goes to show why units can be hard. In the interest of using coherent units, I wish there were a named unit equalling one cubic metre, all the better for attaching prefixes to.
- azalemeth 5y agoOne of my favourite SI units that is used in climate science is the Sverdrup, often used to describe oceanic or river flows, which is a million cubic metres per second, or one cubic hectometer per second. (1) (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup
- 5y ago
- mdoms 5y agoBecause an average reader knows what a terabyte because it's a common hard drive size. The typical reader doesn't know how to think about exabytes.
- serf 5y agopeople deal with social media images and text more often than buying hard drives -- and that's (generally) handled in kilobytes. my take : it's because numbers with lots of digits sell clicks easier -- up until scientific notation is needed, and then at that point the general readership can't fathom the number and generally doesn't care. in other words, I bet 8,000,000 terabytes produces more clicks than '8 exabytes' and '6.4 x 10^19 bits' would have. If I had been born a new-age journalist i'd have gone with 8,000,000,000,000 megabytes -- but only if that fit in the link/URL slug and headline for maximum click-bait exposure.
- cratermoon 5y agoHow about "8 station wagons full of tapes"?
- nlclimber 5y agoIreland covered in 3.5’’ HD floppy disks.
- pmontra 5y agoSame reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm, or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm. Some units are usual in some contexts, some are not. In one word, habits.
- sellyme 5y ago> Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm Speak for yourself, I've been trying to popularise "1Mm" for years. Admittedly not with a huge amount of success. > or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm Surely "1 AU" is the preferred form for this one.
- snypher 5y agoIf someone was to ask me how far is was from sun to earth, and I answered 1AU, and they asked what an AU was? The point would be to put it in a familiar unit, even though '150 million' isn't easy to visualize.
- purplecats 5y agopretty sure it was a joke
- sellyme 5y agoNot a joke, the AU is a pretty common unit of measurement when talking about distances too large for metres and too small for light-years, especially since it's based on one of the most widely understood astronomical distances. Of course using it to describe the distance it's derived from is more than a little tautological, but that wasn't too important in the context of discussing magnitude prefixes. It's roughly the same thing as describing a distant potentially-habitable planet as being "1.5 times the size of Earth" instead of giving its radius in metres. It's just that AUs wrap that "n times the distance between the sun and the earth" into a nice standardised unit.
- purplecats 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whoknew1122 5y agoBecause terabytes is a good frame of reference for most computer users. I get paid well to work in the computer space and if I saw 8 exabytes, I'd have to consult a chart/list to just determine how much that is. Most people don't know what an exabyte is. That's why you frame the amount of data in an amount of data (terabyte) that people know.
- omegalulw 5y ago8M terabytes isn't a big number tho. 1TB/person is fairly common these days and Apple has like 900M+ users.
- deeter72 5y agoI would say the family 200GB plan is the most common and also I have to say still its way less paying people than I thought it would be.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 988747 5y agoIs 1TB/person really that common? I mean, my iPhone has 64GB of storage, mostly used for storing photos, which I might want to backup. Other than that, what else do I put on iCloud?
- jobigoud 5y agoTerabyte might be the largest unit people can relate to at a personal level.
- slumdev 5y agoIt's over Eight QUADRILLION kilobytes!
- ACAVJW4H 5y agoApple and Google need to give people a chance to manage their own data.
- SilverRed 5y agoThe files API on ios is open for anyone to use. You can run your own nextcloud server on your own hardware and it integrates in to the OS just like google drive or a plugged in USB would.
- cunthorpe 5y agoYou can’t do backup or sync the Photos.app to a random cloud. The “integration” here is just that occasionally you can save to and load from your server. That’s all.
- SilverRed 5y agoI don't think you can do the full device backup on anything but icloud and I agree that should change but your own storage has the same access as google does on ios. You can have your own photos app which automatically uploads everything in the photo roll and can delete photos to keep them in sync with your cloud.
- acomjean 5y agoBased on what I’m seeing with google one and box’s iOS app, I’m going to agree. You can try to back up your pictures but it’s always a compromise. I ended up just plugging the iPhone into the computer and exporting the photos that way.
- SilverRed 5y agoiOS is opening up to 3rd party services quite a bit in recent releases. The files app and allowing setting default apps are nice improvements which have come recently. As well as allowing 3rd parties in the find my network. I think we could see full device backups to other cloud services later. I guess the problem is they would want to provide a specific api for 3rd parties to implement rather than trying to drop a 256GB zip file on google drive with no differential backups.
- cadence- 5y agoAll the data is encrypted so it doesn’t matter where they are storing it. Using multiple service providers (Google, Amazon, their own servers, etc) might actually be beneficial because it eliminates one point of failure, especially if they replicate data in a smart way to take advantage of it. It might also speed up access to data.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- suifbwish 5y agoUnless you have encryption that is guaranteed to never be obsolete it ALWAYS matters where you store the data.
- peter422 5y agoIt does seem likely that Google will pay to store every bit of encrypted customer data that is currently stored forever because potentially decades from now it could be cracked and they could access all that amazing ancient private information.
- erhk 5y agoGoogle spends way too much money building consumer and corporate trust to attempt to cash it in for data they already have the majority of.
- exitheone 5y agoThis sentiment seems so weird to me. Can you point to a single enterprise offering where Google is collecting data and using it themselves? Or where it would even make sense to do so? Corporate customers pay a lot more per byte than the fleeting value of private data so Google has a strong incentive to never ever touch that data.
- Closi 5y agoI don’t agree with the original point, but there is no doubt lots of telemetry in the cloud.
- karmasimida 5y agoHow much would you pay to store such amount data? 8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 200m dollars worthy of retail hard drives. Ofc the calculation is super inaccurate, which doesn't take redundancies into consideration, and discounted prices for someone like Google to purchase hardware, plus the discount for Apple as a big customer. But had the scale be comparable, in which case, Apple is paying Google billions per year to handle the data storage for itself, doesn't sound quite news worthy IMO, pretty price efficient even. Edit: Previously stated 1.6B -> 200m
- gruez 5y ago>8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 1.6B dollars worthy of retail hard drives. External hard drives can be obtained on sale for $15-16/TB. They can then be shucked to get internal drives. I suspect bulk buyers can get pricing equal or cheaper than this, rather than the retail of $25/TB
- hinkley 5y agoThey are probably paying wholesale prices for that quantity. In many industries that’s half the retail price.
- wincy 5y agoWhy are external drives so much cheaper anyway? Edit: I googled it an apparently it’s an economy of scale thing. People are more likely to buy external hard drives, much more mass market thing, Costco and Walmart sell externals, therefore downward pressure on prices compared to internal drives.
- adt2bt 5y agoIt’s a bit of an open secret among big tech that Apple is a huge user of storage on all major clouds. They manage encryption on their hardware and in return get cheap storage, higher availability and competition from their suppliers. Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service.
- simondotau 5y agoCalling it a secret is an exaggeration. It's more like an obscure topic on Wikipedia: it's publicly available to anyone who cared to ask the question.
- Stratoscope 5y agoThat's what "an open secret" means: something that may be thought to be secret but really isn't.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fulafel 5y ago> Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service. They do of course have access to the ciphertext and access to traffic patterns, in crypto threat models traffic analysis tells the adversary a wealth of information.
- manigandham 5y agoLike what? What's a practical vulnerability or leak?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bastard_op 5y agoBarbarians at the gate, Google and Amazon slurp it all up eventually. How's those big ones feel inside your budget, Apple.
- bushbaba 5y agoFlip side. You have no idea if google is actually making a profit on this workload. It might literally be cheaper for apple to use GCP for storage here than doing it themselves.
- KaiserPro 5y agoManaging 8 exabytes reliably is a massive pain in the arse. with no redundancy, and nothing but hardrives, 8 exabytes burns around a megawatt. Its a million drives. given the failure rate that I had when I was looking after 5 pb,(about 8k hdds) you'd be looking at at least 100-400 failed drives a week But how do you detect that, how do you schedule replacements? whats your hamming factor for redundancy, how do you optimise your storage? for speed, power, geospatial, or redundancy? what about capacity management, the lead time on growth would be large. I was a sys admin for a large VFX place, so did a lot of storage admin, but unless it was a core business function, I'd buy over build that shit, for that scale.
- user3939382 5y agoGoogle and Amazon recoup their investment in processes, tools, and cultivating the institutional knowledge to run massive data center infrastructure by marketing cloud services. Maybe Apple calculated that they would need to do the same to “level up” their data center infra but decided that doesn’t align with their business strategy.
- sydthrowaway 5y agoAre there any high density devices in production that can support planet-scale data storage?
- suifbwish 5y agoWhat do you mean by planet scale?
- rootsudo 5y agoIronic arbitrage, Apple sells it for X, pays google for Y. The absolute state of things.
- SilverRed 5y agoYou aren't just buying dumb storage though. Its a whole service and tools to utilize the service. What Apple and Google are selling are different products. A fruit salad is different to what the fruit store sells and receives a higher price.
- malwarebytess 5y agoWhat does Apple sell wrt data storage that Google doesn't? The integration into apple's product line? Seems a bit mealy mouthed to me. Both companies sell storage to consumers.
- jfrunyon 5y agoYou also pay more for Google's consumer storage than for Google's "Cloud Storage".
- alister 5y agoIt would be interesting to know how that data breaks down -- like photos vs videos vs software backups vs saved movies, etc. I assume that most people stream movies, TV shows, and music these days, and that few people save them to disk. And even for those that do, Apple could deduplicate (i.e., store exactly one copy of Men in Black even if 100,000 people saved it). Software installs are easily deduplicated as well. So that leaves personal photos and videos. Apple has about 1 billion active users, so a back of the napkin calculation suggests that each user is storing 8GB of data. That actually sounds quite low. That's 1600 5MB photos without even talking about the crazy storage that personal videos would use. The article talks about how much Apple stores on Google's servers, but doesn't say how much they store on their own servers or with other third parties. Maybe they have multiple times as much storage on their own servers.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoiMessage is probably secretly insane: A lot of people's iClouds are stuffed with it, so it probably has random not-worth-saving content going back several years that people don't know how to clean out.
- hintymad 5y agoWow! It's amazing that with so much data yet Apple still finds it cheaper to store on public clouds instead of building its own storage.
- iJohnDoe 5y agoApple finally realized they weren’t very good at hosting stuff. They never were. Plus, it’s a no brainer leveraging Google and AWS. Their global footprint and expertise alone is worth it. Also, $300 million a year is a drop in the bucket to Apple’s bottom line. They probably make that alone from the millions of adapters they sell each year.
- jbverschoor 5y agoIt's not just $300m. It's $300 for storage. I'm sure they spend more on the GCP platform. They also use AWS, which is over $350m a year. That contract ends in a year or two. Afaik, they don't run on azure anymore. It's not hard to believe they're spending $1B+ on external cloud partners. At $57B net revenue ($274B), a high margin space such as the cloud services could make sense. Although if they're not selling it to the public it would only account for 1-2% net revenue. Apple likes to learn from companies.. Soon there will be an Apple cloud using low energy ARM (M1X) servers. Let's call it the "Digital Apple Tree". Maybe a small reference to the DAT recorder, as Apple likes music. Of course this last part is just made up ;-)
- ksec 5y ago>Afaik, they don't run on azure anymore. why?
- jbverschoor 5y agocould only find old articles mentioning it..
- joezydeco 5y agoEveryone is acting like that $300MM expense is being paid by Apple. I'm paying Apple $120/year for 2TB of iCloud storage. I might not be doing the math right but at $300 million/year for 8 million TB, that's $75/year in google expense for the $120 I'm paying Apple.
- rcarmo 5y agoI don’t see why this is news, given that it’s been common knowledge to anyone who has things like Little Snitch running and tracing your network requests to all sorts of online services.
- avipars 5y agoSnapchat also uses google cloud...
- jbverschoor 5y agoI'm sure many companies use google cloud...
- avipars 5y agoYes, people were worried about apple's privacy (as it seems)...
- wodenokoto 5y agoThey used to be the poster-child for app-engine. Don’t know if they still are, but they are not only using, but deeply embedded in GCP.
- iJohnDoe 5y agoI thought it was pretty well known that nothing stored on iCloud is encrypted. It’s encrypted on your iPhone, but once it leaves your iPhone it becomes unencrypted once stored in iCloud. This is also why they can comply with law enforcement requests. Now, someone may argue that “only Apple can unlock it” if indeed there is any protection at all. https://fortune.com/2020/01/21/apple-icloud-encryption-law-enforcement/ https://fortune.com/2020/01/21/apple-icloud-encryption-law-e... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
- 8fingerlouie 5y agoiCloud _is_ encrypted (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303), but it's not End to End encrypted, meaning Apple holds the keys, not you.
- habosa 5y agoI can't tell why this is on the front page of HN. Is the implication that Google would spy on Apple customer's data stored on Google Cloud? Google is evil/dumb/both at times but that's completely outlandish. I do find it interesting that Apple could be one of Google's biggest Cloud clients though, that's very surprising.
- jtdev 5y agoApple has built significant brand trust and brand loyalty on the premise that Apple’s business model is built around devices and services and that your data is not something that Apple is not interested in exploiting/monetizing; Google has a reputation for an antithetical business model in terms of user data.
- zepto 5y agoThese two things are totally unconnected. It’s literally innuendo and conspiracy thinking to suggest they are.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wdb 5y agoA bit fascinated how 8M terabyte looks like in a data centre How much physical space is needed for that?
- 988747 5y ago1 million 8TB hard drives. you can probably put at least 100 of them in the single rack, which means 10.000 racks, put in 100x100 grid that means a single 300mx300m factory hall. Treat that as an upper bound, probably it is possible to package the drives more tightly.
- aaronax 5y agoYou can do 60-90 HDDs in 4U, so conservatively using 36U of a 42U rack that is 540-810 HDDs per rack. So it could be more like 1600 racks.
- swiley 5y agoOwn your data or quit gripping when this happens. On my phone I keep all my personal stuff in git with the remote set to my desktop (it has a public IP) over ssh. My photo stream is just rsynced occasionally over ssh. Not having to deal with this is arguably even more convenient provided your OS vendor doesn't intentionally get in the way.
- djxfade 5y agoYes this probably works great for you. Now please explain my grandma how to set up Git and SSH on her phone.
- swiley 5y agoObviously she would use different software, my point is iOS essentially forces people like her to use this.
- Dah00n 5y agoWhich phone do you use?
- CountDrewku 5y agoNon-tech people aren't going to ever be able to set something like that up on their own and keep it working. I don't even want so mess with stuff like that. I do that all day at work, I neither have the time or motivation to worry about messing with more tech after work. Also, I would suggest not port forwarding ssh directly to an internal machine. Use a VPN and then ssh.
- Dah00n 5y agoI'm amazed any HN readers could believe Google would want to know what is stored if they could actually read it. That is completely useless to them. What is interesting and useful is who is connecting from where, when, with what. Yet again it feels like Snowden is forgotten. Metadata is what matters in high volume data, not content.
- jtdev 5y agoSo why does Google engage in automated reading of Gmail email contents?
- harringtonjones 5y agothey haven't done that (allegedly) in years right
- jtdev 5y agoRight…?
- Dah00n 5y agoAs far as I know they don't but for arguments sake let's say that they do. A lot of smart people have worked on Gmail so any scanning of mails would be for useful metadata or if they scan all the text it would be to provide services from context (find something with a date, ask if it should put it in your calendar, etc.). Almost all emails are worthless information and I doubt even the NSA with 100 times the budget it has today could learn anything worthwhile from scanning everything even if everything is only "everything at gmail". At best they would end up with data worse than they get from metadata and more likely the need for thousands of people looking at mails that match wordlists (hate USA, bombmaking, presidents route...) and not learn anything useful at all.
- UI_at_80x24 5y ago8,000,000TB = 8,000PB = 8EB
- tiffanyh 5y agoThat equates to $1/month for 320 GB of storage. Seems like a bargain, even at that scale. Note: Apple charges $1/month for 50 GB of storage. That's ~84% margin Apple is making on their cloud storage service. Though granted they do give everyone 5 GB of storage for free, so the math will be lower (and they will still be generating a profit so long as 1 out of 5 are paying for iCloud storage).