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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

#141

Post by cochne »

boringg wrote: post #117
frognumber wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

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.

I hardly think it's fair to say that they were 'taking advantage'. If Google says unlimited, should the typical person really expect that to be taken away? That's a really bad look for Google. "If we offer something that's good value to you, expect it to be taken away suddenly in the future." Those are not the actions of a company I would want to rely on.

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

#142

Post by Sanzig »

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…

> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that

The standard S3 tier, sure, but Deep Glacier would be about $250/month. Retrieval can be up to 12 hours but that shouldn't really be a problem for long term archiving. As with anything AWS, egress can kill you, but you can sidestep that with something like Snowball, and really that's only an issue if you need to egress everything to migrate the archive.

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

#143

Post by Nicksil »

jsnell wrote: post #136
Nicksil wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

As far as I can tell, they did not pay for an "unlimited storage forever" service. They paid for an "unlimited storage this month for $X" service. Eventually Google stopped offering that deal, and he continued storing his data as if the payments for data storage in the past would entitle him to store the data indefinitely into the future as well.

>as if the payments for data storage in the past would entitle him to store the data indefinitely into the future as well.

Why do you think he thought this?

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

#144

Post by superkuh »

Anthony-G wrote: post #86
plagiarist wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems ludicrous that they can get a warrant to take everything if he really was just hitting URLs.

I almost get the impression that the act of gathering of evidence for the supposed CFAA violation is intended as a form of extrajudicial punishment.

Yes, CFAA raids are definitely done as a form of extrajudicial punishment. When the FBI raided me at 6am with guns drawn in ~2010 they never indicted me, never charged me with anything. But they did steal all my computers and electronics, and all my flatmate's computers and electronics, and got me kicked out of my apartment (which they trashed). That morning they raided ~100 people across the US as part of a giant warrant to try to quash dissent and make people think twice about supporting wikileaks. It ruined my life despite no crimes being involved.

I didn't receive my computer equipment back until literally last year: 2022. And they shipped them back in two large thin cardboard box with computer parts sliding around freely inside. Literally it arrived at my house with a video card poking half out through the box side. Obviously non-functional. One last "fuck you" from the FBI for doing nothing but being politically active.

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

#145

Post by Nicksil »

boringg wrote: post #137
Nicksil wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system Why do you think this?

[flagged]

>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.

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

#147

Post by petee »

dspillett wrote: post #103

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…

And I'm assuming you'd get blocked before even finishing the download. I've gotten rate-limited in gmail just for deleting messages too fast

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

#148

Post by katbyte »

hedora wrote: post #100
oefrha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also banned encrypted files, effectively kicking off everyone using it for backup. I assume this means they look at your photos and other data.

They did? I have a bunch of encrypted files on gdrive

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

#149

Post by amf12 »

masfuerte wrote: post #106
kotaKat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. We just have half of the story.

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

#150

Post by davidmurdoch »

gwervc wrote: post #33
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

> And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. I was about to say 'you should have other backups', but the FBI is a very powerful persistent threat, and might be the more important problem.

Startup idea: SaaS portal to trigger FBI raid on RAID disks, acting as a free replicated permanent archival storage. Retrieving the data is out of scope of the MVP.

Reminds me of the unlimited write-only cloud storage service (an April fools joke, maybe?) from a few years ago.
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