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The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be De

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.
      - Nicksil 3y ago
        > 237 Tb in an unlimited service from Google So, not excessive. 237 TB does not exceed unlimited. What am I missing here? >they knew they had found a loop hole in google policy. What, exactly, is this loop hole?
      - cldellow 3y ago
        You talk about loopholes three times in this comment. > Because they are using 237 Tb in an unlimited service from Google Google's a trillion dollar company. A popular saying amongst Googlers is "I don't know how to count that low". They're used to big numbers. I work at a much smaller company. We are not a trillion dollar company. Even we, when offering an unlimited service, ask ourselves: "What happens if someone takes us up on this offer?" It's not a loophole, it's what he paid for. It's fine to stop offering an unlimited service. We did! My only beef with Google's conduct here is the 7 days of notice prior to deletion. I've followed Mike Masnick's reporting in other cases. He seems like an even-handed, fair journalist. I trust that he's not hiding the ball, nor letting the other journalist mislead him about the situation.
        boringg 3y ago
        You should question the story a bit more. You think Google only gave 7 days? That seems super suss.
  - bakugo 3y ago
    > The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation The victim is "taking advantage" of an advertised feature of the service they paid for, and has done nothing wrong. The fault lies entirely with Google for advertising unlimited storage, knowing full well that no such thing exists. Same with every other cloud storage service that once advertised unlimited storage. Just because someone who understands how computer storage works could probably figure out that it wasn't really unlimited doesn't make it not false advertising.
    - boringg 3y ago
      They offered the service for 10 years and then sunset it.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    Google offered unlimited storage, no? It’s reasonable to believe that they can do that since it averages out to a small amount per user, meaning most users overpay and the power users get peace of mind. Of course nothing is unlimited but a company like Google is perhaps best positioned in the world to offer that. And sure, if someone writes /dev/urandom at 1Gbit/s you could claim abuse, but for people working with video TBs of data is normal. 200+ is a lot but again averages out among users. In either case it’s extremely easy to avoid the word “unlimited” if you don’t intend to honor it for legitimate customers. It’s also reasonable that companies products change. And maybe it doesn’t last forever, fair enough. But if your product is backup, and you pull the rug with a 7 day grace period, of course people are going to be upset and warn others not to trust you.
  - Pikamander2 3y ago
    > I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. If it's excessive, then Google shouldn't have offered an unlimited data plan. They could have called it a 100 TB plan, but they chose to call it unlimited to make it sound better and then canceled it once people took them up on the offer. Regardless of whether that kind of action is legal, it's a shady business practice. For that matter, there's nothing wrong with Google discontinuing the plan going forward, but they had plenty of options for making the transition more fair and building consumer trust without hurting their bottom line too much. For example, they could have converted his account to a 250TB account and tripled its price, at which point he wouldn't be in immediate danger of losing his files but would be pressured into gradually moving to a more cost effective solution.
    - boringg 3y ago
      They offered it for 10 years and then probably realized that people were taking advantage of the position and then tried to phase it out. Most likely with a lot of warning beforehand. I have a tough time believe that they didn't give any warning and then kicked them off the service.
      - crooked-v 3y ago
        > taking advantage It was unlimited. If they didn't want it to be unlimited, it should have had a limit on it.
        renewiltord 3y ago
        It was unlimited and they retained the right to exit the contract. If someone wants to pay for unlimited duration unlimited storage they should find a provider who does that.
        darkwater 3y ago
        They had it, it was Google.
      - 3y ago
  - m_0x 3y ago
    237TB of unlimited data is a drop in the bucket.
  - sssilver 3y ago
    What number is 237 in excess of? That is the number that Google should have advertised, instead of “unlimited”.
    - thinkharderdev 3y ago
      I don't understand why people are stuck on the term unlimited here. It wasn't like he still had an unlimited plan but Google said "you are using too much data so we're going to delete it". They discontinued the plan so as of now he does not have an unlimited storage plan. I don't understand why this is complicated. Seems like he can either pay whatever it costs to store 237TB in Google Drive (probably a lot) or he can migrate to another storage provider. If he wasn't willing to pay whatever the cost for Google Drive is he should have started migrating his data when they discontinued the service.
masfuerte 3y ago
This is all reasonable but you missed the bit where they gave him only seven days' notice.
- kotaKat 3y ago
  They didn't; there were many emails throughout 2022 discussing "Important changes to your subscription" from the Google Workspace Team stating that unlimited storage plans were going away and that people were being moved to pooled storage across the entire account. They were moved to a new storage subscription in mid-2022 and while they were over the limits, Google ignored it up to this point.
  - masfuerte 3y ago
    He says he believed the data would remain read-only. Did the emails make clear that the data was going to be deleted? If Google had already made that decision then they could have sent him the final warning two months ago.
    - amf12 3y ago
      Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. We just have half of the story.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  To download that in seven days would require something like 3gbit/s I somehow doubt google drive would even support that level of egress.
  - dacryn 3y ago
    it happily chugs along at 1gbit for me, that's the max I can test. I'd be surprised if it doesnt support it. Its google after all. Despite their shitty customer support, their engineers dont mess around
frognumber 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" Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position. He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data. He need to get his data out. Trying to get my data out of Google, I've gotten ~1TB out in ~1 week. This is about a year's worth of time to not lose it. The facts are not "even less inflammatory." A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company.
- compsciphd 3y ago
  I had a business account that was told they were cancelling the service. We were given 3 months or so notice. What I believe happened (as happened to many other people as can see from rclone forum) is that some people decided that they were going to simply go into "overage" mode, as that assumed that google would keep their data around when over quota, just it be locked into read only mode (so the data would remain, but just be readable, they couldn't add anything to it). Google decided that this wasn't something they were going to support, so people who went into read only mode, have now been getting the letters that their data is going to be deleted. i.e. they have been for months paying google for an account that they knew is over quota. 200TB is fairly easily extractable over 3 months from google drive if one plans correctly. You have a 10TB download quota a day, which one would need a gigabit/s connection to hit. If you have only 250megabit connection, it will take 80 days. Bumping up on the 3 month warning I had, but still doable especially if one filters out unnecessary things.
- boringg 3y ago
  Crisis (!?) is a bit dramatic. Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy.
rokkamokka 3y ago
The bad part is that Google announced 60+ days before the change took effect that the account would become read-only. Nowhere did they state the account would be terminated, or could not indefinitely remain in a read-only state. Then, they suddenly spring a 7 day deadline to download all your data, with no previous mention. Very poor communication from Google.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  I'd assume it couldn't remain in read only forever. But yeah since it's data loss Google should be very loud about that eventuality. I was getting weekly emails from dropbox about my inactive account before they nuked it.
gaoshan 3y ago
My previous comment was not as informed as it should have been (because I opined after only read the title... a mistake, to be sure). I've edited it and will leave it at this being a very unfortunate situation to be in.
- boringg 3y ago
  Completely agree with this. If it's your "life's work" - "free tier" storage is 100% not the place to put it. update: Not Free but feels like taking advantage of enterprise storage (0.07 $/TB) close to free.
  - bachmeier 3y ago
    From the article: > Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.
  - xoa 3y ago
    >free tier storage is 100% not the place to put it. It's curious how hard you keep pushing in this flagrant lie in this thread when the article explicitly and repeatedly makes clear that he was paying Google for Enterprise level storage and on top of that did indeed have local first, except all that got taken from him by the FBI. Yet for some reason you insist on claiming he wasn't paying and was somehow abusing cloud-only. Why?
    - boringg 3y ago
      Sorry correction. 20$ a month for an enterprise account formerly unlimited - (which is pretty much free considering how much data is being used ~ 7 cents a TB if my calcs are correct). Now that account is a 100$ / 25 TB. for 273 == 1000 $/month. https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/942777-no-more-unlimited-google-drive-google-workspace-enterprise-storage-full https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/942777-no-more-unlimit...
      - 3y ago
azemetre 3y ago
Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it. I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court. It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.
- cassac 3y ago
  Just like “unlimited vacation.” Whenever someone says it you know there is something going on and you aren’t going to like it.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  I believe most companies don't offer unlimited plans anymore these days. And Google probably removed theirs because of use cases like this. Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time. Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.
  - azemetre 3y ago
    Idk if that’s always the case. I still have unlimited data plan from my mobile provider, from 2008ish. $50 for unlimited data (no it’s not rate limited either). Obviously the cellular provider hates this but they can’t remove something I’m paying for and haven’t broken the contract. They do try to get me off the plan several times a year offering new phones fully paid if I switched. Fuck them, I paid for it and I’m not going to leave. It’s not my fault a multi billion dollar corporation didn’t get one over me. I’m glad I live in an area with good protections against this corporate abuse. Absolutely disgusting what Google has done. I’ll keep this in mind 5 years from now when I have the power to spend real money on budgets and ensure that I never give Google a cent of it. It takes decades to build a reputation and minutes to destroy it. Google has destroyed theirs.
deleted 3y ago
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that_guy_iain 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" You just expanded it. It's still basically the same. > 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. 230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore. Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.
- rkagerer 3y ago
  Unlimited means unlimited. Too often what gets lost in the phrase "edge case" is that there's a human being on the other end. They should do the decent thing and work with him and anyone else storing more data than can be practically downloaded to come up with a workaround or extension. Imagine if your bank closed your account and forfeited your money because they couldn't dole it out to you fast enough.
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    While they had unlimited they didn’t have a problem. But at a certain point someone is going to do the maths and realise the 1% who fully take advantage and go massive in an unlimited offer cost more than you make from the others.
  - croutonwagon 3y ago
    Unlimited does. And it should. But if its your "lifes work" i would assume the value there is more than just the cost of storage. That the person storing it would have thought about ownership and egress options a bit further out. Like i use workspace for all sorts of stuff. But its google, they can and may just axe your account for any reason. So i have backups of all things at all times and worst case, i just move my email/drive whatever to another service along with the domain, which I own (and he appears to as well) Im not excusing google at all. But at some point you have to take some accountability. Not having a backup plan and just trusting google or ANY company to faithfully keep your lifes work for you seems slightly....naive.
gizmo 3y ago
You cannot export 240TB in 7 days. And a journalist can be forgiven for not knowing what the market value of cloud storage is. Besides, Google offers many services for free (or below cost) in order to maintain their dominant market position. I don't think your take is fair to the journalist.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I think everyone is also burying the HUGE wrench in the whole idea of storage preservation: >And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. And finding (and paying for) multiple backup services that can handle 250 TBs of data is likely pretty cost prohibitive. This was a pretty big story back then: https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2023/08/10/tim-burke-fbi-investigation-fox-news-tucker-carlson-kanye-west/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2023/08/10/tim-burke-fbi... though the names in that URL probably gives the real reason behind this "investigation". Rich people got caught with their pants down and we know laws don't apply to them
bachmeier 3y ago
> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan Sure, but you're missing the main point of the story, which is the seven days they gave him to download everything. > It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 According to the S3 Glacier pricing I see, it would be less than $900/month. It would cost less than a $5000 one-time payment to buy enough USB storage for the full 237 TB. > and he doesn't want to pay that No, the story doesn't say that.
Sanzig 3y ago
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that The standard S3 tier, sure, but Deep Glacier would be about $250/month. Retrieval can be up to 12 hours but that shouldn't really be a problem for long term archiving. As with anything AWS, egress can kill you, but you can sidestep that with something like Snowball, and really that's only an issue if you need to egress everything to migrate the archive.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > you can sidestep that with something like Snowball Going by AWS's website[0], a 50 TB Snowball is $200, so you'd need to drop $1000 for five Snowballs to hold that data. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-petabyte-scale-data/ https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-peta...
  - Sanzig 3y ago
    It's about $20k to egress 250 TB from AWS, so you still come out way ahead.
    - erik_seaberg 3y ago
      Anyone contemplating Snowball or Snowmobile needs to be aware that they always charge the per-GB price for data egress, on top of the hardware rental and shipping.
      - Sanzig 3y ago
        Ah damn, you're right. Looks like it's cheaper than the internet egress fee (looks like $0.02/GB versus $0.09/GB if I'm interpreting the pricing table correctly?). Azure's glacier equivalent might be worth a look in that case, since their egress is usually a lot cheaper.
      - msh 3y ago
        The webpage says: Data transfers into Amazon S3 are free.
RajT88 3y ago
For 5k you could build a box to store that kind of data. Throw in a case of beer, and maid services to clean up your living room afterward, and you'd still make budget. ETA: OK maybe more like 10-12k it would be.
- rst 3y ago
  The guy's boxes were confiscated by the FBI, which was why he'd been forced onto cloud storage.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    Sure. Make me read the article. lol
  - briffle 3y ago
    Earlier this year, becuase of some legal issues, his 'business critical' data was now only stored in one place, that was telling him it was locked, and over quota. And he has made no attempts to fix that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xethos 3y ago
  As noted in the article, > "Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News. As we noted, this seemed like a pretty big 1st Amendment issue. Burke is also facing bogus CFAA charges because he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content." Even if Burke had built a box, the maid service and beer would be the most helpful (but would not solve his actual issue).
- x0x0 3y ago
  Because I was curious what drives cost today -- 20 TB drives on newegg seems to be available for $310 to $360. If you use erasure coding w/ 30% overhead that's 18 +3 drives or $7.5k in drives alone, pre chassis. Having a DR replica living somewhere outside your house probably gets this well over $12k, even if that replica is glacier or similar.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
S3 is not where this belongs. Backblaze B2 would be better and cheaper (~$1428/month) and no egress fees due to Cloudflare bandwidth alliance, the Internet Archive also has a private offering [3]. If the journalist in question sees this, or someone knows them, I am happy to assist in a migration at no cost. If someone from Google sees this (HN Google support), it would be swell if the delete lifecycle could be paused while this migration is facilitated. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing [2] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ [3] https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault
- stephenr 3y ago
  Rsync.net works out essentially the same ($6/month cheaper) on a monthly basis, but offers 10% and 15% discounts for 12 and 24 month options. B2 does mention a "capacity bundle", saying 250TB/year is $19.5K - but that's $1.5K more than the monthly pricing for the same capacity so it doesn't seem like they have any meaningful long-term pricing discounts.
deleted 3y ago
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hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I agree, dang should fix the title, this one is falsely editorialized as saying the deletion already occured.
deleted 3y ago
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lolinder 3y ago
> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. You make it sound like he could have chosen to keep paying Google under a different plan, but I can't find any way for him to pay Google to keep the data for him short of creating 100+ dummy "users" in his workspace to get their 2TB each (which I'm sure Google would totally be okay with) [0]. Google is firing him as a customer, which is their prerogative, but they're doing it on a timeframe that means he can't actually get the data out in time. That's what the (actual) headline says, and those are the facts. [0] https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
- shkkmo 3y ago
  Google gave him 60 days after they fired him to continue using his account for free. After that they gave him another 5 months in read only mode to find a solution. The short timeframe now is because the user did nothing in over half a year to resolve the problem. Google could have more clearly communicated that read-only state was temporary, but assuming it was permanent seems wildly optimistic and naive.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Assuming that the read only state was permanent would be naive. Assuming that they would give him 60 days notice again before actually deleting his data isn't, except insofar as Google is a terrible company and he clearly didn't realize that.
    - shkkmo 3y ago
      Google held onto his data for him for over half a year after his plan was cancelled. Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time. Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data. Google makes plenty of bad choices, but this seems like a problem that Burke made entirely for himself.
jdross 3y ago
It would cost around $300 a month for archive tier storage, $5000 a month would be for standard ready access Buying the drives would cost at least $5k
avereveard 3y ago
> 5000 a month assuming it all goes into frequent access tier, which this shouldn't as this is an archive. just by enabling the automatic tiering is going to be more like 1000/month and if it's would instead end up organized into glacier as it should it's gonna be more like 300$/m which is not dirt cheap, but still. it start giving the prospect of maintaining a home archive with manual disk rotation and scheduled data verification some second thought.
backtoyoujim 3y ago
I am not a fan of "some else figured out that they could overcharge people" as a moral lesson.
toastercat 3y ago
I think the bigger issue here is that 237.22TB is not trivial, yet, it is still a gargantuan task to actually get a hold of a human being at Google.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Yup. Youtubers have, are, and continue to be subjected to this. Can be booted out at a whim at anytime due to automation, with no hopes of getting any actual human to interact with unless they have dedicated line to staff (i.e. you're one of the huge 1M+ subscriber channels) or you make a big enough ruckus on social media. Your potential livelihood can be terminated by the whims of bots. Ofc you can argue that a Youtuber goes into such a contract willingly. This case is much more egregious as a series of "I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
For readers' reference, a "Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS 22 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive" costs $399.99. You would need at least 11 or 12 of these, running you $4,799.88 for the latter, plus tax and shipping, or one month of S3 storage in storage hardware alone.
germandiago 3y ago
Thanks. I almost believed the headline. That looks more accurate.
dontupvoteme 3y ago
He was definitely pushing it, but google is being extremely aggressive with timelines just to get resources freed up. For instance, suddenly out of nowhere they are only telling people with a 7 day heads up that they will reclaim google voice numbers, and only with a single email. I've used the service for over a decade and they never bothered to "monitor usage" or anything like this. Thankfully I think due to US law they can't immediately re-issue them, but you have to claim them under a new phone number or such. Very disturbing policy shifts at the company.
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
The fault here still lies with Google. Why advertise the plan as "unlimited" if it is not actually unlimited. I was in a similar boat a few years ago. Had about 70 TB of archives and backups on Google Drive and was forced to scramble to move these somewhere else when they terminated the unlimited plan.
zlg_codes 3y ago
I make it a point to downvote people who think they are tone moderators. You could have submitted it yourself if you found it first. I don't see how it's less of a concern that he has 200+ TB of video. Perhaps don't advertise a limited resource as unlimited; then you won't get people like this guy. He deserves the ability to get the data off his account. Google acting like their hands are tied are simply being malicious.

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.
    - Nicksil 3y ago
      > 237 Tb in an unlimited service from Google So, not excessive. 237 TB does not exceed unlimited. What am I missing here? >they knew they had found a loop hole in google policy. What, exactly, is this loop hole?
    - cldellow 3y ago
      You talk about loopholes three times in this comment. > Because they are using 237 Tb in an unlimited service from Google Google's a trillion dollar company. A popular saying amongst Googlers is "I don't know how to count that low". They're used to big numbers. I work at a much smaller company. We are not a trillion dollar company. Even we, when offering an unlimited service, ask ourselves: "What happens if someone takes us up on this offer?" It's not a loophole, it's what he paid for. It's fine to stop offering an unlimited service. We did! My only beef with Google's conduct here is the 7 days of notice prior to deletion. I've followed Mike Masnick's reporting in other cases. He seems like an even-handed, fair journalist. I trust that he's not hiding the ball, nor letting the other journalist mislead him about the situation.
      - boringg 3y ago
        You should question the story a bit more. You think Google only gave 7 days? That seems super suss.
- bakugo 3y ago
  > The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation The victim is "taking advantage" of an advertised feature of the service they paid for, and has done nothing wrong. The fault lies entirely with Google for advertising unlimited storage, knowing full well that no such thing exists. Same with every other cloud storage service that once advertised unlimited storage. Just because someone who understands how computer storage works could probably figure out that it wasn't really unlimited doesn't make it not false advertising.
  - boringg 3y ago
    They offered the service for 10 years and then sunset it.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Google offered unlimited storage, no? It’s reasonable to believe that they can do that since it averages out to a small amount per user, meaning most users overpay and the power users get peace of mind. Of course nothing is unlimited but a company like Google is perhaps best positioned in the world to offer that. And sure, if someone writes /dev/urandom at 1Gbit/s you could claim abuse, but for people working with video TBs of data is normal. 200+ is a lot but again averages out among users. In either case it’s extremely easy to avoid the word “unlimited” if you don’t intend to honor it for legitimate customers. It’s also reasonable that companies products change. And maybe it doesn’t last forever, fair enough. But if your product is backup, and you pull the rug with a 7 day grace period, of course people are going to be upset and warn others not to trust you.
- Pikamander2 3y ago
  > I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. If it's excessive, then Google shouldn't have offered an unlimited data plan. They could have called it a 100 TB plan, but they chose to call it unlimited to make it sound better and then canceled it once people took them up on the offer. Regardless of whether that kind of action is legal, it's a shady business practice. For that matter, there's nothing wrong with Google discontinuing the plan going forward, but they had plenty of options for making the transition more fair and building consumer trust without hurting their bottom line too much. For example, they could have converted his account to a 250TB account and tripled its price, at which point he wouldn't be in immediate danger of losing his files but would be pressured into gradually moving to a more cost effective solution.
  - boringg 3y ago
    They offered it for 10 years and then probably realized that people were taking advantage of the position and then tried to phase it out. Most likely with a lot of warning beforehand. I have a tough time believe that they didn't give any warning and then kicked them off the service.
    - crooked-v 3y ago
      > taking advantage It was unlimited. If they didn't want it to be unlimited, it should have had a limit on it.
      - renewiltord 3y ago
        It was unlimited and they retained the right to exit the contract. If someone wants to pay for unlimited duration unlimited storage they should find a provider who does that.
        darkwater 3y ago
        They had it, it was Google.
    - 3y ago
- m_0x 3y ago
  237TB of unlimited data is a drop in the bucket.
- sssilver 3y ago
  What number is 237 in excess of? That is the number that Google should have advertised, instead of “unlimited”.
  - thinkharderdev 3y ago
    I don't understand why people are stuck on the term unlimited here. It wasn't like he still had an unlimited plan but Google said "you are using too much data so we're going to delete it". They discontinued the plan so as of now he does not have an unlimited storage plan. I don't understand why this is complicated. Seems like he can either pay whatever it costs to store 237TB in Google Drive (probably a lot) or he can migrate to another storage provider. If he wasn't willing to pay whatever the cost for Google Drive is he should have started migrating his data when they discontinued the service.

masfuerte 3y ago

This is all reasonable but you missed the bit where they gave him only seven days' notice.

kotaKat 3y ago
They didn't; there were many emails throughout 2022 discussing "Important changes to your subscription" from the Google Workspace Team stating that unlimited storage plans were going away and that people were being moved to pooled storage across the entire account. They were moved to a new storage subscription in mid-2022 and while they were over the limits, Google ignored it up to this point.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  He says he believed the data would remain read-only. Did the emails make clear that the data was going to be deleted? If Google had already made that decision then they could have sent him the final warning two months ago.
  - amf12 3y ago
    Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. We just have half of the story.
calamari4065 3y ago
To download that in seven days would require something like 3gbit/s I somehow doubt google drive would even support that level of egress.
- dacryn 3y ago
  it happily chugs along at 1gbit for me, that's the max I can test. I'd be surprised if it doesnt support it. Its google after all. Despite their shitty customer support, their engineers dont mess around

frognumber 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" Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position. He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data. He need to get his data out. Trying to get my data out of Google, I've gotten ~1TB out in ~1 week. This is about a year's worth of time to not lose it. The facts are not "even less inflammatory." A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company.

compsciphd 3y ago
I had a business account that was told they were cancelling the service. We were given 3 months or so notice. What I believe happened (as happened to many other people as can see from rclone forum) is that some people decided that they were going to simply go into "overage" mode, as that assumed that google would keep their data around when over quota, just it be locked into read only mode (so the data would remain, but just be readable, they couldn't add anything to it). Google decided that this wasn't something they were going to support, so people who went into read only mode, have now been getting the letters that their data is going to be deleted. i.e. they have been for months paying google for an account that they knew is over quota. 200TB is fairly easily extractable over 3 months from google drive if one plans correctly. You have a 10TB download quota a day, which one would need a gigabit/s connection to hit. If you have only 250megabit connection, it will take 80 days. Bumping up on the 3 month warning I had, but still doable especially if one filters out unnecessary things.
boringg 3y ago
Crisis (!?) is a bit dramatic. Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy.

rokkamokka 3y ago

The bad part is that Google announced 60+ days before the change took effect that the account would become read-only. Nowhere did they state the account would be terminated, or could not indefinitely remain in a read-only state. Then, they suddenly spring a 7 day deadline to download all your data, with no previous mention. Very poor communication from Google.

wombat-man 3y ago
I'd assume it couldn't remain in read only forever. But yeah since it's data loss Google should be very loud about that eventuality. I was getting weekly emails from dropbox about my inactive account before they nuked it.

gaoshan 3y ago

My previous comment was not as informed as it should have been (because I opined after only read the title... a mistake, to be sure). I've edited it and will leave it at this being a very unfortunate situation to be in.

boringg 3y ago
Completely agree with this. If it's your "life's work" - "free tier" storage is 100% not the place to put it. update: Not Free but feels like taking advantage of enterprise storage (0.07 $/TB) close to free.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  From the article: > Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.
- xoa 3y ago
  >free tier storage is 100% not the place to put it. It's curious how hard you keep pushing in this flagrant lie in this thread when the article explicitly and repeatedly makes clear that he was paying Google for Enterprise level storage and on top of that did indeed have local first, except all that got taken from him by the FBI. Yet for some reason you insist on claiming he wasn't paying and was somehow abusing cloud-only. Why?
  - boringg 3y ago
    Sorry correction. 20$ a month for an enterprise account formerly unlimited - (which is pretty much free considering how much data is being used ~ 7 cents a TB if my calcs are correct). Now that account is a 100$ / 25 TB. for 273 == 1000 $/month. https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/942777-no-more-unlimited-google-drive-google-workspace-enterprise-storage-full https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/942777-no-more-unlimit...
    - 3y ago

azemetre 3y ago

Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it. I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court. It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.

cassac 3y ago
Just like “unlimited vacation.” Whenever someone says it you know there is something going on and you aren’t going to like it.
renewiltord 3y ago
I believe most companies don't offer unlimited plans anymore these days. And Google probably removed theirs because of use cases like this. Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time. Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.
- azemetre 3y ago
  Idk if that’s always the case. I still have unlimited data plan from my mobile provider, from 2008ish. $50 for unlimited data (no it’s not rate limited either). Obviously the cellular provider hates this but they can’t remove something I’m paying for and haven’t broken the contract. They do try to get me off the plan several times a year offering new phones fully paid if I switched. Fuck them, I paid for it and I’m not going to leave. It’s not my fault a multi billion dollar corporation didn’t get one over me. I’m glad I live in an area with good protections against this corporate abuse. Absolutely disgusting what Google has done. I’ll keep this in mind 5 years from now when I have the power to spend real money on budgets and ensure that I never give Google a cent of it. It takes decades to build a reputation and minutes to destroy it. Google has destroyed theirs.

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that_guy_iain 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" You just expanded it. It's still basically the same. > 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. 230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore. Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.

rkagerer 3y ago
Unlimited means unlimited. Too often what gets lost in the phrase "edge case" is that there's a human being on the other end. They should do the decent thing and work with him and anyone else storing more data than can be practically downloaded to come up with a workaround or extension. Imagine if your bank closed your account and forfeited your money because they couldn't dole it out to you fast enough.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  While they had unlimited they didn’t have a problem. But at a certain point someone is going to do the maths and realise the 1% who fully take advantage and go massive in an unlimited offer cost more than you make from the others.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  Unlimited does. And it should. But if its your "lifes work" i would assume the value there is more than just the cost of storage. That the person storing it would have thought about ownership and egress options a bit further out. Like i use workspace for all sorts of stuff. But its google, they can and may just axe your account for any reason. So i have backups of all things at all times and worst case, i just move my email/drive whatever to another service along with the domain, which I own (and he appears to as well) Im not excusing google at all. But at some point you have to take some accountability. Not having a backup plan and just trusting google or ANY company to faithfully keep your lifes work for you seems slightly....naive.

gizmo 3y ago

You cannot export 240TB in 7 days. And a journalist can be forgiven for not knowing what the market value of cloud storage is. Besides, Google offers many services for free (or below cost) in order to maintain their dominant market position. I don't think your take is fair to the journalist.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
I think everyone is also burying the HUGE wrench in the whole idea of storage preservation: >And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. And finding (and paying for) multiple backup services that can handle 250 TBs of data is likely pretty cost prohibitive. This was a pretty big story back then: https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2023/08/10/tim-burke-fbi-investigation-fox-news-tucker-carlson-kanye-west/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2023/08/10/tim-burke-fbi... though the names in that URL probably gives the real reason behind this "investigation". Rich people got caught with their pants down and we know laws don't apply to them

bachmeier 3y ago

> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan Sure, but you're missing the main point of the story, which is the seven days they gave him to download everything. > It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 According to the S3 Glacier pricing I see, it would be less than $900/month. It would cost less than a $5000 one-time payment to buy enough USB storage for the full 237 TB. > and he doesn't want to pay that No, the story doesn't say that.

Sanzig 3y ago

> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that The standard S3 tier, sure, but Deep Glacier would be about $250/month. Retrieval can be up to 12 hours but that shouldn't really be a problem for long term archiving. As with anything AWS, egress can kill you, but you can sidestep that with something like Snowball, and really that's only an issue if you need to egress everything to migrate the archive.

LoganDark 3y ago
> you can sidestep that with something like Snowball Going by AWS's website[0], a 50 TB Snowball is $200, so you'd need to drop $1000 for five Snowballs to hold that data. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-petabyte-scale-data/ https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-peta...
- Sanzig 3y ago
  It's about $20k to egress 250 TB from AWS, so you still come out way ahead.
  - erik_seaberg 3y ago
    Anyone contemplating Snowball or Snowmobile needs to be aware that they always charge the per-GB price for data egress, on top of the hardware rental and shipping.
    - Sanzig 3y ago
      Ah damn, you're right. Looks like it's cheaper than the internet egress fee (looks like $0.02/GB versus $0.09/GB if I'm interpreting the pricing table correctly?). Azure's glacier equivalent might be worth a look in that case, since their egress is usually a lot cheaper.
    - msh 3y ago
      The webpage says: Data transfers into Amazon S3 are free.

RajT88 3y ago

For 5k you could build a box to store that kind of data. Throw in a case of beer, and maid services to clean up your living room afterward, and you'd still make budget. ETA: OK maybe more like 10-12k it would be.

rst 3y ago
The guy's boxes were confiscated by the FBI, which was why he'd been forced onto cloud storage.
- RajT88 3y ago
  Sure. Make me read the article. lol
- briffle 3y ago
  Earlier this year, becuase of some legal issues, his 'business critical' data was now only stored in one place, that was telling him it was locked, and over quota. And he has made no attempts to fix that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xethos 3y ago
As noted in the article, > "Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News. As we noted, this seemed like a pretty big 1st Amendment issue. Burke is also facing bogus CFAA charges because he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content." Even if Burke had built a box, the maid service and beer would be the most helpful (but would not solve his actual issue).
x0x0 3y ago
Because I was curious what drives cost today -- 20 TB drives on newegg seems to be available for $310 to $360. If you use erasure coding w/ 30% overhead that's 18 +3 drives or $7.5k in drives alone, pre chassis. Having a DR replica living somewhere outside your house probably gets this well over $12k, even if that replica is glacier or similar.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

S3 is not where this belongs. Backblaze B2 would be better and cheaper (~$1428/month) and no egress fees due to Cloudflare bandwidth alliance, the Internet Archive also has a private offering [3]. If the journalist in question sees this, or someone knows them, I am happy to assist in a migration at no cost. If someone from Google sees this (HN Google support), it would be swell if the delete lifecycle could be paused while this migration is facilitated. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing [2] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ [3] https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault

stephenr 3y ago
Rsync.net works out essentially the same ($6/month cheaper) on a monthly basis, but offers 10% and 15% discounts for 12 and 24 month options. B2 does mention a "capacity bundle", saying 250TB/year is $19.5K - but that's $1.5K more than the monthly pricing for the same capacity so it doesn't seem like they have any meaningful long-term pricing discounts.

deleted 3y ago

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hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I agree, dang should fix the title, this one is falsely editorialized as saying the deletion already occured.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lolinder 3y ago

> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. You make it sound like he could have chosen to keep paying Google under a different plan, but I can't find any way for him to pay Google to keep the data for him short of creating 100+ dummy "users" in his workspace to get their 2TB each (which I'm sure Google would totally be okay with) [0]. Google is firing him as a customer, which is their prerogative, but they're doing it on a timeframe that means he can't actually get the data out in time. That's what the (actual) headline says, and those are the facts. [0] https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

shkkmo 3y ago
Google gave him 60 days after they fired him to continue using his account for free. After that they gave him another 5 months in read only mode to find a solution. The short timeframe now is because the user did nothing in over half a year to resolve the problem. Google could have more clearly communicated that read-only state was temporary, but assuming it was permanent seems wildly optimistic and naive.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Assuming that the read only state was permanent would be naive. Assuming that they would give him 60 days notice again before actually deleting his data isn't, except insofar as Google is a terrible company and he clearly didn't realize that.
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    Google held onto his data for him for over half a year after his plan was cancelled. Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time. Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data. Google makes plenty of bad choices, but this seems like a problem that Burke made entirely for himself.

jdross 3y ago

It would cost around $300 a month for archive tier storage, $5000 a month would be for standard ready access Buying the drives would cost at least $5k

avereveard 3y ago

> 5000 a month assuming it all goes into frequent access tier, which this shouldn't as this is an archive. just by enabling the automatic tiering is going to be more like 1000/month and if it's would instead end up organized into glacier as it should it's gonna be more like 300$/m which is not dirt cheap, but still. it start giving the prospect of maintaining a home archive with manual disk rotation and scheduled data verification some second thought.

backtoyoujim 3y ago

I am not a fan of "some else figured out that they could overcharge people" as a moral lesson.

toastercat 3y ago

I think the bigger issue here is that 237.22TB is not trivial, yet, it is still a gargantuan task to actually get a hold of a human being at Google.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Yup. Youtubers have, are, and continue to be subjected to this. Can be booted out at a whim at anytime due to automation, with no hopes of getting any actual human to interact with unless they have dedicated line to staff (i.e. you're one of the huge 1M+ subscriber channels) or you make a big enough ruckus on social media. Your potential livelihood can be terminated by the whims of bots. Ofc you can argue that a Youtuber goes into such a contract willingly. This case is much more egregious as a series of "I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

For readers' reference, a "Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS 22 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive" costs $399.99. You would need at least 11 or 12 of these, running you $4,799.88 for the latter, plus tax and shipping, or one month of S3 storage in storage hardware alone.

germandiago 3y ago

Thanks. I almost believed the headline. That looks more accurate.

dontupvoteme 3y ago

He was definitely pushing it, but google is being extremely aggressive with timelines just to get resources freed up. For instance, suddenly out of nowhere they are only telling people with a 7 day heads up that they will reclaim google voice numbers, and only with a single email. I've used the service for over a decade and they never bothered to "monitor usage" or anything like this. Thankfully I think due to US law they can't immediately re-issue them, but you have to claim them under a new phone number or such. Very disturbing policy shifts at the company.

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

The fault here still lies with Google. Why advertise the plan as "unlimited" if it is not actually unlimited. I was in a similar boat a few years ago. Had about 70 TB of archives and backups on Google Drive and was forced to scramble to move these somewhere else when they terminated the unlimited plan.

zlg_codes 3y ago

I make it a point to downvote people who think they are tone moderators. You could have submitted it yourself if you found it first. I don't see how it's less of a concern that he has 200+ TB of video. Perhaps don't advertise a limited resource as unlimited; then you won't get people like this guy. He deserves the ability to get the data off his account. Google acting like their hands are tied are simply being malicious.