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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

#451

Post by kzrdude »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #412

Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive? And, did the author forget that Microsoft had done the same couple of times already? It's easy and trendy to bitch on Google. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/microsoft-onedrive-unlimi... https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-ha…

Yes we can be that naive, people learn from what they see. And they see companies being investor funded for a decade without breaking even, offering services for free. It's not just the users who have lost the connection to reality I think.

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

#452

Post by lwhi »

frognumber wrote: post #80
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" 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.…

> A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company.

Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

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

#453

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

This is what, at least $7500 or so of hardware, to keep it local? (And without much redundancy.) Worse, Newegg has been out of stock on the 20tb golds for weeks.

I figure 14 x 20tb = 280tb or so for $5600. Then you could get the 8 bay from Synology for $1000ish, and another $600 or so for the expansion bay. Is there a cheaper setup than this? You can get a better price-per-terabyte sometimes, but it's bay-prohibitive. And oh god... the time to silver that, I don't even want to know.

I don't know how to transfer that either... if it were on Amazon, didn't they have a service where they'll 1-day ship you all the data on a suitcase full of drives?

As always, the cloud is someone else's computer.

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

#454

Post by gurchik »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #299
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…

Just to be put the record straight: Google is an advertising company with hobbies. And like for many of us hobbies change over time, so do Google's hobbies. There's somewhere a website with all the products killed by Google for various reasons, some even after a few months.

I've always wanted to ask, how do engineers who work at Google think about this? I want to work at a company where I feel like I'm making the lives of our users better. I'm sure this is true for lots of users of Google products, but there are also thousands or tens of thousands of people who have had serious real life impacts because of it. You can see many of them in this thread: AdSense businesses getting shut down, Youtube content creators getting banned for mysterious reasons. I try to work at companies that believe these problems to be unacceptable to even 1 person. While that goal may not always be possible, I would not be comfortable with anything less than an immediate resolution and a postmortem to prevent it from happening again. Is this also true at Google? I don't know anyone at Google to ask.

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

#455

Post by thinkharderdev »

terminous wrote: post #433
thinkharderdev wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is bad about the situation exactly? You get a service for below cost for some amount of time at which point you have to start paying what it actually costs. I can understand if the company manages to corner the market by selling below cost and then jacks up the price way above cost, but cloud storage is still an extremely competitive market and generally quite a bit cheaper than the cost of storing an equivalent…

It is literally anti-competitive, bad for consumers and competitor startups. How can an average startup compete if a rich company or VC backed startup has a business model of selling below cost to get market share? The fact that the big players are doing it makes it an oligopoly not a monopoly, but that's still bad. This is a 100+ year old problem and has already been solved in other industries, but tech likes to thi…

> raised prices when those competitors folded

This part only works if you don't have other large competitors. But this obviously not the case for cloud storage. It is an extremely competitive commodity product.

> bad for consumers

How exactly is it bad for consumers to get products below cost?

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

#456

Post by ethbr1 »

tedivm wrote: post #70
matwood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, say all you want about AWS pricing, but damn if Amazon doesn't go out of their way to support things for a very long time.

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…

> It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.

This feels like the crux of the difference between Google and Microsoft/Amazon.

Google product culture seems to assume they built everything correctly, so if there's an issue, you're questioning their competency.

Microsoft/Amazon product culture seems to start with "weird things will constantly go wrong", so support is viewed as an opportunity to figure out how things can be made better, based on real world experience.

For most Google products, what seems to be missing is a link between customer support and SRE. I.e. "We're Google, we can't do customer support at our scale. SRE is a superior way of keeping services reliable."

Fair... but SRE doesn't handle "the real world is messy, and here's a situation a product manager never thought of."

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

#457

Post by ajross »

danaris wrote: post #417
ajross wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah usually the thing about deadlines is that you should communicate them as harshly as possible, then let them slip when they do arrive. Is this not exactly what has happened? He was clearly threatened harshly, and... the data isn't yet deleted?

No; the opposite happened. Google initially told him that there was no hard deadline for getting the data off—just that his drive would be read-only as long as it was over the limit. Then, 6 months later, they told him he had 7 days to get it off or it would be wiped.

Right, exactly. "He has 7 days or it would be wiped" is a threat, not a punishment. Was the data wiped or not? What are you willing to bet that we'll actually see a followup claiming the data was wiped? Almost certainly he's going to download the thing onto $3k of SSDs and get off the service, which is what everyone wants.

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

#458

Post by andrewmcwatters »

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…

For readers' reference, a "Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS 22 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive" costs $399.99.

You would need at least 11 or 12 of these, running you $4,799.88 for the latter, plus tax and shipping, or one month of S3 storage in storage hardware alone.

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

#459

Post by sitkack »

From a solution perspective, if you want to move 240TB of data out of google drive, spin up a bunch of VMs in us-central1 and copy it into GCS buckets (keep bandwidth to each bucket under 500Gbps). From there, one could copy it out to Backblaze or Cloudflare R2.

240TB is going to be some coin, even on R2.

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

#460

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

chlorion wrote: post #440
garblegarble wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota. They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they…

[flagged]

> There is no way this person wasn't aware of what was going to happen,

Sure. That's what it is. He's a grifter, grifting Google to try to shame them into giving him a quarter of a petabyte of storage for free. He knew all along that his data would be deleted, and waited to the last second because he figures this is a sure thing and he'll get to keep it forever. You caught him. I can't believe we all fell for it.

It's not as if non-technical people (and technical ones too!) can't be confused or overwhelmed, and he should have been able to telepathically read Google's collective hivemind that "goes into read-only mode" means "we'll delete all the shit you don't have room or time to put anywhere else".

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