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

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

#71

Post by AlexandrB »

WhatsName wrote: post #22

When will a regulatory entity step in and stop large corps to run services at a net loss. In essence, the whole tech industry relies heavily on venture capital supported bait&switch. Giving services away for free or selling under value is clearly anti-competitive behavior.

Yes. This approach kneecaps any startups/small businesses that try to run profitably from day 1 (i.e. without taking tons of VC money). The net effect is that VC firms get to pick winners before the market ever gets involved.

Hopefully there will be more pushback on this practice now that Bork's ideas[1] about antitrust are falling out of favour.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork#Academic_career

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

#72

Post by uxp8u61q »

winter_blue wrote: post #52
whatamidoingyo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen, I've heard of this happening to a lot of people. I hate using Adsense, and have mainly disabled it in the past, but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic and always think, "darn, I should have kept Adsense running". I'm wondering if it's worth slowing down my s…

> but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic Do you mean you get more traffic when Google Ads are active/present on your website? I.e. that the google search ranking algorithm prioritizes websites running Google ads?

Maybe I misread but GP seems to be saying the opposite.

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

#73

Post by whatamidoingyo »

winter_blue wrote: post #52
whatamidoingyo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen, I've heard of this happening to a lot of people. I hate using Adsense, and have mainly disabled it in the past, but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic and always think, "darn, I should have kept Adsense running". I'm wondering if it's worth slowing down my s…

> but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic Do you mean you get more traffic when Google Ads are active/present on your website? I.e. that the google search ranking algorithm prioritizes websites running Google ads?

No, the opposite. When they're inactive, traffic reaches all time highs. When they're active, traffic is still decent, but nowhere near as high when they're off. Google ranks your site based on speed (as well as a few other factors), and their product (adsense) slows everything down, so that's potentially a reason.

So, it's like... wow, I should have kept adsense on (although I probably wouldn't have the same traffic if it was).

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

#74

Post by flibble »

Unicorn tech founder here. Google — if you are reading, it’s stories like this and examples where you c.10x the price of products overnight like Google Maps that I would never let our team use GCP. Your reputation is losing you business here.

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

#75

Post by oefrha »

matwood wrote: post #37
tedivm wrote: post #24

People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in the startup world, and I'd rather host all my content in us-east-1 than rely on google. * I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error, * I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and…

Yeah, say all you want about AWS pricing, but damn if Amazon doesn't go out of their way to support things for a very long time.

Amazon Cloud Drive used to be “unlimited”. They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google. Before Microsoft’s OneDrive too IIRC.

Out of the big three, Google Drive had an insanely good run as unlimited. (Even non-enterprise business plans with caps in theory were unlimited in practice until this year.)

- Former ACD customer who got burned.

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

#77

Post by DeathArrow »

miked85 wrote: post #46

I honestly don't know why anyone would use Google for anything anymore.

Maybe someone who like losing work, like losing money, like his account being terminated for whatever puerile reason, likes being tracked and likes to see lots of ads.

Wait, I don't think such a person exists. Wrong market fit, Google!

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

#78

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

This article convinced me to get a real backup HDD setup. Google has pretty much my entire life history in photos, documents, excel sheets, etc, and storage is dirt cheap now.

In regards to the amount of storage he was using though, 250TB of information seems insane.

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

#79

Post by masfuerte »

andrewmutz wrote: post #51

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 fo…

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

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

#80

Post by frognumber »

andrewmutz wrote: post #51

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 fo…

> 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.

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