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Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
11–20 of 229 posts
Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#12Apple and Google need to give people a chance to manage their own data.
The files API on ios is open for anyone to use. You can run your own nextcloud server on your own hardware and it integrates in to the OS just like google drive or a plugged in USB would.
You can’t do backup or sync the Photos.app to a random cloud. The “integration” here is just that occasionally you can save to and load from your server. That’s all.
Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#13Apple and Google need to give people a chance to manage their own data.
I disagree - the average person is not capable of securely managing their own data, which is why they pick a consumer brand like Apple to do it for them - providing an option to do so would likely result in significant exposure of personal data at significant scale from botched DIY attempts.
To test this theory, simply ask an average iPhone or Android user what encryption is.
What you are saying here is the equivalent to me buying a plane ticket, but also having the option to fly the plane as well.
If you want to manage your own data - use something like a PinePhone - the barrier to entry is high enough that people who are capable of managing their own data securely can use the device and achieve the data sovereignty outcome they require.
That said, I believe Apple should build and manage their own infrastructure. They have the resources and capabilities to do so. The longer Apple stick’s with GCP the larger the inertia of moving away and the less leverage they have when it comes to negotiating to maintain their high standard of privacy commitments.
Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#14Barbarians at the gate, Google and Amazon slurp it all up eventually. How's those big ones feel inside your budget, Apple.
Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#15It’s a bit of an open secret among big tech that Apple is a huge user of storage on all major clouds. They manage encryption on their hardware and in return get cheap storage, higher availability and competition from their suppliers. Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service.
Calling it a secret is an exaggeration. It's more like an obscure topic on Wikipedia: it's publicly available to anyone who cared to ask the question.
Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#16All the data is encrypted so it doesn’t matter where they are storing it. Using multiple service providers (Google, Amazon, their own servers, etc) might actually be beneficial because it eliminates one point of failure, especially if they replicate data in a smart way to take advantage of it. It might also speed up access to data.
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Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#17How much would you pay to store such amount data? 8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 200m dollars worthy of retail hard drives. Ofc the calculation is super inaccurate, which doesn't take redundancies into consideration, and discounted prices for someone like Google to purchase hardware, plus the discount for Apple as a big customer. But had the scale be comparable, in which…
>8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 1.6B dollars worthy of retail hard drives.
External hard drives can be obtained on sale for $15-16/TB. They can then be shucked to get internal drives. I suspect bulk buyers can get pricing equal or cheaper than this, rather than the retail of $25/TB
Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#18It’s a bit of an open secret among big tech that Apple is a huge user of storage on all major clouds. They manage encryption on their hardware and in return get cheap storage, higher availability and competition from their suppliers. Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service.
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Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#19Apple and Google need to give people a chance to manage their own data.
I disagree - the average person is not capable of securely managing their own data, which is why they pick a consumer brand like Apple to do it for them - providing an option to do so would likely result in significant exposure of personal data at significant scale from botched DIY attempts. To test this theory, simply ask an average iPhone or Android user what encryption is. What you are saying here is the equivalen…
I don't find this so convincing.
Most normal usera may not be able to secure things effectively and they can still use the existing iCloud / Google Play infrastructure. That doesn't mean that other users, who want to manage their own data for one reason or another, shouldn't get the opportunity.
It's far more likely that building and maintaining this feature is not worth the development time for Apple and Google product teams at this point, since the possible market is small
Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
#20How much would you pay to store such amount data? 8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 200m dollars worthy of retail hard drives. Ofc the calculation is super inaccurate, which doesn't take redundancies into consideration, and discounted prices for someone like Google to purchase hardware, plus the discount for Apple as a big customer. But had the scale be comparable, in which…
The article claims that Apple is on track to spend around $300 million on GCP storage services this year. With redundancies, server costs, and DC costs, the upfront price could easily touch 3 to 6 billion, or 10 to 20 years of GCP storage costs.