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Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

• blobbers 3y ago
  What is it about telecoms that grandfathers in customers to cell plans. Certainly it isn't the cellular provider that does it in the name of "great service".
• Blackstrat 3y ago
  Sooner or later, people have to realize that the cloud and subscription are not in their best interests. On the front end, perhaps, it made sense. The company from which I retired, went all in on the cloud, pointing to all the money they were saving on infrastructure. Their hosting charges have nearly doubled in less than 3 years. Further, when hosting companies are routinely scanning your private data for various reasons, ranging child porn to their own AI projects, e.g., GitHub & Microsoft, you have surrendered the keys to the kingdom with no control over anything. Google canceling the unlimited plan is a perfect example. Frankly, consumers and companies are naive to think this will benefit them in the long run.
• devilsAdv0cate 3y ago
  [dead]
• 0pteron 3y ago
  This is tough, one could argue life's work deserved to be backed up but there was a reasonable expectation that the cloud wouldn't lose the data and that Google would be more fair when it wasn't cost effective anymore. Also, the cost of keeping 200TB on the cloud is quite a bill to maintain for rest of your life, buying the HDD space yourself is more attractive.
• turquoisevar 3y ago
  People are genuinely breaking their backs trying to carry water for Google here, making comparisons with looting ketchup packets from McDonald’s and other stupid stuff. None of it changes the simple facts of this matter: Google sold an unlimited storage plan, not unlimited with a big asterisk but unlimited with terminology such as “as much storage as you need.” Google then decided they didn’t like that anymore, so they retired that plan and told people that they needed to either free up storage or upgrade within 60 days or else it would switch to read-only mode. Two things are essential here: 1) 60 days was not enough to download all the data this person had stored, and 2) it said nothing explicitly about deleting data; instead, the heavy implication was that the data would remain stored with the caveat that nothing could be added or edited. Then suddenly, Google informed the user that they’d delete his data within seven days. That’s it, no “loophole,” no “ketchup packets,” no nothing. A promise to be able to use as much storage as you needed in exchange for payment, an implicit promise that the data would be safe, and then a rug pull. No amount of Olympic levels of mental gymnastics will change these facts. If Google wanted to renege on its promises, it should’ve provided ample time to download the data. In a general sense, Google, one of the wealthiest companies in the world, needs to stop being a cheapskate and stop refusing to provide basic customer service on their consumer services. The fact that their “Contact Us” option keeps sending people to a forum for most of their products, which customer service agents don’t regularly frequent, is pathetic.
• wkat4242 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons i dont like cloud. I only use it for (encrypted) backups and temporary sharing. Not for important stuff. Also i dont want my account or data to be randomly deleted due to vague terms and conditions or policies.
  • brookst 3y ago
    I use cloud for everything, but that’s because I did some reflection and realized that I don’t actually have any digital data that would be catastrophic to lose. Annoying, sure. But whatever. I can’t think of a single digital artifact that would be so terrible to lose that it’s worth maintaining highly redundant storage at multiple locations myself.
    • wkat4242 3y ago
      Oh I have a lot. All my photos for example. I have moved around so much I don't have all the hard copies anymore. And of the last 20 years there just are no hard copies. I store them on ZFS shares at various sites and S3 glacier (not Amazon's own though).
      • dacryn 3y ago
        I have started to just create physical photo books a few years ago. It started as a gift to my girlfriend, but now every year we take our best pictures of the year and put it in a photobook. Cant be deleted that way. All the other photos are less important indeed. I store about 20gig of important photos on my laptop (weddings, events, ... the really important stuff) and everything else is just dumped into google photos. We'll see how that works out in 20 years. But I feel at ease
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • jbaber 3y ago
      I thought this way until I had kids.
• theandrewbailey 3y ago
  > And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. I was about to say 'you should have other backups', but the FBI is a very powerful persistent threat, and might be the more important problem.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • plagiarist 3y ago
    Seems ludicrous that they can get a warrant to take everything if he really was just hitting URLs.
    • deafpolygon 3y ago
      Worse than that- even if you are adjacent to a crime that took place and not the suspect, they can also invade your privacy - rifle through all of your private data online and so on. I had a friend who owns a PC repair shop who bought a laptop from another 'friend' that was sold to him illegally. (He did not know it was illegally stolen from the next state over) The state police came in (with FBI in tow) and seized all of his equipment. Every last computer (all of his own, as well as customers that had their pc in for repair) in the shop was checked over. They held onto his equipment (along with 3 other customers) for 6 months, and he had to make do with a laptop to keep his business running. Fortunately, he had backed up his PC repair software to another location. Or he would have been out of business. All because the FBI wanted to be thorough. Not because he was on suspicion of a crime.
      • hmottestad 3y ago
        This sounds a bit far fetched. Then again I remember a story about a tire storage facility in Norway that went bankrupt and no one could get their winter tires out. Doing a bit of research on this it actually looks like it happened at least two times once in 2019 [1] and previously in 2011 [2]. Looks like all the customers eventually got their tires back, but in Norway we have deadlines for when you need to change from summer tires to winter tires and if you have studded tires then you have to change back by a week or so after end of easter. So customers were in a bit of a pickle. 1: https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/bilverksted-har-stengt-dorene-_-kundene-far-ikke-dekkene-tilbake-1.14754793 https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/bilverksted-har-stengt-dorene-_... 2: https://www.rb.no/lokale-nyheter/kunder-fortviler-over-dekkhotell-konkurs/s/1-95-5566826 https://www.rb.no/lokale-nyheter/kunder-fortviler-over-dekkh...
• draugadrotten 3y ago
  Remember, the cloud is just somebody else's computer. This is what happens when you store 250 TB video on somebody else's computer and expect it to be free forever.
  • jonnycomputer 3y ago
    He was paying, it was just an unlimited storage plan. Not free.
    • specto 3y ago
      I think their point still stands, you can't trust the cloud companies for anything important.
      • jonnycomputer 3y ago
        I agree.
  • eviks 3y ago
    This is what happens when you don't read the article: > Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while. "free forever." indeed
  • isaacfrond 3y ago
    According to the article Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while. So he wasn't expecting it to be free forever at all.
  • slantyyz 3y ago
    > expect it to be free forever. Where does it say he expected it to be free? In the article, there's a tweet that says "So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage" To me, the bigger problem is that companies are allowed to offer "unlimited" anything in their marketing copy.
• ethbr1 3y ago
  I try to fully read articles before I upvote. >> Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over. ... but the first sentence sold me.
• xyst 3y ago
  a lesson I learned long before Google tried to “worm” itself the daily fabric of our lives: don’t trust cloud services personally, during college had work stored on cloud storage provided by uni. All is fine until one day I can’t access or find my docs I have been working on. Turns out the idiot sys admin purged the wrong data as part of some clean up effort and cost reduction. I never keep anything of importance on these cloud services. Everything is duplicated/replicated to servers I own. Nightly backups taken.
• blibble 3y ago
  I think the best advice you can give anyone for tech in the 21st century is to never, ever rely on any Google services or products
  • UseStrict 3y ago
    Agreed, I use their services, but I absolutely do not depend on them. They can't be trusted.
• jonnycomputer 3y ago
  Well, what he needs to do is get a lawyer, though I'd expect he has one, given that he stuff has been seized by the FBI. I bet in a week you couldn't even sync that much data tho.
• WhatsName 3y ago
  When will a regulatory entity step in and stop large corps to run services at a net loss. In essence, the whole tech industry relies heavily on venture capital supported bait&switch. Giving services away for free or selling under value is clearly anti-competitive behavior.
  • AlexandrB 3y ago
    Yes. This approach kneecaps any startups/small businesses that try to run profitably from day 1 (i.e. without taking tons of VC money). The net effect is that VC firms get to pick winners before the market ever gets involved. Hopefully there will be more pushback on this practice now that Bork's ideas[1] about antitrust are falling out of favour. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork#Academic_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork#Academic_career
• tedivm 3y ago
  People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in the startup world, and I'd rather host all my content in us-east-1 than rely on google. * I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error, * I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and suddenly stop getting their ads shown, * I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen, * I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview. One of my more recent startups was actually funded by a Google based venture firm, and they wanted to know why we refused to use GCP. My answer is that I wanted the startup to actually succeed, and it wasn't worth the risk of dealing with Google's horrible support.
  • DeathArrow 3y ago
    >People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've heard horror stories with GCP from paying customers.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • matwood 3y ago
    Yeah, say all you want about AWS pricing, but damn if Amazon doesn't go out of their way to support things for a very long time.
    • frognumber 3y ago
      What I can say about AWS pricing is that my monthly personal bill is just over $10 for all I want to do personally, and my employer's bill is... higher, but cheap compared to the cost of my time. If I had to lose one bit of data or port one platform due to Google's !@#$%^&, it would more than pay my lifetime personal Google expenses many times over, as well as of the lifetime expenses of my current employer. Former employer bubbled up to millions of dollars, and it was still worth it. Former employer got screwed over by Google to a greater tune, despite having a dedicated engineering support team at Google. The math starts to work out differently for some of the PaaS providers, where costs are several times higher than AWS, and my time is cheaper despite the (rather impressive) time savings. However, having a reliable cloud provider pays for itself many times over. I've lost had serious unexpected expenses literally every time I've been in any business setting which did business with Google. That's quite a few times. Literally the only time I'll do business with Google is: - Free tier, quick one-off hack - Legacy - Literally no other options Even the legacy, I'm working to port away since it's cheaper to do on my timeline than Google's.
• h2odragon 3y ago
  [flagged]
• toss1 3y ago
  1) Physical Media that YOU physically own & control. 2) Off-Site Backups Regardless of the threat, whether it is just bad media, house fire, ordinary thieves, or the FBI, relying on some cloud service as your only backup is a plan to fail. If it is a threat if someone reads the backups, encrypt. Sure, as a supplemental convenience, use Google or something. But as the only backup of your life's work? I feel really bad for them, they're obviously gutted. But at the same time, Google has been so publicly unreliable and high-handed for so many years (decades, really), that it's hard not to also feel some, 'whelp, what did you expect, doing something like leaving your valuables out on the sidewalk?'. Edit: And test your backups
  • xeromal 3y ago
    He had backups. The FBI took them from multiple locations
    • toss1 3y ago
      I didn't see that, but if so, then clearly more steps (i.e., more locations, hidden) were needed in that risk scenario. Plus, he had 60 days, then 7 days notice form Google. I'm not saying I don't feel bad for the guy, but can you really say that it was smart to rely on even a paid Google account, considering how often Google randomly drop entire product lines, or nuke individual accounts for random reasons with zero recourse (e.g., the screw-up of a 7-year-old kid described in the same article)?
      • Ekaros 3y ago
        Even more so time line: 2023/05/26 News about FBI seizure 10 July 2023 End of grace period 16 December 2023 closure of account So there would have been plenty of time for new backups... Between July and December.
  • Mashimo 3y ago
    I agree with having offsite backup. But for 250 TB that is not that easy or cheap. One disk of family pictures you can give to a family member.
• mngdtt 3y ago
  The title is wrong. He had the option of paying for the space at least for the time that it takes him to download and archive the data himself.
  • nhumrich 3y ago
    Source? None of the emails shown said anything about buying additional space.
    • jsnell 3y ago
      The first email shown in the article ends with the call to action of "get more storage" and a link. Pretty obviously that would be buying additional space, not getting it for free. (But it would cost something like $5k-10k/month, not the ~$10/month that he seems willing to pay.)
    • jsolson 3y ago
      The second one has a link labeled "free up or get more storage." I suspect it links here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/12005619?sjid=17742628127998933131-NC https://support.google.com/a/answer/12005619?sjid=1774262812...
  • kristofferR 3y ago
    Pretty clear blackmail. "We are gonna delete your data before you have a chance to download it, unless you pay us thousands of dollars"
  • eemil 3y ago
    Had? He still has that option. Just buy 48 seats of Google Workspace Business Plus to get 240 TB pooled storage. 237 TB is a lot of storage, 864 USD/month is actually pretty cheap to store it all in the cloud. For comparizon, Backblaze B2 costs 6 USD/TB which works out to 1422 USD/month. As much as I despise Google, this is simply a case of RTFM.
• ofrzeta 3y ago
  Google charges USD 0,15/GB for egress traffic out of GCP. That's USD 36864 for 240TB. Am I right? EDIT: Actually egress seems to be 0,08. So roughly half of what I wrote.
  • jeremyjh 3y ago
    The article said it was stored in a Google Workspace account, which means it is Google Drive and there are no egress fees.
    • ofrzeta 3y ago
      Oh I see. Thanks for the information.
  • TomK32 3y ago
    Just looking at the cheap 20TB disk drives available here in Austria, the disks alone add just over 4000 Euros to that, and then you still need a machine to host 12 drives, I see one QNAP for 12 disk for only 1500 Euros. But it has only a 2x10Gb connection. Slimming down the data sounds like the first thing to do here.
    • ansible 3y ago
      It is likely uncompressed video, so that really means just picking and choosing what to keep. Most of it is likely trash anyway.
    • at_a_remove 3y ago
      He's really at the point where owning (much less renting) a tape drive would make sense. LTO-9 is eighteen terabytes uncompressed, which I would leave it at because hey, this is video. Rent a tape drive and get a few boxes of tapes. One copy at home for the FBI to take and one copy over at a friend's place in a shoebox ...
  • oefrha 3y ago
    No, download from Google Drive (Workspace or not) is free. They don’t promise they’ll actually let you download 240TB in 7 days, though. Honestly, /r/datahoarder with their 240TBs or more is why we can’t have nice things…
• darrmit 3y ago
  They've skated by with this sort of completely insensitive handling of customers for years and my (completely anecdotal) recent experience is that less technical people are starting to take note. I have friends who have never cared about investing their entire digital lives in Google who are suddenly asking about de-Googling. I hope it prompts a change, but in the meantime I never recommend to friends or family they put anything solely in Google they can't afford to lose.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  Don't use Google services and you'll be a happier person. :)
• TomK32 3y ago
  250TB, does that qualify as data hoarding?
  • Mashimo 3y ago
    Probably contains unedited and maybe raw video files. I hope he has at least the final versions of whatever he did somewhere.
• stephc_int13 3y ago
  I think that "the cloud" should not be considered to be a safe long-term storage. It can be used as redundancy backup, but if you really need to keep your data, you should take care of that yourself. This is not a technical issue, but an ownership issue. Google is mostly an ad company and as such they don't really treat you as users but as a product.
• miked85 3y ago
  I honestly don't know why anyone would use Google for anything anymore.
  • DeathArrow 3y ago
    Maybe someone who like losing work, like losing money, like his account being terminated for whatever puerile reason, likes being tracked and likes to see lots of ads. Wait, I don't think such a person exists. Wrong market fit, Google!
    • logicchains 3y ago
      They're going to corner the https://www.dictionary.com/browse/masochist https://www.dictionary.com/browse/masochist market.
• andrewmutz 3y ago
  The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. Now, the account is scheduled for termination since he's not paying for a valid current account. It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.
  • s3p 3y ago
    Not entirely true. S3 Glacier would only come out to $830 a month.
  • darkwater 3y ago
    Sure, let's blame the victim here!
    • boringg 3y ago
      I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Google is in the wrong on their response but, come on, let's be reasonable human beings and stop saying 'victim blaming'.
      • Nicksil 3y ago
        >The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Why do you think this?
        • boringg 3y ago
          Because they are using 237 Tb in an "unlimited" service from Google. And based on the mechanism they are using to pay for it (enterprise account with one seat) - they knew they had found a loop hole in google policy. (r/datahoarders) Seriously I'm all on board with giving Google the much grief that they deserve - but I also would expect someone claiming victim here to have more of a claim than abusing a "unlimited" account and getting mad about it. Yes 100% Google should be holding onto their data or offering them the ability to pay for the larger data tier - that part is BS. Get mad at the FBI for raiding you, get mad that you didn't think of another cloud service to store with or pay for an appropriate service (0.07$/TB [my rough calc] is dirt cheap to the point of suspect). I also have to assume that the individual, former anonymous hacker has some wherewithal to be suspect of 'unlimited' packages from large corporations. There's gotta be more to this story -- it smells off.
• tky 3y ago
  It appears that he had a Workspace account which offered “unlimited” storage for a time, predicated on the account type being multiuser businesses or education, with a per-seat fee. Google phased out the unlimited storage awhile ago (over a year) after people discovered a loophole where paying for one account still provided unlimited storage. Predictable abuse followed (see /r/datahoarders). While I’m sympathetic to the user and skeptical of Google’s commitment to their customers, this doesn’t appear to be a straightforward case of someone getting Scroogled. If he were paying for the consumed storage as a standard Drive customer, this wouldn’t be happening.
  • Nicksil 3y ago
    >If he were paying for the consumed storage as a standard Drive customer, this wouldn’t be happening. >Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time”
    • E39M5S62 3y ago
      "a lot of money" and "a long time" are subjective.
      • Nicksil 3y ago
        >"a lot of money" and "a long time" are subjective. You've missed the point. It's the fact that this guy did pay for the services.
        • jsnell 3y ago
          As far as I can tell, they did not pay for an "unlimited storage forever" service. They paid for an "unlimited storage this month for $X" service. Eventually Google stopped offering that deal, and he continued storing his data as if the payments for data storage in the past would entitle him to store the data indefinitely into the future as well.
          • Nicksil 3y ago
• anthk 3y ago
  Terabyte sized disks are dirt cheap today.
  • datadrivenangel 3y ago
    Not on a per kilo or per m^3 rate compared to actual bags of dirt from the hardware store.
• not_your_vase 3y ago
  You know what would be "funny"? If Google would charge him egress fees while he is moving his data, just to add insult to injury
• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  This article convinced me to get a real backup HDD setup. Google has pretty much my entire life history in photos, documents, excel sheets, etc, and storage is dirt cheap now. In regards to the amount of storage he was using though, 250TB of information seems insane.
• flibble 3y ago
  Unicorn tech founder here. Google — if you are reading, it’s stories like this and examples where you c.10x the price of products overnight like Google Maps that I would never let our team use GCP. Your reputation is losing you business here.
  • TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
    Someone else up-thread mentioned that they add Google as a risk when documenting risks. I have run a 100+ user non-profit on Google Workspace. I’ve used it for many clients over the years. There’s a reason Azure and AWS get my spend these days. One of the biggest liabilities GCP has is that “G”.
• game_the0ry 3y ago
  Out of the bug cloud providers - Google, AWS, Azure - which one has the best support and most reliable storage?
  • logicchains 3y ago
    Definitely AWS.
    • game_the0ry 3y ago
      Wondering if I should zip all the pics i save on my paid g drive and uploading to s3.
• DharmaPolice 3y ago
  "Unlimited" anything needs to be retired as an offering since we know genuinely unlimited storage would be impossible to deliver. I assume it's easier to legally weasel out of a service offering if you say "Unlimited" (but really mean 5TB) rather than say 6TB (but really mean 5TB).
  • katbyte 3y ago
    The one I hate is “unlimited bandwidth” by ISPs that then throttle and then aregue it’s unlimited because they throttled not cut off - no it’s not it’s data caps in a round about way
• greenie_beans 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • dpkirchner 3y ago
    According to the article he had backups, they were stolen/seized by the FBI.
    • greenie_beans 3y ago
      ah okay, point taken. i just read the headline :~)
• Ekaros 3y ago
  I wonder why did they not have local copy of such important data? Isn't that only safe way anyway?
  • notamy 3y ago
    > And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit.
    • Ekaros 3y ago
      And did that happen in December? If it is truly important data I would expect process of new backups to be started immediately. After finding new device to order some disks online when the agents left. And then hide those very well...
• tantalor 3y ago
  cloud = somebody else's computer
• dspillett 3y ago
  A week of notice to move ~250TByte out is definitely unreasonable. 250TiB in 7 full days is an average of over 3.6Gbit/s, assuming no transfer interruptions and that he started immediately (i.e. already had other storage options lined up, and started transferring the second the notification email was sent). For a company like Google several Gbit/s constantly over a week, or even the tens of Gbit/s needed to finish in one day, is not troublesome, but for most other people/entities it is completely unrealistic. Getting that much storage with that much bandwidth to it is far from impossible, but it won't be cheap, especially given he'd need it right this second.
  • petee 3y ago
    And I'm assuming you'd get blocked before even finishing the download. I've gotten rate-limited in gmail just for deleting messages too fast
    • roboyoshi 3y ago
      you can generate serviceAccounts in google cloud that act as clients for your google workspace with no additional cost. It's a neat hidden trick to circumvent the google quotas, but you need to write your own clients/wrappers to utilize that properly.
  • ansible 3y ago
    The FBI seized his computers back in August. He should have bought new hard drives and made a backup of his cloud storage starting back then, if that was so important.
    • dspillett 3y ago
      Assuming new kit would not be seized once it had data on… Maybe looking for other online providers at that point to store secondary copies would have been an option, but not a cheap one.
  • aPoCoMiLogin 3y ago
    the unlimited plan was phased 7 months ago [0] so got few notices, with the final one 7 days before termination. so the guy with 250tb of data neglected that for half a year and now is surprised. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937436
• duxup 3y ago
  Title is straight up false compared to the actual story.
  • Nicksil 3y ago
    >Title is straight up lies. Enlighten us
    • duxup 3y ago
      The actual text in the story doesn't match the title. It's pretty obvious if you read it.
      • Nicksil 3y ago
        >The actual text in the story doesn't match the title. It's pretty obvious if you read it. I did read it. Title is definitely reflective of the articles content. Did you read it?
        • duxup 3y ago
          Yes.
          • Nicksil 3y ago
            You've endarkened us
      • ziddoap 3y ago
        I'm dumb. Where and what is obviously not matching?
        • charcircuit 3y ago
          Deleted is past tense, but in reality a 7 day advanced notice was sent. The title makes you think that the user lost the data where in reality he needs to host the data somewhere else.
• thih9 3y ago
  Tangental, but I have a feeling that media size - 40MP+ raw photos, 4k videos - outpaced the storage costs. Is there an analysis anywhere that looks into that?
• cassac 3y ago
  They also pulled this bait and switch on Universities.
• ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  [flagged]
• lijok 3y ago
  I heralded this warning to many people before - doing business with Google is a liability. Every company I've ever had any pull in, using Gsuite or GCP was marked as a risk in the risk register, and mitigations were put in place to manage that risk.
• effnorwood 3y ago
  [dead]
• deadbabe 3y ago
  250TB is a lot of data, there is a good chance a lot of that will never even be seen more than once if at all. It’s at least 15 years of straight video runtime.
  • ansible 3y ago
    Apparently the guy has some kind of video production company. It is possible that these are raw video files which will take up way more space. Even though this is his business, there's a decent chance that most of it will never be needed again. He should have started backups back in August when the FBI seized his computers, instead of waiting until the last minute (week).
• shdon 3y ago
  Stories like these have led me to come to the conclusion that Google has literally become downright evil. Our company does basically everything in the Google cloud and if Google decides to shut us down, we're gone. Our reliance is, imho, an existential threat. I have brought this up with management several times and they are not concerned... after all, we pay Google a lot of money every month and we're doing nothing wrong. Yeah, tell that to those dumb algorithms, and when (not if) they misfire, try to get to talk to an actual human being with any influence and willing to help in a thoroughly evil company?
  • logicchains 3y ago
    They're not downright evil, if they were downright evil they'd be doing everything they can to make money. Instead they're stupid evil: deliberately losing money and customers because they can't bring themselves to treat their customers with respect.
• EnigmaFlare 3y ago
  This video data isn't even his to have any right to keep. He took it from another company's insecure website. Even if Google kept it for him, the government could and probably should make them delete it. As for the parts of it that really are his, he'll probably get that back from the FBI when they eventually return his equipment so I don't think his life's work is lost.
• b8 3y ago
  This isn't new and Aaron Swartz actually wrote a blog post back in 2006 about his gmail account being gone [1]. 1. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/gmaildown http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/gmaildown
• skymast 3y ago
  [dead]
• bitcharmer 3y ago
  Classic Google
• 6510 3y ago
  I think the solution is to inform and assist the FBI with seizing the rest of his data.
  • 6510 3y ago
    At least that way it is preserved? Fujifilm had a "free" 500 TB trial. Maybe they can move the data fast enough. https://channelbuzz.ca/2020/06/fujifilm-unveils-unique-pricing-model-for-new-object-archive-solution-34139/ https://channelbuzz.ca/2020/06/fujifilm-unveils-unique-prici...
• avgcorrection 3y ago
  HN comment from eight years ago: snickers serves them right for relying on some cloud company. And for relying on digital data. I have made a thrice-redundant backup system that uses a fire-etching leather-printer[1][2]. Of course there is a Python program to read it back as well. It just took me three weekends. Why didn’t they do something like that? Not sure how well my setup works with binary files. My files are mostly org and source code. YMMV. [1] Ibex leather is the most durable. [2] You can find it second-hand on https://amazon.kz/ https://amazon.kz/ pretty easily.
• muragekibicho 3y ago
  Shameless plug: I make custom data compressors here : https://github.com/MurageKibicho/Middleclass-Zip/ https://github.com/MurageKibicho/Middleclass-Zip/
• 23B1 3y ago
  The days of looking up to SV unicorns is over. The sooner we start thinking small, building small, and ignoring the religion of hyper-growth the better. Yeah you might only be a decamillionaire instead of a billionaire but that's okay, you can die happy with the respect of your peers and family.
• ajhurliman 3y ago
  I don’t understand how tech companies aren’t being sued for reneging on their promises, it seems like an announcement like “unlimited storage forever” is a unilateral contract that has been broken. If someone puts up a reward sign for a lost dog and a stranger finds and returns your dog, you can’t just say “actually the terms have changed”.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• tdsanchez 3y ago
  [flagged]
• dustedcodes 3y ago
  Can anyone recommend any good ways of migrating tons of data from Google Drive to an alternative and what alternatives do people recommend? I can't stand OneDrive, I find it is a complete shitshow. I am a heavy Apple user so wondering if iCloud is maybe a worthwhile option or shall I use DropBox?
• WalterBright 3y ago
  The lesson, again, is never trust your life's work to some unaccountable third party that can go dark on you on purpose or by accident. 20T drives cost $300, so for around $4000 he could make his own backup copy of his life's work.
  • LoganDark 3y ago
    The FBI took all their hardware in a raid.
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      Yes, but that's a separate problem.
      • LoganDark 3y ago
        No, it's really not. "Never trust your data to the cloud!" They never did. They used the cloud as a backup. They trusted the data to their computer with a cloud backup, which is usually better than not having any cloud backup at all. The problem is that their computers were then seized and they couldn't make another copy of their data in time.
        • WalterBright 3y ago
          I meant the FBI raid had nothing to do with Google shutting him down. Also, the article did not say he was using Google as a backup. BTW, one can go directly to a store and buy a new computer and start downloading.
          • LoganDark 3y ago
            > BTW, one can go directly to a store and buy a new computer and start downloading. Not two hundred terabytes in a week. A week is 168 hours, and a gigabit network connection can only theoretically transfer 450 gigabytes per hour, or 75,600 gigabytes in 168 hours, still a far cry from over 200,000 gigabytes of content to download. Try getting more than a gigabit from anything other than custom fiber installations from a very limited selection of ISPs from a very limited subset of countries. That's even assuming they're able to just buy a new computer with over 200 terabytes of storage, set it up with a gigabit network connection, and somehow convince google to use a gigabit of upload bandwidth for a week straight, which they definitely will not do for a single customer, considering they already just got cut off for using too much resources. And that's also assuming the FBI didn't bar them from buying more computers somehow, and that computers are easily available / affordable in their country (including the said over 200 terabytes of storage). The lowest price-per-gigabyte listed on PC Part Picker (which doesn't have every product ever made, but is still useful) is $0.012, or 6 TB for $71.45[0]. You'd need about 40 of them to hold this data (237.22 TB), which works out to about $2,858 for just the drives. [0]: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/kXXfrH/seagate-internal-hard-drive-st6000nm0034 https://pcpartpicker.com/product/kXXfrH/seagate-internal-har...
• flerchin 3y ago
  I guess google wouldn't charge him at all if all those videos were uploaded to youtube and set private. The disconnect is weird.
• MarkusWandel 3y ago
  Relying on a cloud account, free or otherwise, to store the only copy of your life's work is asking for disaster. If you rely on data being archived, you need to know enough to do it yourself, on redundant portable hard disks, whatever. The cloud copy may be a working copy, but it has to be backed up. As for Google accounts being nuked for inappropriate pictures: Whoa. You buy a cheap Android tablet, never really use it for photography. Then one day you grab some quick pix with it, not even realizing the default installed Google Photos app is going to upload them to the cloud by default. And then see them pop up on your other devices! This happened. Of course I instantly vaporized the Google Photos app on all my devices and installed Gallery Go instead. No cloud! And of course an alternate scheme for backing up the camera roll on my phone (I already remembered to set it not to sync photos to the cloud - I just forgot to check the tablet).
  • LoganDark 3y ago
    > Relying on a cloud account, free or otherwise, to store the only copy of your life's work is asking for disaster. They didn't. All their equipment was taken in an FBI raid. They only backed it up to the cloud, never intended for the cloud to be the only copy.
• diamondfist25 3y ago
  What’s a good way to remove Google from my life? I already switched most of my queries to OpenAI. But Gmail and gcal are embedded in many of my daily life
  • wrboyce 3y ago
    I can recommend Fastmail for email, they’ll even pull in all your gmail data. I use iCloud for my calendars which works well but I guess you’d need to be an Apple user. I can also recommend Kagi as a Google Search replacement.
• exabrial 3y ago
  I don't know how many times this has to be repeated in the comments section: Don't depend on Google in production for anything. The problem stems around that their culture is to break all existing backwards compatibility at any moments notice (You know, ""innovating""), their politics is to rapidly cancel projects and products due to infighting and power struggles, software development leadership is make things as expensive to maintain as possible by using the most impractical of languages and frameworks, and budgets are rarely given until a project gains executive attention, which is usually too late.
• asimpletune 3y ago
  What’s sad is how all of the prestige from late 00’s has gone down the toilet. More and more google as a brand holds less weight.
• tmaly 3y ago
  Remember Google Reader? If this is how they are going to treat customers, it is probably not a good strategy to build a business around any of their products including their new AI stuff.
• alacode 3y ago
  I'm no great defender of Google but point some fallacies the article pushes: "regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, that’s a problem" If a 7 year old found a parent's gun, walked into the street and shot a neighbor to death accidentally; the parent is also still responsible and accountable. "he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News." and "he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content." https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/website-permissions/websites/ "As a general rule, it is wise to operate under the assumption that all works are protected by either copyright or trademark law unless conclusive information indicates otherwise. A work is not in the public domain simply because it has been posted on the Internet (a popular fallacy) or because it lacks a copyright notice (another myth). For information on these and other public domain issues, see the section, “The Public Domain.”" Related, search for "OpenAI lawsuits over copyrighted materials it uses to train ChatGPT".
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • alacode 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • pvg 3y ago
      That's not how HN works but you can read about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • Almondsetat 3y ago
    The fallacy you push is that the legal process in case your child shoots someone is the same as the private and inscrutable process that Google follows to ban people, which it isn't
• danpalmer 3y ago
  Dropbox did the same thing in August: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/dropbox_ends_unlimited_advanced_plan/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/dropbox_ends_unlimite...
• kissgyorgy 3y ago
  This is exactly why I will NEVER host any of my data at any cloud provider and self-host Nextcloud. It's also waaaay cheaper and more convenient.
• alacode 3y ago
  Google Bard has interesting information when asked what happens to my data if a plan is restructured and my existing data exceeds the new plan's allowance. It seems the answer is "it depends".
• zaps 3y ago
  “Google Workspace Enterprise Standard”—do they have “Enterprise Pro” and “Enterprise Enterprise” tiers?
• neilv 3y ago
  Comments on being an enterprise provider, and on the particular examples the article used... > plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers [...] phased out [...] since he’s using too much storage, they’re going to delete his entire account in seven days (later this week). First, an enterprise service provider who disrupts your operations in any way should probably be penalized, such as when evaluating future spending. But an enterprise service provider who gives you seven days before they willfully delete your data... I guess you'd activate the lawyers immediately, to give the incompetent provider's bureaucracy enough time to halt the deletion... before it gets dramatically more expensive for both companies. (And in parallel, throw money at the problem of racing to migrate to a different vendor, or at least get backups. You can try to recover the cost from the incompetent 'enterprise' vendor later.) That said (and also acknowledging the HN memes that Google doesn't do customer service, and that Google will probably shut down most services of theirs upon which you might depend)... there's an obvious pattern in the 3 examples that the article gave. In each example, the account had come under US law enforcement scrutiny. HN has heard other anecdata, but someone reading only this article would reasonably suspect that law enforcement action was a factor: maybe the company simply doesn't want to deal with that headache, either specifically or as a general policy; or it's conceivable that in some cases they might be asked to cripple/disrupt a user. Neither would be great, for a massive sometimes-monopoly for often crucial services, in a country with a legal standard of innocent unless&until proven guilty. There are some interesting questions around those few examples of how customers under LE scrutiny are treated, but also questions around the various other examples HN hears of from time to time. And the article using only examples of the former might make the reader not as sympathetic as they should be, to a more general problem. (Though occasionally some of the latter "Dear HN, company ___ cut me off!" examples sound like they could conceivably belong to the former category, without the complainer mentioning that factor. Even when a company makes it clear they're too big to care about a small percentage of users/customers, that's not necessarily the only reason a particular one gets stomped.)
• HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  I'd love to store all my years of photos in the cloud and have someone else responsible for backups, but I just don't trust them for this sort of reason. What if I failed to make cloud storage payments due to sickness or credit card being denied/whatever .. how long will they keep stuff before just deleting it? This is just another possible cloud failure mode - the unreachable/unreasonable cloud provider just deciding to delete your account due to some error on their part. So, it's multiple hard drives for me. I guess I should really put one in a fire-proof safe or something ... It really would be convenient to be able to trust Google/whoever with them!
• irrational 3y ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• charcircuit 3y ago
  Keep in mind this person was paying $100 per month to host >250 TiB (which anywhere else will cost >$1000 per month). The moral of the story is that if your usage of an unlimited plan costs the company more than what you are paying, then you shouldn't be surprised when you get kicked off.
  • JohnMakin 3y ago
    Then they shouldn't advertise it as "unlimited" if it actually isn't. This is an absurd statement on its face.
• dboreham 3y ago
  A glimpse of the future when all customer service is AI bots.
• chaostheory 3y ago
  Google spent all of their goodwill a few years ago. As more examples like this come to light, it will become much harder for Google to release new products since no one trusts them anymore
• diogenescynic 3y ago
  I can't believe Google with a trillion+ dollar market cap gets away with all this. They have zero human customer support and basically enable account takeovers and identity theft. I hope someday Google gets some comeuppance for how abusive/hostile they've been to their customers forever.
• racl101 3y ago
  I don't wanna victim blame, but I don't understand how people could put their entire body of work on a cloud service and not make the effort to get several external drives to have some redundancy. All my work is probably like 50GB, but I have it backed up on an external drive AND the cloud. It's like self preservation instinct is missing. 3rd party services are fallible, even when they don't make business decisions that screw with you, and nobody is gonna care about your livelihood more than yourself.
  • shkkmo 3y ago
    Multiple backups are significantly easier with 50gb that with 250tb. Additionally, any external drives he had were seized by the FBI so he would have needed two cloud backups.
  • judge2020 3y ago
    Because storing 240TB is expensive even locally. From https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/, if he gets a good deal of $8/tb, it's going to cost $2,000 just for the storage of his data, and getting the data onto it would require a setup that can address and power 20 drives (assuming 12TB drives), unless they use a few USB HDD Sata adapters to archive it all.
  • pwg 3y ago
    > All my work is probably like 50GB, but I have it backed up on an external drive AND the cloud. > It's like self preservation instinct is missing. And if, as happened in TFA, you are raided by the FBI and all your local computer hardware (which includes your external drive) is confiscated as evidence and hauled away to an FBI warehouse somewhere, you will have only that cloud backup left. This is where the journalist found themselves. And then, after the FBI raid, if the cloud then says they are dropping you and deleting your cloud data, what backups do you now have (remember, your external drive is still in the FBI warehouse somewhere as "evidence")?
  • PeterisP 3y ago
    All his off-cloud hardware was seized by the FBI.
  • 3y ago
• therealmarv 3y ago
  Shocked by this and having a Workspace account in same condition (read-only state, not in deletion yet) I've deleted some terrabytes of my (redundand) backups on Google Drive with many thousands files. But the emptying the trash/bin is horrible UX wise. You can only trash the files visible there. It seems the easiest way to empty the trash completely is to configure rclone and run this command (so emptying trash with API): https://rclone.org/drive/#emptying-trash https://rclone.org/drive/#emptying-trash Hope this is helpful for anybody else here.
  • crazygringo 3y ago
    > You can only trash the files visible there. There's a dedicated "empty trash" button at the top of the web interface. I've successfully emptied the trash of many thousands of files using it -- it doesn't have anything to do with visibility. A couple times I had to use it twice to fully empty, but it still deleted way more than anything visible. Massive bulk operations just sometimes seem to get killed (timeouts?), same as producing massive zip archives of thousands of files for download. But I can imagine rclone might work more consistently by performing tons of individual delete operations instead of Drive performing a single massive operation.
    • therealmarv 3y ago
      well, maybe the "empty trash" button works as intended (not sure because I see new files showing up in trash). It can be I was not patient enough. The rclone command finishes after a second but also only queues files internally at Google Drive to be fully deleted (so maybe it works the same as empty trash button)
      • therealmarv 3y ago
        small update: I'm trashing 16TB with many small files. That seems like a multi week operation oO
      • crazygringo 3y ago
        Yeah it's weird that it doesn't have a progress indicator or anything. But if you keep reloading the trash page in your browser, you'll see that files keep disappearing over the course of minutes.
• freedomben 3y ago
  Google deserves some hate here, but this problem is bigger than just them, and I think by being too narrowly focused on G we're missing a systemic problem. G is one of the worst offenders, but this is a cultural attitude/approach in most of tech. The idea is to acquire users by giving stuff away or making your service cheap, lock them in, then squeeze by ratcheting up the price. It's a playbook that has worked fantastically well and made a lot of people very rich, so it's not going to change overnight and/or without some pain. I've started refusing business with these types of companies, and I tell them why. I'm sure none of it matters, but if I do it then I know that at least somebody is saying something. An example: I would be one of the biggest buyer of Kindle books on the planet if they were DRM free. I'd still buy some things if I could use software to read it that wasn't invasively spying on me. It's nice that they make stuff cheaper by putting some of the data revenue into it (and even subsidizing it in some cases), but I'd much rather pay for something like Remarkable more but get a respectful product.
  • LoganDark 3y ago
    I would have strongly preferred if my reMarkable didn't come with a mandatory subscription. It's mandatory because you completely lose warranty service if you ever cancel it. The reason? I had been saving up to afford the device for five years and missed the introduction of their subscription by one. single. month. I'm stuck paying forever because I don't count as a "grandfathered" customer. What's worse is that their customer service told me I'm eligible for unlimited free service, got me to cancel (and lose my warranty), then backpedaled and told me that I'm not actually eligible and on top of that I just lost my warranty. I managed to get them to un-cancel it but that entire ordeal is just even fucking worse. I never want to deal with that company again, and will not be recommending their products.
  • thinkharderdev 3y ago
    What is bad about the situation exactly? You get a service for below cost for some amount of time at which point you have to start paying what it actually costs. I can understand if the company manages to corner the market by selling below cost and then jacks up the price way above cost, but cloud storage is still an extremely competitive market and generally quite a bit cheaper than the cost of storing an equivalent amount of data on your own hardware (with the same availability)
• noobface 3y ago
  The Google drive unlimited policy has been predictably abused by some of the datahoarding and piracy communities. Those groups have been paranoid for[1] a[2] while[3] that this could and was likely to go away, including tracking changes in the way Google marketed this to users. People with pirated movie collections took this risk more seriously than a guy whose livelihood appears to be inexorably linked with the policy. [1]https://forum.rclone.org/t/any-unlimited-alternative-to-google-drive/5655 https://forum.rclone.org/t/any-unlimited-alternative-to-goog... [2]https://forum.rclone.org/t/google-drive-unlimited-alternative/22417 https://forum.rclone.org/t/google-drive-unlimited-alternativ... [3]https://www.seedboxexpert.com/end-of-unlimited-google-drive/ https://www.seedboxexpert.com/end-of-unlimited-google-drive/
  • crooked-v 3y ago
    > unlimited > abused Using the explicitly stated and loudly advertised functionality of a service isn't abuse.
    • thinkharderdev 3y ago
      It's not abuse to store the data in an unlimited plan to begin with. But once the unlimited plan is discontinued, continuing to store the data there without paying for it does seem like abuse to me.
    • JohnMakin 3y ago
      It sure is if you're a google astroturfer!
• Pxtl 3y ago
  Can anybody recommend a good solution for automated synching of photos and files between my Google Drive and my Pi NAS? Something that makes mirroring a deletion possible but not accidental, so that if the Drive loses data it won't get mirrored to my NAS? Is rclone and rsync the way to go?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• agumonkey 3y ago
  After the recent google drive data loss, that's twice in a row. It's a long stream of Google failing users over the years it corroded all the appreciation and trust I had in anything they do. Surprising.
• kbenson 3y ago
  It's very hard for me not to initially reinterpret headlines such as these as "person stupidly doesn't take care with important personal property and loses it." That doesn't mean the other party in these stories isn't at fault in some way, but we're about a decade past the point where anyone should consider a single online copy of something, regardless of where it is, as safe from problems (of which there are many possible). That probably marks me as jaded. I know it's just the journalist reframing the story in a way to draw the interest of the average reader and the underlying problem is still relevant, but I think it actually does the opposite for me. I wonder how many others feel the same?
  • dangus 3y ago
    I think Google is in the wrong in some ways here, but someone with over 200TB of data should know what they are doing and should have a more professional solution for such an unusually large amount of data. This isn't at the level of "I backed up my 8TB consumer-grade hard drive to Google Drive," this is "I used a low cost small business service to store data center scale amounts of information." Storing this amount of data on raw drives alone before even buying the server and paying the electric bill costs over $2,000, and that's before you add any redundancy. This person thought that it was realistic for them to pay $30/month and expect Google to be fine losing money forever? They can't even theoretically break even before factoring in other costs besides raw hard drives given the limited lifespan of disks in a data center. Like the person who got an unlimited food/drink annual pass to Six Flags and went there for lunch every day, it should be common sense that any time you are getting a deal that's way better than it should be that it won't last. You should be ready with a backup plan. As soon as this person's storage was placed in read-only mode they should have been downloading a copy, but they just sort of trusted Google to never want to clean house, and as a result ended up with an impossible 7 day deadline. That deadline isn't impossible if you were using it as a small business service like Google intended. It's unfortunate that "Unlimited" was used to market the service but I think someone with 200TB of stuff should know what Google Drive is designed to be.
• tylervigen 3y ago
  I find the actions of Google here are as troubling as every other commenter. However, I cannot fathom managing 200TB on Google Drive. It's just such a terrible cloud platform experience for managing that much data. It is clearly design for "typical" consumers who have a few gigabytes at most; moving, modifying, downloading, and uploading files is all bottlenecked. Personal anecdote: Once I was using Google Collab to process a few thousand images. I needed to move the photos (less than one GB) to a new folder. It took over an hour, and appeared to process the moves in JavaScript in my web browser.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  We (as in us geeks) really need to be vocal about telling people that if they're storing things on someone else's server, they 100% need to keep their own local copies of that data as well.
• donjorgenson 3y ago
  As a journalist, this keeps me awake at night
• HackerThemAll 3y ago
  Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive? And, did the author forget that Microsoft had done the same couple of times already? It's easy and trendy to bitch on Google. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/microsoft-onedrive-unlimited-storage-capped-stopped-1tb-office-365-a6720961.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/microsoft-onedrive-unlimi... https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-has-removed-unlimited-storage-options-for-its-onedrive-business-plans/ https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-has-removed-unlimited-...
  • kzrdude 3y ago
    Yes we can be that naive, people learn from what they see. And they see companies being investor funded for a decade without breaking even, offering services for free. It's not just the users who have lost the connection to reality I think.
  • latexr 3y ago
    > Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive? Do companies really believe they can promise untenable amounts of free stuff indefinitely and not have upset customers when they take it away? Can they be that naive? Google isn’t the victim here. > It's easy and trendy to bitch on Google. Maybe they should stop screwing people all the time if they don’t want to be constantly criticised.
• iamleppert 3y ago
  Sundar is quickly turning Google into the equivalent of Accenture or Tata —- complete with a direct stream of obedient IIT workers.
• pontifier 3y ago
  That was about how much data Murfie had. Surprise Google cloud storage and egress costs were the final straw that broke the company 4 years ago. It wasn't economical to save the data when I took over, and Murfie still hasn't fully recovered (for multiple reasons).
• sargun 3y ago
  I’m not following how this is a google problem, and not a feds problem. It sounds like the the used their power to render his account unusable, and as a secondary effect all data was lost. What company would preserve your data in light of finding CP?
• INTPenis 3y ago
  That headline is kinda funny because in any other context it says "A promised B the world, A lied." Everyone in society needs basic IT training, everyone, from journalists to doctors. Among other things they need to understand that there is no such thing as unlimited. And of course, lesson #2, it's always just someone's computer. Last lesson for today, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
• nXqd 3y ago
  It's just unreliable using any of Google products, or their empire starts to crumbling
• NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  This is what, at least $7500 or so of hardware, to keep it local? (And without much redundancy.) Worse, Newegg has been out of stock on the 20tb golds for weeks. I figure 14 x 20tb = 280tb or so for $5600. Then you could get the 8 bay from Synology for $1000ish, and another $600 or so for the expansion bay. Is there a cheaper setup than this? You can get a better price-per-terabyte sometimes, but it's bay-prohibitive. And oh god... the time to silver that, I don't even want to know. I don't know how to transfer that either... if it were on Amazon, didn't they have a service where they'll 1-day ship you all the data on a suitcase full of drives? As always, the cloud is someone else's computer.
• sitkack 3y ago
  From a solution perspective, if you want to move 240TB of data out of google drive, spin up a bunch of VMs in us-central1 and copy it into GCS buckets (keep bandwidth to each bucket under 500Gbps). From there, one could copy it out to Backblaze or Cloudflare R2. 240TB is going to be some coin, even on R2.
• inasio 3y ago
  In another universe Google's head of crisis PR grabs the red phone and calls the Wolf. Mr Wolf becomes point for this crisis, two hours later they get Tim Burke a beta account on the new 20 Gbps internet service, a decommissioned GCP storage pod with 300 TB on RAID 10, as well as the option to keep his data on his original plan if he so wishes.
• confd 3y ago
  This is a poorly written article and for what it’s worth, I expected better data discipline from a man as aggressively online as Tim Burke.
• stephenr 3y ago
  I do feel for someone in this scenario (whatever the specifics of it are) but this should serve as a strong reminder to anyone: "Cloud sync" services ARE NOT A BACKUP. You want to use cloud sync for convenience? Great. It works well (mileage may vary by provider). Just don't expect it to be any safer than just having a single copy of those files on your PC or thumb drive or iPad or whatever.
• tomatotomato31 3y ago
  It's always unreasonable to expect 230tb of data to just be save at a company who is for profit. And I would definitely like to know what he stored. But using a Google cloud VM might work to get the data out in time.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• scotty79 3y ago
  I think Gmail started with a promise of unlimited email storage.
  • jsnell 3y ago
    No, it didn't. It started out with 1GB, and the limit increased gradually to the current 15GB.
• rustymonday 3y ago
  For a post with over 800 points posted only 6 hours ago it's remarkable this isn't in HN's top 30 posts on the front page.
  • davisr 3y ago
    Welcome to mass media, everything you see is "curated" (ahem...censored by @dang).
• justinclift 3y ago
  Hmmm. You'd be able to store that qty of data across 2x storage servers on Hetzner. Grabbing ones already available from Hetzner's "server auction" means they'd be fairly cheap (comparatively) compared to ordering brand new ones. Something like the ones with 10 x 16TB drives for €260/mo. Not sure if Hetzner would upgrade the network interface to 10GbE though, as that would be a requirement. That's just the hardware too. He'd need someone technical enough to set it up for him (and keep it running), and there'd need to be some way to download the data to it from Google.
• octacat 3y ago
  So, google invented unlimited storage so it is easier to convince managers of small companies to use their gsuite. Once conversion is finished, they can raise prices. Cool. Making a notice 7 days before the data removal is bad. It is really bad. Next time when someone asks me: "Should we host on AWS or on Google Cloud?" I could say "Google looks marginally cheaper now, but it is not reliable partner, so they could change pricing anytime". People who say "oh, but it is a loophole". Not really. Google saved a lot of money on marketing by making storage unlimited, comparing to onsite hosting, which was still popular 10 years ago.
• tamimio 3y ago
  Will people ever learn NOT to trust any cloud provider for storing their data? Especially when they have those “unlimited” and “lifetime “ deals?! Make your home NAS setup, it’s not even expensive.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    Why the rush? Given the growth in hard drive space, putting off making a home NAS for as long as possible seems more economically efficient. If I'd setup a home NAS with three drives for raid5 in 2012 when Google drive was first released, I'd have on the order of 8TB + 4TB parity, assuming I bought the biggest drives available then, which wouldn't have been cheap. Instead, by waiting until this announcement, that money didn't go to depreciating hardware that's ancient by this point and instead could go into an index fund or other investment. By waiting until this year (2023), the home NAS I bought drives for this year is comprised of 18 TB drives.