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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."

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.

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.