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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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's blame the victim here!

I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Google is in the wrong on their response but, come on, let's be reasonable human beings and stop saying 'victim blaming'.

Google offered unlimited storage, no? It’s reasonable to believe that they can do that since it averages out to a small amount per user, meaning most users overpay and the power users get peace of mind. Of course nothing is unlimited but a company like Google is perhaps best positioned in the world to offer that. And sure, if someone writes /dev/urandom at 1Gbit/s you could claim abuse, but for people working with video TBs of data is normal. 200+ is a lot but again averages out among users. In either case it’s extremely easy to avoid the word “unlimited” if you don’t intend to honor it for legitimate customers.

It’s also reasonable that companies products change. And maybe it doesn’t last forever, fair enough. But if your product is backup, and you pull the rug with a 7 day grace period, of course people are going to be upset and warn others not to trust you.

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

#183
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…

> People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything.

Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data.

However, it looks like this journalist did pay Google to host his data. So this immediately puts it in a worse category.

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

#184
post #128
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but they actually provide real support. I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day. In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools…

There was that time in 2013, that I leaked my AWS key and a "hacker" ran up a $3500 bill running Litecoin mining[0]. Not only was the support excellent and forgave the debt, Werner Vogel (AWS CTO) popped into the HN thread[1] and offered to help -- I got to email him and tell him his people were already on top of it. And yes, they have made their money back off me in the 10 years since (average $100-200 a month). [0]…

Exact same thing happened to me but the bill was $11000.

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

#186

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 hi…

The GP comment didn't "just expand it". There is a huge difference in the English language between "Life's Work Deleted" and "Life's Work Will Be Deleted." Past tense and future tense are very different things.

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

#188

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…

The FBI seized his computers back in August. He should have bought new hard drives and made a backup of his cloud storage starting back then, if that was so important.

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

#189
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Because he stopped paying for the service of unlimited storage for this month (as that service was no longer offered), didn't migrate the data to somebody offering a better deal, and expected for it to be retained indefinitely?

>didn't migrate the data to somebody offering a better deal

Why would this be considered? What if he didn't want to migrate 200+ TB of data and just decided to stay where he's at, continuing to pay Google a lot of money?

>expected for it to be retained indefinitely?

For as long as he pays for the service, right?

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

#190
HN comment from eight years ago: snickers serves them right for relying on some cloud company. And for relying on digital data. I have made a thrice-redundant backup system that uses a fire-etching leather-printer[1][2]. Of course there is a Python program to read it back as well. It just took me three weekends. Why didn’t they do something like that?

Not sure how well my setup works with binary files. My files are mostly org and source code. YMMV.

[1] Ibex leather is the most durable.

[2] You can find it second-hand on https://amazon.kz/ pretty easily.

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