> 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.
It's always been a garage argument. If someone is offering free food, and it gives you food poisoning, on purpose, you don't say "well it was free".
Also they've been giving out these warnings for months. I'm sympathetic to the guy with the seemingly abusive legal actions from Fox but this storage problem did not just spring from nothing into the final crisis stage. We had to move a bunch of data off gdrive too, which did little for our opinion of Google's business customer support and was a PITA I didn't need, but the first warnings were in 2002 some time and we…
>>Also they've been giving out these warnings for months. That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable). If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your q…
There are dated messages in the article showing this going back to at least July 2023. So yes, your second case is closer to what appears to have been the sequence of events.
> 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.…
"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." Agreed that this is a crisis but it is not impossible. You can use 'rclone' - running on your own system or hosted elsewhere - to move data between cloud providers. You don't rely on your own bandwidth - they talk directly to one another: rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucke…
I wasn't aware that rclone could create a direct connections and had a quick skim through the documentation where I found this in the FAQ (https://rclone.org/faq/)
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Can rclone sync directly from drive to s3
Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems just fine.
Note that it effectively downloads the file and uploads it again, so the node running rclone would need to have lots of bandwidth.
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Assuming that the read only state was permanent would be naive. Assuming that they would give him 60 days notice again before actually deleting his data isn't, except insofar as Google is a terrible company and he clearly didn't realize that.
Google held onto his data for him for over half a year after his plan was cancelled. Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time. Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data. Google makes plenty of bad choices, bu…
> Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time.
That's not clear at all.
> If he continues to do nothing
What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a technical data migration.
If any given user needs x support hours a week, and their business pays for > x support hours a week, then support scales. I guess as you scale up a business you want to get leaner and you accept lower margins, hoping to make it back by volume? Maybe that's what you mean?
I assume he/she meant scale == grows (mostly independently) of human hours. Support can never scale; only fixing your software so that it doesn't trigger support needs scales. Otherwise, each support request linearly requires human time.
> meant scale == grows (mostly independently) of human hours.
This is a pernicious usage of "scale" that has crept into tech-speak, because it makes the term strictly less useful.
>>Also they've been giving out these warnings for months. That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable). If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your q…
There are dated messages in the article showing this going back to at least July 2023. So yes, your second case is closer to what appears to have been the sequence of events.
Are there? Do you see any message from July 2023 explicitly saying that his data will be deleted with a deadline for such deletion?
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…
Encrypted data is highly random, and a compression ratio would be close to 1. So yeah- technically you can run a compression algorithm over it, but it won't help much
OK gotcha. Close to, but not exactly 1 because patterns appear even in randomness.
Because compression implementations generally have overhead, the output can actually be larger (similar to how compressing already-compressed data can produce a larger result.)
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…
It seems safer to not have any financial ties with google at all. Not paying for services and not being paid for services. Not publishing apps, not using ads.
-just a free user of gmail who hopes to be undisturbed.
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.
> 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. Google clearly made a mistake in offering an "unlimited plan" so it makes perfect sense that they're going to discontinue it, and offer 60 days before the data becomes read…
Perhaps it was a mistake, but offering unlimited was a competitive advantage. Others working with the economies of storage had limits or priced based on usage; having unlimited would be a great way to draw in customers. I'm highly skeptical of tech companies effectively price dumping, harming competition, and then coming out and saying "Oops, that wasn't sustainable. Here are the new terms." I'm of the mindset that if you offered an unlimited plan you should have to grandfather in customers that bought into that plan.