481–490 of 692 posts
"Cloud sync" services ARE NOT A BACKUP.
You want to use cloud sync for convenience? Great. It works well (mileage may vary by provider). Just don't expect it to be any safer than just having a single copy of those files on your PC or thumb drive or iPad or whatever.
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…
Google deserves some hate here, but this problem is bigger than just them, and I think by being too narrowly focused on G we're missing a systemic problem. G is one of the worst offenders, but this is a cultural attitude/approach in most of tech. The idea is to acquire users by giving stuff away or making your service cheap, lock them in, then squeeze by ratcheting up the price. It's a playbook that has worked fantas…
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…
Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it. I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court. It’s disgusting and shows why big tech need…
Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time.
Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company. This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their cust…
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.
He didn’t comply with what? Show me where in Google’s communications where it said they were going to delete his data.
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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?
The argument is that amortized over the lifetime of the business, the prices are actually significantly higher because they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business, and then immediately break the low-priced agreements with their customers.
Sure, they may be a commodity product now. That shouldn't exempt them from holding up their agreements from when they were still competing for market space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They offered it for 10 years and then probably realized that people were taking advantage of the position and then tried to phase it out. Most likely with a lot of warning beforehand. I have a tough time believe that they didn't give any warning and then kicked them off the service.
> taking advantage It was unlimited. If they didn't want it to be unlimited, it should have had a limit on it.
And I would definitely like to know what he stored.
But using a Google cloud VM might work to get the data out in time.