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As someone who used to work for a bioinformatics lab, I'm confused by this tweet. The storage now being limited is for Gsuite- Classroom, Meet, Gmail, Calendar

As someone who used to work for a bioinformatics lab, I'm confused by this tweet. The storage now being limited is for Gsuite- Classroom, Meet, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. These aren't the products you'd store a lab's datasets in. They simply aren't designed for that and won't provide acceptable APIs, performance, etc. Thus although this change may stink for university IT, I don't see an alternate world where this lab had embraced Gsuite storage and was crippled by it.

detaro 5y ago
Given that people have tried stuffing hundreds of TB of data in every cloud service ever that offered "unlimited" storage, I would not be surprised if someone actually did that.
g_p 5y ago
Under funded university labs often have need for archival storage to "keep results for future". You name the technology, I've seen it be used to store results. If a system is centrally funded by the main university (and not the lab itself), researchers will find a way to get it to hold research data if it has an interface to ingest a file... They don't need acceptable APIs or performance - they need something as opposed to nothing, and they'll find a way to make it work! More to the point, they need basic IT infrastructure funded by something central in the university. If there was a centrally funded way to use s3 with glacier for archival, (so they don't need to spend lab money on it forever more), many would use it. In my experience, often the issue is a lack of local budget, meaning infinite ingenuity to find a way to use what is available to get the best outcome for their research. Any ability to upload and store a file for later retrieval can, with enough low-cost RA time, be made into a apparently infinite free storage system!
dekhn 5y ago
unfortunately I see many scientists using Drive storage for long-term sharing. I wouldn't (I put my terabytes in blob storage), but it's very common.
wodenokoto 5y ago
I’ve backed up my master thesis and all relevant data to google drive. I’m I’ll move a copy somewhere else if I ever need to conduct new research on it, but I’m sure if I had gone on to take a phd each paper, published or not would end up in a folder on gdrive if google had promised me the space.

detaro 5y ago

Given that people have tried stuffing hundreds of TB of data in every cloud service ever that offered "unlimited" storage, I would not be surprised if someone actually did that.

g_p 5y ago

Under funded university labs often have need for archival storage to "keep results for future". You name the technology, I've seen it be used to store results. If a system is centrally funded by the main university (and not the lab itself), researchers will find a way to get it to hold research data if it has an interface to ingest a file... They don't need acceptable APIs or performance - they need something as opposed to nothing, and they'll find a way to make it work! More to the point, they need basic IT infrastructure funded by something central in the university. If there was a centrally funded way to use s3 with glacier for archival, (so they don't need to spend lab money on it forever more), many would use it. In my experience, often the issue is a lack of local budget, meaning infinite ingenuity to find a way to use what is available to get the best outcome for their research. Any ability to upload and store a file for later retrieval can, with enough low-cost RA time, be made into a apparently infinite free storage system!

dekhn 5y ago

unfortunately I see many scientists using Drive storage for long-term sharing. I wouldn't (I put my terabytes in blob storage), but it's very common.

wodenokoto 5y ago

I’ve backed up my master thesis and all relevant data to google drive. I’m I’ll move a copy somewhere else if I ever need to conduct new research on it, but I’m sure if I had gone on to take a phd each paper, published or not would end up in a folder on gdrive if google had promised me the space.