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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

#101

Post by E39M5S62 »

Nicksil wrote: post #67
tky wrote: post #56

It appears that he had a Workspace account which offered “unlimited” storage for a time, predicated on the account type being multiuser businesses or education, with a per-seat fee. Google phased out the unlimited storage awhile ago (over a year) after people discovered a loophole where paying for one account still provided unlimited storage. Predictable abuse followed (see /r/datahoarders). While I’m sympathetic to…

>If he were paying for the consumed storage as a standard Drive customer, this wouldn’t be happening. >Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time”

"a lot of money" and "a long time" are subjective.

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

#102

Post by wombat-man »

rokkamokka wrote: post #83
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 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.

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.

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

#103

Post by dspillett »

A week of notice to move ~250TByte out is definitely unreasonable. 250TiB in 7 full days is an average of over 3.6Gbit/s, assuming no transfer interruptions and that he started immediately (i.e. already had other storage options lined up, and started transferring the second the notification email was sent).

For a company like Google several Gbit/s constantly over a week, or even the tens of Gbit/s needed to finish in one day, is not troublesome, but for most other people/entities it is completely unrealistic. Getting that much storage with that much bandwidth to it is far from impossible, but it won't be cheap, especially given he'd need it right this second.

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

#104

Post by that_guy_iain »

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"

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.

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

#105

Post by gizmo »

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…

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.

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

#106

Post by masfuerte »

kotaKat wrote: post #87
masfuerte wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

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

#109

Post by Nicksil »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #101
Nicksil wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If he were paying for the consumed storage as a standard Drive customer, this wouldn’t be happening. >Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time”

"a lot of money" and "a long time" are subjective.

>"a lot of money" and "a long time" are subjective.

You've missed the point. It's the fact that this guy did pay for the services.

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