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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

#491

Post by at_a_remove »

TomK32 wrote: post #50
ofrzeta wrote: post #29

Google charges USD 0,15/GB for egress traffic out of GCP. That's USD 36864 for 240TB. Am I right? EDIT: Actually egress seems to be 0,08. So roughly half of what I wrote.

Just looking at the cheap 20TB disk drives available here in Austria, the disks alone add just over 4000 Euros to that, and then you still need a machine to host 12 drives, I see one QNAP for 12 disk for only 1500 Euros. But it has only a 2x10Gb connection. Slimming down the data sounds like the first thing to do here.

He's really at the point where owning (much less renting) a tape drive would make sense. LTO-9 is eighteen terabytes uncompressed, which I would leave it at because hey, this is video. Rent a tape drive and get a few boxes of tapes. One copy at home for the FBI to take and one copy over at a friend's place in a shoebox ...

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

#492

Post by [deleted] »

sangnoir wrote: post #485
tmpz22 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#493

Post by sangnoir »

alwa wrote: post #416
rsync wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

(Minimum rsync.net) is still (237.22TB x 1024 x $0.006/GB =) $1457/month. Most “independent journalists” I know aren’t operating on the kind of household budget where they can handwave that kind of bill away.

Perhaps they ought to invest in tape drives and (encrypted) offsite backups at friends' homes. If they want convenience of always-available data, they have to pay for that

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

#494

Post by _Algernon_ »

crooked-v wrote: post #410
amf12 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with any subscription, there is a time bound to it, after which either side can refuse to renew it. The account was never "unlimited for life". Let's assume it's AWS storage. After you stop paying (renewing) would you still expect to keep your data forever free of cost?

> after you stop paying The difference here is that Google was the one who fired him as a customer, and did so on a timeframe tight enough to make it functionally impossible to actually get all his data back.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the "firing of the customer" (i.e. the cancellation of the subscription by Google) occurred >6 months before any actual deletion of the data. The alert that data would be deleted occurred 7 days before. It's difficult to argue that he couldn't have seen this coming.

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

#495

Post by dangus »

kbenson wrote: post #392

It's very hard for me not to initially reinterpret headlines such as these as "person stupidly doesn't take care with important personal property and loses it." That doesn't mean the other party in these stories isn't at fault in some way, but we're about a decade past the point where anyone should consider a single online copy of something, regardless of where it is, as safe from problems (of which there are many po…

I think Google is in the wrong in some ways here, but someone with over 200TB of data should know what they are doing and should have a more professional solution for such an unusually large amount of data.

This isn't at the level of "I backed up my 8TB consumer-grade hard drive to Google Drive," this is "I used a low cost small business service to store data center scale amounts of information."

Storing this amount of data on raw drives alone before even buying the server and paying the electric bill costs over $2,000, and that's before you add any redundancy. This person thought that it was realistic for them to pay $30/month and expect Google to be fine losing money forever? They can't even theoretically break even before factoring in other costs besides raw hard drives given the limited lifespan of disks in a data center.

Like the person who got an unlimited food/drink annual pass to Six Flags and went there for lunch every day, it should be common sense that any time you are getting a deal that's way better than it should be that it won't last. You should be ready with a backup plan.

As soon as this person's storage was placed in read-only mode they should have been downloading a copy, but they just sort of trusted Google to never want to clean house, and as a result ended up with an impossible 7 day deadline.

That deadline isn't impossible if you were using it as a small business service like Google intended. It's unfortunate that "Unlimited" was used to market the service but I think someone with 200TB of stuff should know what Google Drive is designed to be.

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

#496

Post by anonymoushn »

sangnoir wrote: post #485
tmpz22 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

He was paying though?

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

#498

Post by calfuris »

ajross wrote: post #457
danaris wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Moving 237.22 TB in 7 days requires ~3.14 Gbps of bandwidth, assuming that the clock starts ticking the moment that he actually starts moving data. In practice, the requirements would be even higher (subtracting out the time between notice being sent and read, plus time to actually set up alternative storage). Does Google even provide that level of read throughput to Google Drive customers?

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

#499

Post by stephenr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #173
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…

S3 is not where this belongs. Backblaze B2 would be better and cheaper (~$1428/month) and no egress fees due to Cloudflare bandwidth alliance, the Internet Archive also has a private offering [3]. If the journalist in question sees this, or someone knows them, I am happy to assist in a migration at no cost. If someone from Google sees this (HN Google support), it would be swell if the delete lifecycle could be paused…

Rsync.net works out essentially the same ($6/month cheaper) on a monthly basis, but offers 10% and 15% discounts for 12 and 24 month options.

B2 does mention a "capacity bundle", saying 250TB/year is $19.5K - but that's $1.5K more than the monthly pricing for the same capacity so it doesn't seem like they have any meaningful long-term pricing discounts.

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

#500

Post by TehShrike »

terminous wrote: post #138
boringg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> taking advantage No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.

Agreed.

Contrast this "unlimited" with how gmail was rolled out – gmail didn't offer unlimited email storage, it just offered a number orders of magnitude greater than everyone thought was realistic at the time.

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