Apple cut the phone charger for environmental reasons too. It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
Ever heard of "you will own nothing and you will be happy"?
Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
121–130 of 177 posts
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The average person does not do backups. No, he will not do backups. No! He seriously won't. Cloud storage solves this very real, very basic problem. It should be technically feasible to make setting up backups to your own NAS at home as easy as backups to iCloud. So if people are backing up to iCloud, I do not see why they would not backup to their own NAS. Same for why they do not need to understand a file system j…
>It should be technically feasible to make setting up backups to your own NAS at home A proper backup is 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 offsite. Absolutely no average person is going to bother with any of that. Three copies? Ridiculous, he will say. 2 different media? I ain't made of money, he will say; also WTF is a "media"? CNN can backup my stuff? 1 offsite ? I'm not going to juggle stuff in and out of my bank'…
> A proper backup is 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 offsite.
Why is this relevant to people having the bandwidth to do backups at their own site? And getting cutoff by a big tech company with no recourse is not a “proper” backup either.
> Most people do not understand file systems, please stop telling them to because it's never going to happen.
I never did. I setup a Synology NAS 8 years ago and I have not had to look at it since. Surely, the UI software is even easier to use these days.
> What the fuck" as in "WTF is '1TB'?", "WTF do I do with 1TB?", and "WTF is a 'NAS'?". Remember, we are talking about average people. Not computer wizards and sysadmins like most of us here.
We have different expectations of people. At one point, average people did not have electrical, plumbing, washers, dryers, refrigerators, laptops, smartphones, routers and access points, etc.
I think they would be able to handle one more appliance where plugging it into network, scanning a QR code to setup, and pull out and push in HDD in the event a HDD or NAS break.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The average person does not do backups. No, he will not do backups. No! He seriously won't. Cloud storage solves this very real, very basic problem. It should be technically feasible to make setting up backups to your own NAS at home as easy as backups to iCloud. So if people are backing up to iCloud, I do not see why they would not backup to their own NAS. Same for why they do not need to understand a file system j…
>It should be technically feasible to make setting up backups to your own NAS at home A proper backup is 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 offsite. Absolutely no average person is going to bother with any of that. Three copies? Ridiculous, he will say. 2 different media? I ain't made of money, he will say; also WTF is a "media"? CNN can backup my stuff? 1 offsite ? I'm not going to juggle stuff in and out of my bank'…
I’m sad for this average person, seems like if anything changes they’re going to be in big troubles
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#124If Microsoft cutting cost by limiting storage capacity can be construed to be done for environmental reasons, then why can't Google lay-offs be construed similarly? This is not changing the mix of energy production, it is not changing the supply of energy, it just changes the demand. Lay-offs similarly also reduce the demand on energy since people have less money to buy things that are energy intensive to produce, an…
What is the point you're making? MSFT don't care about the environment because they're choosing reducing storage energy usage over famine and war?
Point is almost all cost saving measures can be rebranded as "environmental." It's just a PR trick.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#125Note the 20 GB for OneDrive + 20 GB for Outlook limit is set by McGill University, and it is applied to students (not necessarily staff) [0]. Microsoft sets a different limit: [1]
> all institutions’ tenants will receive 100TB of free pooled storage across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, with an additional 50GB or 100GB of pooled storage per paid user for A3 and A5 subscriptions, respectively (not including Student Use Benefits). With pooled storage, an institutions’ total storage limit is the maximum amount of storage all users combined can use.
> In addition, effective February 1, 2024, users of Office 365 A1 (free subscription) will be limited to a maximum of 100GB of OneDrive storage within the institutional tenant’s 100TB of pooled storage.
McGill seems to offer desktop apps to students, so they have paid licences. [2] This means they could offer 50 GB per student, and I imagine they could allow the student to have more OneDrive files and less Outlook data. Furthermore, if they care about research data, that should be in a common SharePoint space with well-defined access and edit permissions.
[0] https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri...
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft...
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#126On the Microsoft page[1] about this change they say > Storage of this “dark” data takes up space on servers and results in increased electricity consumption, generating 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 alone. Where "dark" data is data that is unused. However they link to this World Economic Forum Page [2] which says > In 2020, digitisation was purported to generate 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.…
Isn't it more misleading to claim that this is just due to environmental reasons? The first link you provide actually says the first reason is due to security (you wouldn't believe how often student accounts are compromised and/or used for sharing pirated content). The second reason is the environment, and the 3rd, reason, even though they don't say it outright, is cost, and I'm guessing that's the real reason. But g…
> The first link you provide actually says the first reason is due to security
To me personally the security claims don't make much sense either.
When I face disk space limitations I don't delete my spreadsheet of survey results that's full of private information. I just delete the original video of that public lecture that I've put onto youtube already anyway.
Now, for professors there might be a case for shunting the files they haven't touched in a few years into secure offline storage in case it contains forgotten private information. But it sounds like this applies to student accounts, and there's already a process to eliminate forgotten years-old data: Graduation.
IMHO it's far more likely this is a cost-saving measure.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It should be technically feasible to make setting up backups to your own NAS at home A proper backup is 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 offsite. Absolutely no average person is going to bother with any of that. Three copies? Ridiculous, he will say. 2 different media? I ain't made of money, he will say; also WTF is a "media"? CNN can backup my stuff? 1 offsite ? I'm not going to juggle stuff in and out of my bank'…
> A proper backup is 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 offsite. Why is this relevant to people having the bandwidth to do backups at their own site? And getting cutoff by a big tech company with no recourse is not a “proper” backup either. > Most people do not understand file systems, please stop telling them to because it's never going to happen. I never did. I setup a Synology NAS 8 years ago and I have not had to…
>Why is this relevant to people having the bandwidth to do backups at their own site?
By far the biggest reason most people do not do backups is because It Is Fucking Tedious And Expensive. Cloud storage is the answer to that problem.
It's only when we get to big enterprise companies (read: businesses that wouldn't classify as small business) that cloud storage becomes impractical or even legally infeasible. Of course, remember we are talking about the average guy at home.
>I setup a Synology NAS 8 years ago and I have not had to look at it since. Surely, the UI software is even easier to use these days.
I have a Synology NAS too, and I agree it is very easy to use... for special people like us who breathe computers.
>We have different expectations of people. At one point, average people did not have electrical, plumbing, washers, dryers, refrigerators, laptops, smartphones, etc.
I'm not sure if you realize that most people call up a professional technician or engineer for all of that if something comes up. Fridge or washer breaks down? Call. Toilet backs up? Call. Breaker keeps tripping? Call.
Now yes, an average person could hire someone to setup and maintain a NAS for him at home, but that's going to be far more expensive and a hassle than just forking over a Hamilton ($10 bill) or two to Microsoft or Google every month and making it all someone else's problem. It'll be managed better and he won't have strangers coming into his home, too.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#128What can they do now?
Change IT provider!
The reason why things gets worse is not that the cloud companies are evil monopolies(they are for profit companies who cannot put the common good ahead of their shareholders financial interests) but that people refuse to look at smaller less hyped alternatives to what gets marketed by the biggest companies in the cloud sector.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#129On the Microsoft page[1] about this change they say > Storage of this “dark” data takes up space on servers and results in increased electricity consumption, generating 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 alone. Where "dark" data is data that is unused. However they link to this World Economic Forum Page [2] which says > In 2020, digitisation was purported to generate 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.…
> So the 4% figure is not the storage of only dark data, but the storage of ALL data. Storage or ALL processing? SSDs typically need very little power to just store data. They need some power to read and write. But the lion’s share of energy use for “digitization” is compute in various forms.
Disclaimer: Looking with my HPC admin hat.
To be able to store that amount of data on SSDs, you need tons of enterprise mixed load SSDs, and they don't come cheap in any sense or form.
To offset costs, you add tiering with mechanical disks, with varying capacities and readiness states.
Spinning up cold storage takes time and energy, and if you need a three year old CSV file summarizing your results, that's a lot of energy and time. The storage pipeline storing rest of your research might go to "sleep" again until you make sure that you gonna need rest of the dataset and everything to re-run some of the experiments.
The data access pattern maybe hitting some cold paths too often as a result, so Microsoft might be trying to confine research institutions to a warmer tier, and since that tiers are more expensive to operate, they might be slashing storage space. Otherwise the resident data might poison other user's access patterns.
This is not to say Microsoft is doing right, I believe the opposite, but this is why they might be doing it.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#130This is where the emerging field of research data management and digital preservation come into play. Reproducibility and vetting research output, as well as other forms of accountability requires research data to be present and available. Hence the requirement to safeguard that data. However, a personal share hosted on institutional cloud storage isn't the best place to store research data for lack of accessibility,…
The linked post is exactly about McGill, so I either didn't get the irony in your post or you should read the linked post and
https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri...