661–670 of 692 posts
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…
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So I found 20tb drives as low as 270 (which is what I used for my own pricing out of a hypothetical build), but if you feel lucky you can get large capacity refurb drives for a lot less than brand new (I did this recently for scratch space on my NAS). A refurb 20tb can be had as low as 200, which gets you down to 4200. But yes - I realized my mistake in tossing off that comment offhand.
Oh sorry, I wasn't trying to bag on you. I was curious what it takes to store 1/3PB these days, and even at $15k it's surprisingly cheap.
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> I was trying to say[...] Oh yeah? That's a weird thing to write instead of just saying, "I admit that I wasn't telling the truth." PS: Even with your moving the goalposts, September to April still isn't "well over a year".
I fact checked both of us and the timelime is Sept 2023 to July 2024, so you are correct that it's not over a year. >September to April You seem to be not telling the truth, perhaps you should admit that yourself.
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> 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.…
"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…
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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…
I believe the object of discussion was google who /did/ have a Chuck-A-Rama like offering. Specific common sense amount is an unreasonable demand. How long should a customer be allowed to stay in a buffet? Is it an hour? 1:30? 3 hours? I don’t know. Maybe? Depends. Is it reasonable to come in, pay once, and stay for a month in the restaurant (if it was a 24/7 establishment)? Probably not.
I actually have cloud storage customers at my company. If you asked me what an unreasonable amount of cloud storage consumption was, I would have a really hard time coming up with a number. A petabyte, I guess? We have customers that store kilobytes, and others that store many terabytes. Frankly we'd love a petabyte customer, because we actually charge people for storage, like any sane B2B storage offering. Some things are not meant to be unlimited.
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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…
> 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. I'm not "sneaking" it in - I'm saying it outright. When Google (or anyone else competent in the art) is designing and provisioning a service, they have a numbers they use to estimate user resource-usage percentiles: unlike jour…
Right, and not all commodities have workable "unlimited" business models. The fact that somebody wants it to be a business model doesn't mean it should be one.
It's possible to offer honest unlimited plans. The all-you-can-eat buffet is one example. Just write it down somewhere that there's a time limit and that each individual person has to pay, and just like that you've imposed a practical limit without imposing a literal one.
Google Fiber competes with Comcast in my area, and they're happily able to advertise "unlimited gigabit Internet". Which is awesome. It's good marketing, and not dishonest: Their competitor imposes a type of limit which they do not impose (a monthly consumption limit of 1 TB). Of course, we know that there is still an effective limit in place: You can still only consume at the rate of 1 GiB/s. It's right there in the name of the plan.
But "unlimited storage" is just dishonest, especially when you're selling to businesses. Some businesses need cloud storage for documents, others need it for storing RAW video. There's nothing unreasonable about a few hundred TB unless you're just totally oblivious to the cloud storage business.
Essentially I think you're defending a somewhat dishonest marketing technique. What is lost by putting a 10 TB limit on the plan? I guess it wouldn't sell as well? Because it's not a lie? Maybe it's less "flexible" (i.e. Google can't just go change it whenever they feel like it). It's not like I can't see why that's good for Google, I just can't see why it's good for their customers. If there's a limit, just say it. Your customers would certainly appreciate knowing. And for crying out loud I do not care that being just a little bit dishonest about it makes customers excited and gets more sales.
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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.
Yes, I'm blaming the kinds of users who persuade buffets to make up hostile and unpleasant rules for people. If firing a small % of users changes the equation for everyone then customers should be all for it. When customers exploit any concept of free, even the bathroom in a fast food restaurant, that starts a culture where businesses give you a code so you can pee. You can call this being up-front or honest, but I c…
Lots of business need gigabytes. Lots of business need terabytes. That's a 1000x difference. That ratio is not very buffet-like!
People who need terabytes of cloud storage are not like people who try to scam buffets by taking home food in their pants. They are not like people who do unspeakable things to the free bathroom. They are just people with lots of data. There are business that have lots of data. It is a common business problem in today's world.
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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.
A lost-and-found is where there's little or no business relationship and you didn't ask for the stuff.
If we have a formal relationship where you're holding on to my stuff or vice-versa as part of that relationship, you are generally required to return my stuff and I am required to return yours when the relationship ends. If I am working for you, and you have my tools at the office, you need to return them to me. If it's impractical for me to pick them up (e.g. I left them in an office in Alaska), that means you need to ship them to me at your cost. If a contractor has your data, and you don't renew the contract, they need to reasonably provide it back to you. If you are leaving a relationship and your ex has a bunch of stuff at your house, you need to return it. Etc.
That's very different from someone losing something on your property.
I suspect, in this case, if both sides had equal legal budgets, Google would lose a court case. Now, testing that is very impractical since legal budgets aren't equal, but from a pure justice perspective, that's how it works out.
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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?
I have to repeat the question: do you genuinely believe this data is going to be inevitably deleted, or maybe do you think that the threat will work and the guy will get his stuff downloaded somehow?