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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

#341

Post by avereveard »

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…

> 5000 a month

assuming it all goes into frequent access tier, which this shouldn't as this is an archive. just by enabling the automatic tiering is going to be more like 1000/month

and if it's would instead end up organized into glacier as it should it's gonna be more like 300$/m

which is not dirt cheap, but still. it start giving the prospect of maintaining a home archive with manual disk rotation and scheduled data verification some second thought.

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

#342

Post by thiht »

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…

Damn, I've had a great time using GCP at my last job, especially coming from AWS. This disappoints me a lot but I can't say I'm surprised, I've stopped using Google services almost everywhere (I'm slowly migrating away from Gmail, and I'm still stuck with YouTube) for this very reason.

I'm very aware that cloud vendor lock-in should be avoided (or mitigated) at all cost, but PubSub was actually pretty nice.

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

#344

Post by judge2020 »

Nicksil wrote: post #189
jsnell wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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?

Because whatever he was paying Google wasn't enough, so they removed the "unlimited storage for $12/month or officially $60/month" offering.

There was another option - pay for enough Business Plus seats to reach the pooled storage requirement. At 240tb that means he needs 48 seats, and at $18/month that's $864/month. Not bad for cloud storage geo-replicated on at least 2 continents at any time.

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

#345

Post by deely3 »

badpun wrote: post #335
smhenderson wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole "you're not paying"'thing is really a straw man at this point too. When Google was young and eager to be a good netizen I'd have agreed with that and said it was all part of helping to make the web better. But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users. Given their size and stranglehold on just about everything,…

> But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users. That's why I store only 1 file on my Google Drive - a 10 GB encrypted blob (TrueCrypt partition).

Why not VeraCrypt, honest question?

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

#346

Post by racl101 »

I don't wanna victim blame, but I don't understand how people could put their entire body of work on a cloud service and not make the effort to get several external drives to have some redundancy.

All my work is probably like 50GB, but I have it backed up on an external drive AND the cloud.

It's like self preservation instinct is missing. 3rd party services are fallible, even when they don't make business decisions that screw with you, and nobody is gonna care about your livelihood more than yourself.

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

#347

Post by shkkmo »

Nicksil wrote: post #232
jsnell wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per the article, he hasn't been paying for the service for like six months. And he was never paying "a lot of money" for this. He was paying like 1% the going rate, and for every month that he paid that he did get the promised unlimited storage.

>And he was never paying "a lot of money" for this. You're being obtuse: "a lot of money" in this context is a relative amount and you know that.

And in this case, that amount is an order of magnitude lower that what the service cost to provide.

It seems odd that after underpaying by a lot for a long time, that the user would complain that they were given 2 months of free service and then 5 more months of read-only access to get their stuff off. Sure, Google should have communicated more clearly but Burke's expectations here are also entirely unreasonable.

The real villain of this story is the FBI and how computer seizures are handled. The FBI still hasn't charged Tim Burke with anything and are holding his MFA devices hostage trying to get him to unlock his phone for them.

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

#348

Post by faust201 »

avazhi wrote: post #175
boringg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Highly recommend reading the article again, slowly, until you fully understand the situation. This was a paid service until Google changed the terms; afterwards, Google claimed that the files would merely be read only (indefinitely), not deleted. After THAT, they then gave the user 1 week to deal with 250 terabytes. Read it again you understand that properly.

> indefinitely

Does it say somewhere in terms and conditions?

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

#349

Post by slantyyz »

Sanzig wrote: post #112
slantyyz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expect it to be free forever. Where does it say he expected it to be free? In the article, there's a tweet that says "So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage" To me, the bigger problem is that companies are allowed to offer "unlimited" anything in their marketing copy.

Yep, it's pretty clear that unlimited is going to have limits (250 TB is a lot of data, that'd be $1500 a month in Backblaze). However, Google should have been required to be up front about their definition of unlimited (eg: up to 10 TB), rather than leaving it as a nebulous ToS term they can arbitrarily decide upon in the future. This is actually a good use case for something like AWS Deep Glacier or Azure Archive S…

> Google should have been required to be up front about their definition of unlimited

Well, unless the definition of unlimited is actually unlimited as in "no limits", you shouldn't be allowed to use the word in any marketing material.

If a company can go around saying "Unlimited means there's a limit", then that's just nuts.

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

#350

Post by haswell »

ollien wrote: post #304
haswell wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it. 7 days to download 200TB+ does not seem reasonable.

No, I agree. Sorry, my phrasing there was poor. I meant: it is completely reasonable to say that "he has seven days to download it", not that it is completely reasonable for him to only have seven days.

I see what you mean; thanks for clarifying.
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