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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

#641
post #452

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.

It may be nuts, but many companies offer this option. It's not clear what Google is doing here is even legal. If a company is holding my property, they're usually required to make reasonable efforts to return it. A former employer will usually ship your things back to you, for example, or find other ways to return them. Simply tossing things you had in your office in the trash is illegal.

Lost & found will only hold items for so long. Imagine if lost & founds were legally obligated to keep everything, forever.

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

#642
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This is the part I don't like > if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files Lots of sites have images. When exactly can I start to expect paying? Will this unspoken limit change in the future? Will I be notified when it is? As-written, it doesn't seem that way since it's opaque.

Why do you think CF owe you an explanation of when you start paying? You're not paying them; they don't owe you anything.

I imagine it pretty much comes down to "did this one thing that an individual is free hosting suddenly become popular or are they constantly taking the piss/running a biz off free".

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

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"google product experts" aren't generally google employees and aren't speaking for google. i.e. that support site is mostly user to user help, which is perhaps an indictment on google in general, but sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says".

> sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says". I think we're looking at very different things.... there's a screenshot of a literal official email from Google, under the Google Workspace Team. Not sure where you're getting "Google product experts". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

aren't we referring to the ancestor comment of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38629510

if you're referring to something else, I missed that reference, so my apologies then.

I do think google gave sufficient time to move off. I also don't think a "workspace" being in read only mode was ever meant to be a permanent position for that google workspace. i.e. it was meant that "we weren't going to suddenly delete you data if you were over quota, but its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".

though if you can point to the official email from google (I'd have to find the ones they sent me, unsure if I kept or deleted them).

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

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

Google sends multiple emails that are extremely clear about what is going to happen. If you ignore the emails or notifications, that is your fault, not on the service. Like I mentioned above, even the Google podcast service is giving users over a year to prepare for the shutdown, and provides a method to transfer any data you have out of the app. If they take much precaution with a podcast app that few people even us…

you seem the be extrapolating the actions in one service to what you think the actions are in another service, when direct evidence is saying that the other service has not in fact done what you are extrapolating. I don't really see why you think your extrapolation is more believable than the reported facts.

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

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catastrophic? People managed to have kids long before computers and cheap photos. They were happy with the tens of good pictures a year they managed to get on film.

I am sure they will survive but it would be huge loss and emotional shock. It is like saying losing electricity forever should not be catastrophic event, people were living happily without it for 1000s of years.

Electricity makes significant differences to quality of life and you’re talking about having 100 pictures of your kids instead of 10,000 being “a huge loss and emotional shock”. That’s frankly pathetic.

There are many people I know alive today (including myself) that don’t obsess over a day by day photo chronology of their children that you will probably never look at 90% of. Yet we all use electricity significantly every day.

Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?

That’s some addict logic right there.

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

#646
Sooner or later, people have to realize that the cloud and subscription are not in their best interests. On the front end, perhaps, it made sense. The company from which I retired, went all in on the cloud, pointing to all the money they were saving on infrastructure. Their hosting charges have nearly doubled in less than 3 years. Further, when hosting companies are routinely scanning your private data for various reasons, ranging child porn to their own AI projects, e.g., GitHub & Microsoft, you have surrendered the keys to the kingdom with no control over anything. Google canceling the unlimited plan is a perfect example. Frankly, consumers and companies are naive to think this will benefit them in the long run.

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

#647

Out of the bug cloud providers - Google, AWS, Azure - which one has the best support and most reliable storage?

Definitely AWS.

Wondering if I should zip all the pics i save on my paid g drive and uploading to s3.

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

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's the same for everyone company: as long as the pay is good with perks and benefits you don't really care what you code on. And if you drink the company kool-aid, you believe you're doing people a favor.

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

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, I agree that they should have been more explicit when they discontinued the service and said that they would delete data over the new limit at some point. But I don't think you have to be an HN reader to understand that if you stop paying for a service eventually the service provider will stop providing it. Like did this guy really think that the data would just stay in "read-only" mode forever?

They don't stop charging you because your account is over limit.
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