15 ms·

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

> 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.
- Nicksil 3y ago
  >the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system Why do you think this?
  - boringg 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Nicksil 3y ago
      >237 TB for free? What are you talking about? >Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account.
    - terminous 3y ago
      Are you seriously asking this question or are you completely disconnected from the dictionary? What does "unlimited" mean? No limits. If you don't intend for a customer to make use of unlimited storage, with no limits, then use the proper English word. Also, this was a paid subscription.
      - remus 3y ago
        I hate the 'unlimited' marketing too, but as a user it pays to engage your brain in these situations. Selling a service for significantly less than it costs to run is a risky business strategy, so best case you keep getting great value for some period of time and worst case it's going to change and you'll need to get outta there.
    - avazhi 3y ago
      Highly recommend reading the article again, slowly, until you fully understand the situation. This was a paid service until Google changed the terms; afterwards, Google claimed that the files would merely be read only (indefinitely), not deleted. After THAT, they then gave the user 1 week to deal with 250 terabytes. Read it again you understand that properly.
garblegarble 3y ago
He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota. They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they withdrew the unlimited service he was using? I'm no fan of Google, and I agree with you that a good service would have offered an at-or-slightly-above-cost data export for that volume of data... but he's deliberately misrepresenting the situation here (either that or is painfully naive) Edit: as somebody else pointed out downthread, he also would have received numerous e-mails throughout 2022 telling him that the unlimited service was being shuttered
- turquoisevar 3y ago
  Why are we carrying water for Google here and blaming the user? Google stated that it would remain in read-only mode and that’s the end of it. It’s bad enough they reneged on their agreement to store unlimited data for x amount of money, but according to you people need to be soothsayers to figure out that a company will reneg on their promise to maintain the data? And none of that even takes into account that even 60 days wouldn’t be enough to download all that data. Just stop it. Google is in the wrong and to add insult to injury they don’t provide any means of reaching a customer support representative to mitigate issues caused by their own incompetence.
- ollien 3y ago
  The six-month grace period notice pretty clearly states his data would be read-only, while the seven-day notice seems to be the first time destruction is even mentioned. I think we can both agree that there's a world of difference between data being read-only and being destroyed. I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it. 7 days to download 200TB+ does not seem reasonable.
rsync 3y ago
"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." Agreed that this is a crisis but it is not impossible. You can use 'rclone' - running on your own system or hosted elsewhere - to move data between cloud providers. You don't rely on your own bandwidth - they talk directly to one another: rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever ... and if you don't want to bother even installing rclone, you can run it somewhere it is already installed: ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google <--> aws are capable of). I am, admittedly, hand-waving away the actual configuration of those "remotes" as they are called, which involve your login and/or API keys, etc. - here is an example of what that config might look like: https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html
- mderazon 3y ago
  I've been looking for a solution to backup Google Takeout periodically to Back laze. Can rclone be used with Google Takeout ?
- zamadatix 3y ago
  This still requires Google Drive be able to serve your 237 TB at over 3 gbps for the full 7 days. In my experience this is not the case with cloud storage offerings. This guy realistically had plenty of time to figure it out without a fancy transfer method though. The real problem is they don't want to pay $$$ for somewhere else to host the files and have now reached the point it has become a problem.
- alwa 3y ago
  (Minimum rsync.net) is still (237.22TB x 1024 x $0.006/GB =) $1457/month. Most “independent journalists” I know aren’t operating on the kind of household budget where they can handwave that kind of bill away.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    Perhaps they ought to invest in tape drives and (encrypted) offsite backups at friends' homes. If they want convenience of always-available data, they have to pay for that
lwhi 3y ago
> 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. Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Backblaze does this
- tmpz22 3y ago
  A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company. This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.
  - jdiez17 3y ago
    You nailed it. People don't necessarily hate capitalism, companies or business owners. However, this late stage capitalism with huge faceless companies that are unable to care for people, seem to be above the law and are just profit-extraction machines is quite a trip.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - anonymoushn 3y ago
shwouchk 3y ago
Sorry, but I call FUD here; Had a very similar experience with google, except with maybe 20tb rather than 200, and no data loss. They gave warnings at least a year in advance about the transition to google workspace from google for business or however it was called before. It was quite clear that this transition would eventually be mandatory and that it did not include unlimited space for a flat fee. I punted on the transition for as long as possible, and when it finally arrived I temporarily added some accounts until I removed the excess data (mainly old backups I did not need anymore). Nothing in life is unlimited and taking such a promise at face value appears to me as being willfully naive. Relying on such an offer as your main storage is begging for trouble. Expecting this to happen is precisely why I only stored backups there. You don’t need to be an expert to do the math, consider that just to store the data, without any redundancy and without it being constantly spinning would have retailed at at ~ $4K using the cheapest drives (~25 8tb drives), and would have cost them ~$1/h or ~$700 to constantly run at CA electricity prices (~8W idle per drive). And this before redundancy, backups, bandwidth, etc. This is obviously unsustainable and will eventually end. Same goes eg for dropbox, who offered “unlimited” storage for their business plan until fairly recently but now have the same limit of 5tb/acct as Google. Who in their right mind would rely on such an obvious abuse of what was meant by “unlimited” to store the only copy of their life’s work?
- capitainenemo 3y ago
  Well... they could transition the data to tape with a delay for recovering it, instead of outright deleting it. At that point, storing it would be pretty much free no? Regardless, they promised something, then reneged, with little to no time to handle it. The way they handled it in terms of getting rid of the service is pretty terrible. Also apparently it wasn't his only copy - his others were taken, and now he's about to lose the last one.
  - shwouchk 3y ago
    As I and others mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, there was at least a year of warning. At least I was aware of this for about a year out. Tape is cheaper but not free. A quick search[0] quotes it at ~few $ /TB/Yr. Even if we take it at $1 due to G scale, that’s still ~$250/Y to store the archives, roughly what the customer likely paid when it was stored on immediate access media. I agree it would have been nicer of them to store an archive after they stop paying. I disagree that they reneged on their offer - despite being disappointed that the deal ended, would I expect it to be offered forever, especially given the potential for abuse? Of course not. Frankly I’m surprised it lasted this long.
lancewiggs 3y ago
I'm told that Movebot can do this in time - getting the archives to s3/wasabi or Backblaze etc.
Tommstein 3y ago
> 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. Dude uploaded over 237 TB, they must have some really long years where you live.

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.

Nicksil 3y ago
>the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system Why do you think this?
- boringg 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Nicksil 3y ago
    >237 TB for free? What are you talking about? >Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account.
  - terminous 3y ago
    Are you seriously asking this question or are you completely disconnected from the dictionary? What does "unlimited" mean? No limits. If you don't intend for a customer to make use of unlimited storage, with no limits, then use the proper English word. Also, this was a paid subscription.
    - remus 3y ago
      I hate the 'unlimited' marketing too, but as a user it pays to engage your brain in these situations. Selling a service for significantly less than it costs to run is a risky business strategy, so best case you keep getting great value for some period of time and worst case it's going to change and you'll need to get outta there.
  - avazhi 3y ago
    Highly recommend reading the article again, slowly, until you fully understand the situation. This was a paid service until Google changed the terms; afterwards, Google claimed that the files would merely be read only (indefinitely), not deleted. After THAT, they then gave the user 1 week to deal with 250 terabytes. Read it again you understand that properly.

garblegarble 3y ago

He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota. They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they withdrew the unlimited service he was using? I'm no fan of Google, and I agree with you that a good service would have offered an at-or-slightly-above-cost data export for that volume of data... but he's deliberately misrepresenting the situation here (either that or is painfully naive) Edit: as somebody else pointed out downthread, he also would have received numerous e-mails throughout 2022 telling him that the unlimited service was being shuttered

turquoisevar 3y ago
Why are we carrying water for Google here and blaming the user? Google stated that it would remain in read-only mode and that’s the end of it. It’s bad enough they reneged on their agreement to store unlimited data for x amount of money, but according to you people need to be soothsayers to figure out that a company will reneg on their promise to maintain the data? And none of that even takes into account that even 60 days wouldn’t be enough to download all that data. Just stop it. Google is in the wrong and to add insult to injury they don’t provide any means of reaching a customer support representative to mitigate issues caused by their own incompetence.
ollien 3y ago
The six-month grace period notice pretty clearly states his data would be read-only, while the seven-day notice seems to be the first time destruction is even mentioned. I think we can both agree that there's a world of difference between data being read-only and being destroyed. I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it.
- haswell 3y ago
  > I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it. 7 days to download 200TB+ does not seem reasonable.

rsync 3y ago

"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." Agreed that this is a crisis but it is not impossible. You can use 'rclone' - running on your own system or hosted elsewhere - to move data between cloud providers. You don't rely on your own bandwidth - they talk directly to one another: rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever ... and if you don't want to bother even installing rclone, you can run it somewhere it is already installed: ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google <--> aws are capable of). I am, admittedly, hand-waving away the actual configuration of those "remotes" as they are called, which involve your login and/or API keys, etc. - here is an example of what that config might look like: https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html

mderazon 3y ago
I've been looking for a solution to backup Google Takeout periodically to Back laze. Can rclone be used with Google Takeout ?
zamadatix 3y ago
This still requires Google Drive be able to serve your 237 TB at over 3 gbps for the full 7 days. In my experience this is not the case with cloud storage offerings. This guy realistically had plenty of time to figure it out without a fancy transfer method though. The real problem is they don't want to pay $$$ for somewhere else to host the files and have now reached the point it has become a problem.
alwa 3y ago
(Minimum rsync.net) is still (237.22TB x 1024 x $0.006/GB =) $1457/month. Most “independent journalists” I know aren’t operating on the kind of household budget where they can handwave that kind of bill away.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  Perhaps they ought to invest in tape drives and (encrypted) offsite backups at friends' homes. If they want convenience of always-available data, they have to pay for that

lwhi 3y ago

> 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. Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

jbverschoor 3y ago
Backblaze does this
tmpz22 3y ago
A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company. This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.
- jdiez17 3y ago
  You nailed it. People don't necessarily hate capitalism, companies or business owners. However, this late stage capitalism with huge faceless companies that are unable to care for people, seem to be above the law and are just profit-extraction machines is quite a trip.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymoushn 3y ago

shwouchk 3y ago

Sorry, but I call FUD here; Had a very similar experience with google, except with maybe 20tb rather than 200, and no data loss. They gave warnings at least a year in advance about the transition to google workspace from google for business or however it was called before. It was quite clear that this transition would eventually be mandatory and that it did not include unlimited space for a flat fee. I punted on the transition for as long as possible, and when it finally arrived I temporarily added some accounts until I removed the excess data (mainly old backups I did not need anymore). Nothing in life is unlimited and taking such a promise at face value appears to me as being willfully naive. Relying on such an offer as your main storage is begging for trouble. Expecting this to happen is precisely why I only stored backups there. You don’t need to be an expert to do the math, consider that just to store the data, without any redundancy and without it being constantly spinning would have retailed at at ~ $4K using the cheapest drives (~25 8tb drives), and would have cost them ~$1/h or ~$700 to constantly run at CA electricity prices (~8W idle per drive). And this before redundancy, backups, bandwidth, etc. This is obviously unsustainable and will eventually end. Same goes eg for dropbox, who offered “unlimited” storage for their business plan until fairly recently but now have the same limit of 5tb/acct as Google. Who in their right mind would rely on such an obvious abuse of what was meant by “unlimited” to store the only copy of their life’s work?

capitainenemo 3y ago
Well... they could transition the data to tape with a delay for recovering it, instead of outright deleting it. At that point, storing it would be pretty much free no? Regardless, they promised something, then reneged, with little to no time to handle it. The way they handled it in terms of getting rid of the service is pretty terrible. Also apparently it wasn't his only copy - his others were taken, and now he's about to lose the last one.
- shwouchk 3y ago
  As I and others mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, there was at least a year of warning. At least I was aware of this for about a year out. Tape is cheaper but not free. A quick search[0] quotes it at ~few $ /TB/Yr. Even if we take it at $1 due to G scale, that’s still ~$250/Y to store the archives, roughly what the customer likely paid when it was stored on immediate access media. I agree it would have been nicer of them to store an archive after they stop paying. I disagree that they reneged on their offer - despite being disappointed that the deal ended, would I expect it to be offered forever, especially given the potential for abuse? Of course not. Frankly I’m surprised it lasted this long.

lancewiggs 3y ago

I'm told that Movebot can do this in time - getting the archives to s3/wasabi or Backblaze etc.

Tommstein 3y ago

> 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. Dude uploaded over 237 TB, they must have some really long years where you live.