9 ms·
Google is force canceling gsuite because I used unlimited storage as unlimited
- mike503 2y agoI found references on Google's pages still that said "as much as you need" or whatever, even after they were actively shutting things down and enforcing limits.
- remram 2y agoGoogle is also revoking the unlimited storage they granted to universities in the US. Many of my colleagues have terabytes (and 1-2 PB for some) of research data or lab backups on Drive that IT is having a hard time relocating.
- shreddit 2y agoThis being a thing should have been pretty obvious. “Unlimited” never means unlimited in a literal sense. Even if phrased like so. And loosing actual backup files a whole different story…
- AlexandrB 2y agoSaying something and then pretending you actually meant a different thing is lying. It shouldn't be up to the consumer to understand the minutia of an industry and intuit whether "unlimited" actually means "unlimited".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- simondotau 2y agoUnlimited has never meant unlimited in its truest sense. It’s just that the consumer tends to have their own natural limits, whether that’s time, or attention span, or the human body’s ability to ingest liquid.
- scrps 2y agoWell the public at large seems to disagree with the corporate definition of unlimited. Also these unlimited storage accounts of consumers are stacked so high with data they are taxing the physical limits of google's storage pools? Methinks someone at google is angling for a promotion behind a good ole rug pull knowing people will pay rather than have to shift that data around. Consumers don't need langauge lessons they need to learn business is not to ever to be taken at their word without contracts & legal counsel involved. They are zero-trust players.
- simondotau 2y agoWhile your response is sincerely appreciated, it entirely misses the point. I'm not arguing definitions or "language lessons". I'm saying that any reasonable person understands that every single instance of "unlimited" with respect to the definition of a product or service is, with few if any exceptions, are not actually unlimited. Unlimited Coke refills at a soda fountain aren't unlimited. The human body is naturally limited by how much it can drink. Elide that natural limit and you still butt up against a person's stamina for doing objectively stupid things. Elide that limit and you're still limited by the amount of syrup on hand at that location.
- Grimeton 2y agoThere is a commonly and widespread accepted definition of the term "unlimited" If anyone uses it outside of that definition, it needs to be disclosed upfront. If that didn't happen, then it's "unlimited" as in the common widespread definition of the term. If you change the definition later, then you have changed your mind and look for a loophole to f people over. That's all there is to it. They said unlimited and now they're not keeping their word.
- etrautmann 2y agoSure, but if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. As an academic with hundreds of TB of data, I personally wouldn’t assume that some company would actually provide unlimited storage in perpetuity when the costs are clear and obvious.
- Grimeton 2y agoOf course I would. It's Google! They can do it! And obviously they did. How else do we explain people with petabytes of data on Google's drives when the term "unlimited" meant "30GB"?
- etrautmann 2y agoMy main point is that the costs of storage are fairly well known. One can estimate the cost to google of provisioning the datacenter class storage that a user with PB of data is using, and if your estimate of the situation is that it seems like that arrangement is likely to continue, then great. In my estimate, that seems unlikely unless there's a business case to be made for google (there certainly are some, like building familiarity in the system for academic trainees who may then go start startups or purchase storage from positions in industry).
- teo_zero 2y agoIf there's a place in the world I would expect to not have capacity issue, that's Google. If I were a judge, I wouldn't rule it's unreasonable for users to assume that it can store as many data as they produce, after having committed and advertised to do so.
- politelemon 2y agoAny idea what approach they're going to take? I wonder if Gsuite have an unpunished ability to do a snowball type export as a one-off.
- Dylan16807 2y agoFor those university accounts they did much worse than revoke "unlimited". They were making a big effort of cutting down to 100TB per university. With a moderate amount of students, that's less than the 15GB a random free personal account gets. A single SSD server (plus replicas) can hold much more than 100TB.
- sitkack 2y agoYou can get 500TB+ NAS appliances on ebay for 10k. Universities outsourcing this stuff WHILE STILL HAVING IT support staff at the same or higher levels is insane. Run your own schtuff people! At least when you outsource your supposed core competence, then cull your infra and your staff.
- Dylan16807 2y agoWhy do you assume universities didn't have fewer server admins while Google was actually delivering unlimited? Though one person can manage a lot of storage, and you still need to support all the users. So even if you don't get rid of people, you save a lot of money when you don't need to store petabytes. Moreso with every year you look back.
- sitkack 2y agoI am just getting butt hurt about how universities are wasting so much on administrators of all types while making services worse. Looking at you University of Washington! This is a systemic problem in our civilization right now. IT departments outsource their core competency to a vendor, spending more to deliver less while trumpeting new operational synergies only to have vendor fuck them over again, so instead of paying 2x for less, they are now paying 3.14x for 1.44x more less.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- betaby 2y agoSome USA universities literally have endowments in billions/year. Universities were the places where Unix and Internet thrived back. And now? Uh-oh hosting our own data is very hard problem. Ridiculous!
- oivey 2y agoWhy would they host their own data it Google said they would do it for free? If you’re in IT, how do you even get support for on prem storage if Google has used its monopoly position to provide that service for free?
- josephcsible 2y agoI hope whoever that is has a really fast Internet connection, because 400TB is too much to download in 30 days even with a 1Gbps connection.
- anuptalwalkar 2y agoThats just over 88 hours.
- duskwuff 2y ago88 hours would be at 1 GB/sec = 8 Gbps, not 1 Gbps. 400 TB over 30 days is about 1.23 Gbps.
- Jtsummers 2y ago~400,000 GB * 8 bits/Byte = 3,200,000 Gb at 1Gbps that's 3,200,000 seconds or about 888 hours or about 37 days. If that's 400TB * 1024, instead of 1000, then it's a bit longer, pushing 38 days.
- netsharc 2y agoSheesh, the TCP and whatever else overhead is probably more than the 24 byte difference of 1024 vs 1000..
- dark-star 2y agoDid you ever try and calculate the difference? 1TiB = 1024GiB = 10241024MiB = 102410241024KiB = 1024102410241024 bytes... 1024^4 is 1099511627776 bytes... So it's 1099 GB vs 1000 GB which is a solid 10% difference. Your TCP overhead is not anywhere close to 10% unless you are sending with an MTU of 240...
- Timothee 2y agoChatGPT and Wolfram Alpha confirmed to me that it's about 37 days, which is 888 hours, not 88 :) Wolfram Alpha: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=400tb+at+1gbps https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=400tb+at+1gbps ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/4ddd464a-dabd-4c12-9cc4-e8271a51a671 https://chatgpt.com/share/4ddd464a-dabd-4c12-9cc4-e8271a51a6... (ChatGPT did a great job at breaking down the problem)
- allturtles 2y agoThe story here is that Google used to have unlimited storage, and now they don't (for the obvious reason that it was a bad idea), and are enforcing 5TB/user limits on enterprise accounts. This was announced well in advance with plenty of warning.
- DANmode 2y agoHow much adv. warning makes up for making a promise you (should have known you) couldn't keep?
- x0x0 2y agoHowever much was specified in the contract. If you used a service you pay month-to-month, you explicitly agreed that, just like you can cancel w/ a month's notice, the counterparty can change terms with the same 30d notice.
- Barrin92 2y agoA reasonable amount which they did. There was nothing bad faith about this. Google did offer unlimited space, people abused the crap out of it, they changed it. This is literally just childish behavior. Unlimited offers have always implicit limits which every adult understands. When you go to the all you can eat buffet there's a common sense understanding that you can't literally fill your pockets with a thousand bucks worth of food.
- cal85 2y ago> abused used > Unlimited offers have always implicit limits which every adult understands. No, you're defending straightforward lying. Why should people have to figure out there's an "implicit limit" when they see the word "unlimited" with no asterisk/qualifier? Companies have the option to not lie about this. There is no need for them to use the word unlimited. If it's truly impossible them to offer anything as truly unlimited, then OK, in that case the word "unlimited" should not appear on anyone's advertising (at least not without an asterisk). What's the problem with that?
- walrushunter 2y agoWithout telling us how much storage he was actually using, this post is worthless. I could trivially abuse any "unlimited" storage plan to make the provider renege on their claims.
- jameskilton 2y agoRead the comments, 400TB, and he's not bitter, but expected this to happen. Seems to be posting it because it's entertaining more than anything.
- DoctorOW 2y agoShe hasn't replied to the tweet directly, but I haven't poked around her profile because Twitter it's behind the sign-in wall. The only thing her tweet showed was that she was previously notified and that she presumably hasn't taken action.
- aveao 2y agoI replied to the tweet directly. Twitter hides anything but the direct tweet you were linked to these days if you're not logged in. I have 402TB on google drive. I was told 2 months ago (and since, every morning at 9:23 -a good ritual-) that unless I go down to 5TB they will make my data read-only in 2 months. I ignored this as it's hard to get rid of so much data, and hoped they'd let me stay read-only. Deadline elapsed yesterday and they told me they're going to nuke my account in a month. I'm okay with this outcome.
- katbyte 2y agoI sincerely wish that any company that advertised unlimited and didn't actually allow unlimited X was penalized because it is straight up false advertising. unlimited data (but after 5tb we throttle you to 100kpbs) is not unlimited it is 5tb + 100k * 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 Google was unlimited with 5 users. Then they rug pulled and it was "as much as you need" + "you can request increases every 3 months". then prices went way up. now its "you are only allowed 3 increases" its fine to have limits but businesses should be forced to disclose them upfront
- leetrout 2y agoSame for unlimited vacation.
- cogman10 2y agoYup. This should be considered bait and switch. It's fraud plain and simple and they should be severely penalized for lying about the services because "it's too expensive".
- pockybum522 2y agoI would love to see this happen. How do we actually bring a class action or some other thing that effectively means they can't do this anymore?
- cogman10 2y agoThis is something that should be under the purview of an agency like the FTC. If you are affected by this you could file a complaint with them.
- vedmed 2y agoWhy do you need a class action lawsuit? Simply sue the company in small claims court. Why give money to useless lawyer? You can put more money in your own pocket.
- 2y ago
- gundmc 2y agoThis is silly. The email in the screenshot shows the Google Workspace Enterprise Standard package, which is clearly documented as 5 TB/user limit. If the complaint is that at some point in the past it was unlimited and Google switched it to have limits, then we can talk about that (and we have in numerous other threads over the last 2+ years).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yarg 2y agoIt's pretty clear from the tone of his comments that he's not complaining, knows he was being unreasonable, and is treating this whole thing as a joke already.
- 3836293648 2y agoIt really isn't
- aveao 2y agoshe* When I first signed up (years ago, even before "Google Workspace Enterprise Standard", I got further grandfathered in from a GSuite plan) they were promising unlimited storage. I don't have any ready proof for this (except screenshots of gdrive etc saying I have unlimited data), but if I had a 5TB limit this whole time, I clearly wouldn't be able to upload 400TB to gdrive through mostly conventional means. They changed from unlimited to 5TB/seat years ago (but they rolled out the enforcement very gradually: I heard that several friends got hit by this last year) and I was given notification to cut down my use 2 months ago (with threats of making it read-only), but one does not simply go from 400TB to 5TB. I wanted to try my chances on it staying read-only and google stopping nagging me about it. Chances were not in my favor, and the read-only deadline was yesterday, and it changed instead to "we'll delete all your data in a month". I'm not complaining (if anything I'm happy that I got a mad deal on storage for years), but it is indeed a matter of "unlimited" does not mean "unlimited forever".
- tayo42 2y agoTangentenly related, I thought my Google personal storage for photos and emails was unlimited for free but I've been getting nagging stuff about their 15gb limit now and shutting off my Gmail. Frustrating and feels like I'm being forced into it where the other option is to set up and manage my own photo back ups and hard drives...
- kayxspre 2y agoPhotos can be uploaded up to 16MP resolution in Google Photos "High Quality" option and will not be counted towards storage space, but that was before June 2021. After that date, Photos, emails and even Google Docs files are counted. The count made me shift my storage provider to OneDrive, which I opted not to have my storage reduced (from 30GB) at the time they changed policy and reduced free storage to 5GB. I still retain backup in my own drive, though.
- Sporktacular 2y agoSo, like Homer Simpson kicked out when he hadn't had all he could eat? There's always someone.
- skeledrew 2y agoCan't tell how much exactly I'm actually using across my private groups+channels on Telegram (decent number of TBs), but their free and unlimited storage has been going well for me for the past 5+ years. Although arguably a significant chunk is actually shared (forwarded files).
- Havoc 2y agoIm just surprised google let that fly for years. Half a petabyte of triple redundant storage ain’t cheap. Esp couple years back.
- butz 2y ago"Unlimited" and "For lifetime" are two biggest lies services are using to sell their products.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoLooks like it is across-the-board or something. I thought Google was a real billionaire not a fake billionaire like some of them are.
- 28304283409234 2y agoI cannot read X/Twitter. Exactly what did this person waste our valuable earthly limited resources on?