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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

#471

Post by tedivm »

kzrdude wrote: post #449
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…

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.

I'd rather be a paid user of Fastmail than a free user of GMail.

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

#472

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #463
layer8 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn’t threatened harshly. He was told his data would become read-only, which he took at face value and assumed his data would remain safe. Then suddenly he was told the data would be deleted within seven days.

> He wasn’t threatened harshly. [...] he was told the data would be deleted within seven days How exactly is that not a harsh threat? Sounds like a harsh threat to me. They were nice before, he didn't comply, now they're jerks. But it remains just a threat unless they actually wipe the data. Which they won't, because he's surely downloading it right now while we yell about it on HN.

[deleted]

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

#473

Post by inasio »

In another universe Google's head of crisis PR grabs the red phone and calls the Wolf. Mr Wolf becomes point for this crisis, two hours later they get Tim Burke a beta account on the new 20 Gbps internet service, a decommissioned GCP storage pod with 300 TB on RAID 10, as well as the option to keep his data on his original plan if he so wishes.

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

#474

Post by pvg »

alacode wrote: post #323
alacode wrote: post #271

I'm no great defender of Google but point some fallacies the article pushes: "regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, that’s a problem" If a 7 year old found a parent's gun, walked into the street and shot a neighbor to death accidentally; the parent i…

[flagged]

That's not how HN works but you can read about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#475

Post by CodesInChaos »

pton_xd wrote: post #305
licomo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT, but this is why I am skeptical of Cloudflare right now. Am I right to be concerned?

Cloudflare covers this in their terms of service: Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business) Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN.…

R2 has similarly misaligned pricing, and I don't think it comes with comparable ToS limitations: You pay per request, and not proportional to data egress. So theoretically you could use it to distribute huge files very cheaply. Assuming there is no maximum request duration, it could even be used with a long running connection to download a video as it's being watched.

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

#476

Post by WalterBright »

LoganDark wrote: post #290
WalterBright wrote: post #254

The lesson, again, is never trust your life's work to some unaccountable third party that can go dark on you on purpose or by accident. 20T drives cost $300, so for around $4000 he could make his own backup copy of his life's work.

The FBI took all their hardware in a raid.

Yes, but that's a separate problem.

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

#477

Post by layer8 »

ajross wrote: post #463
layer8 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn’t threatened harshly. He was told his data would become read-only, which he took at face value and assumed his data would remain safe. Then suddenly he was told the data would be deleted within seven days.

> He wasn’t threatened harshly. [...] he was told the data would be deleted within seven days How exactly is that not a harsh threat? Sounds like a harsh threat to me. They were nice before, he didn't comply, now they're jerks. But it remains just a threat unless they actually wipe the data. Which they won't, because he's surely downloading it right now while we yell about it on HN.

I was referring to the making it read-only.

And there’s no practical way to download that amount of data within seven days, just based on the bandwidth this would require. The situation would be totally different if they gave him six months notice for the deletion.

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

#479

Post by ahtihn »

Pikamander2 wrote: post #224
boringg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

> I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. If it's excessive, then Google shouldn't have offered an unlimited data plan. They could have called it a 100 TB plan, but they chose to call it unlimited to make it sound better and then canceled it once people took them up on the offer. Regardless of whether that kind of action is legal, it's a shady business practice. For that matter, there's nothing wrong wi…

> If it's excessive, then Google shouldn't have offered an unlimited data plan.

Right, which is why they discontinued it.

They offered unlimited, not unlimited forever.

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

#480

Post by Espressosaurus »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #430
voakbasda wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With modern connected devices, I absolutely do expect for features (or even total functionality) to be removed on a whim by the manufacturer. Cloud services are no different. Lesson being: do not rely on devices or services that rely on a third party. They absolutely will screw you; it’s only a matter of time. If you do not believe this, then I would say that you have not been around this industry long enough. There…

You see why this is horrific UX and people have good reason to complain about it tho right? You can't expect customers to go into this as battle-hardened as their opponent.

People have excellent reason to complain about it. But we should still be prepared.

If you don't own the hardware and software stack, you don't own the service.

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