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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

#531

Post by rvba »

boringg wrote: post #292
Pikamander2 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Interesting that they realized it only after 10 years.

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

#532

Post by capitainenemo »

shwouchk wrote: post #526
frognumber wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Sorry, but I call FUD here; Had a very similar experience with google, except with maybe 20tb rather than 200, and no data loss. They gave warnings at least a year in advance about the transition to google workspace from google for business or however it was called before. It was quite clear that this transition would eventually be mandatory and that it did not include unlimited space for a flat fee. I punted on the…

Well... they could transition the data to tape with a delay for recovering it, instead of outright deleting it. At that point, storing it would be pretty much free no? Regardless, they promised something, then reneged, with little to no time to handle it. The way they handled it in terms of getting rid of the service is pretty terrible.

Also apparently it wasn't his only copy - his others were taken, and now he's about to lose the last one.

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

#533

Post by rvba »

cedilla wrote: post #131
tky wrote: post #56

It appears that he had a Workspace account which offered “unlimited” storage for a time, predicated on the account type being multiuser businesses or education, with a per-seat fee. Google phased out the unlimited storage awhile ago (over a year) after people discovered a loophole where paying for one account still provided unlimited storage. Predictable abuse followed (see /r/datahoarders). While I’m sympathetic to…

Google offered "as much storage as you need" for the Workspace account, without attaching a condition on a required number of seats. It's not a loophole if a customer takes them up on the offer. I'm usually sympathetic with businesses who failed to appreciate how much power very few power users really have, but this is Google we're talking about. Their sales and legal department is larger than 90% of tech companies.…

Their departments are so big yet they solve the problem in shittiest way using third world standards.

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

#534

Post by threatofrain »

rcoveson wrote: post #510
sangnoir wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced…

In all free anything people who over-consume threaten the model for everyone. I hate that the end result is that nobody should have it. We're all subsidizing the extreme users and we should desire that those customers are fired.

All those rules at a buffet are just codifying ethics because the business has learned that it's stupid to trust people.

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

#535

Post by vertis »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #388
vertis wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a GitHub repo that I made public that I didn't realise had a key in it. And yes,it's bad practice putting the keys in code to begin with, and I knew better.

Happens to the best of us Thanks for being willing to share, openness about "stupid" mistakes helps everyone else avoid them.

Biggest lesson is to setup billing alerts for any service like that. Put it 20% above normal usage and then you'll get a fairly immediate warning.

Won't save some of it if you're sleeping, but can definitely reduce the time someone has to run up bills.

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

#536

Post by shwouchk »

godelski wrote: post #525
llbeansandrice wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that this comment chain is about 7 deep trying to figure out whether the customer was given enough notice or not I think is also evidence that Google has a terrible UX for this anyway. If your data is going to be deleted, it should be painfully obvious well in advance.

I don't think the depth of this comment chain has anything to do with the UX design. The words on that warning are unequivocally interpretable as "the data will not be deleted." At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter if hidden in the terms of service or somewhere if it is made clear that the data will be deleted. It doesn't even matter if it is clear to @andrewmutz and @garblegarble that the data will be delet…

> What matters is if not thinking the data would be deleted is a reasonable interpretation. Full stop.

In what world would it be reasonable to expect Google to pay thousands of dollars per year indefinitely to store your data for free?

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

#537

Post by gruez »

terminous wrote: post #501
thinkharderdev wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> How exactly is it bad for consumers to get products below cost? Because it is necessarily a short term strategy, and when the subsidy ends, it is incredibly disruptive (in the bad way). It is good in the short term for those consumers who get in early and get their consumption subsided by VC funds or FAANG profits from another subsector. But it is bad in the long term for everyone when firms try to compete by selli…

Except in this particular case cloud storage is a very competitive space with dozens of competitors.

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

#538

Post by calfuris »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #404
rkagerer wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited means unlimited. Too often what gets lost in the phrase "edge case" is that there's a human being on the other end. They should do the decent thing and work with him and anyone else storing more data than can be practically downloaded to come up with a workaround or extension. Imagine if your bank closed your account and forfeited your money because they couldn't dole it out to you fast enough.

Unlimited did mean unlimited though. There was probably some sort of limit but this guy never in fact hit it. But Google stopped offering unlimited storage (probably because of people like this who would store 100s of TB). They notified him of this months before discontinuing the service and he apparently made no effort to find a different storage solution, maybe because it would be really expensive to store that muc…

He was told that after the grace period ends, his account would become "read-only". Interpreting "read-only" as "I will still have read access to the data" is not unreasonable. I'm guessing that neither of us would have trusted it, but HN readers are not representative of the population as a whole. Google should have provided explicit notice of their intention to delete the data a reasonable amount of time in advance, accounting for the amount of data involved. I don't think that a week is reasonable in any case, but it is especially unreasonable when hundreds of TB of data need to be moved.

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

#539

Post by lopkeny12ko »

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 fault here still lies with Google. Why advertise the plan as "unlimited" if it is not actually unlimited.

I was in a similar boat a few years ago. Had about 70 TB of archives and backups on Google Drive and was forced to scramble to move these somewhere else when they terminated the unlimited plan.

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

#540

Post by TremendousJudge »

threatofrain wrote: post #534
rcoveson wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced…

In all free anything people who over-consume threaten the model for everyone. I hate that the end result is that nobody should have it. We're all subsidizing the extreme users and we should desire that those customers are fired. All those rules at a buffet are just codifying ethics because the business has learned that it's stupid to trust people.

You are blaming the users for taking "unlimited" literally, while it was the company who said the plan was "unlimited" in the first place. Nobody forced them to market it that way. If they know 99.9% of users are fine with 1Tb, then they should sell them that and not lie in their marketing.
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