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Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

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Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#21

Post by [deleted] »

ben-gy wrote: post #13
ACAVJW4H wrote: post #4

Apple 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…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#22

Post by hinkley »

bravetraveler wrote: post #2

I guess 8 exabytes doesn't get the same number of clicks Edit: Not really trying to be facetious, but come on. Apple using a lot of storage at a lot of places isn't too surprising

I’m only here because I don’t understand why you would say 8 million terabytes instead of 8 exabytes.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#23

Post by hinkley »

gruez wrote: post #17
karmasimida wrote: post #9

How 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

They are probably paying wholesale prices for that quantity. In many industries that’s half the retail price.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#24

Post by user3939382 »

Google and Amazon recoup their investment in processes, tools, and cultivating the institutional knowledge to run massive data center infrastructure by marketing cloud services. Maybe Apple calculated that they would need to do the same to “level up” their data center infra but decided that doesn’t align with their business strategy.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#25

Post by SilasX »

hinkley wrote: post #22
bravetraveler wrote: post #2

I guess 8 exabytes doesn't get the same number of clicks Edit: Not really trying to be facetious, but come on. Apple using a lot of storage at a lot of places isn't too surprising

I’m only here because I don’t understand why you would say 8 million terabytes instead of 8 exabytes.

People use "terabytes" a lot (on the order of the size of a desktop hard drive), they don't use petabytes or exabytes.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#26

Post by bushbaba »

bastard_op wrote: post #14

Barbarians at the gate, Google and Amazon slurp it all up eventually. How's those big ones feel inside your budget, Apple.

Flip side. You have no idea if google is actually making a profit on this workload. It might literally be cheaper for apple to use GCP for storage here than doing it themselves.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#27

Post by wincy »

gruez wrote: post #17
karmasimida wrote: post #9

How 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

Why are external drives so much cheaper anyway?

Edit: I googled it an apparently it’s an economy of scale thing. People are more likely to buy external hard drives, much more mass market thing, Costco and Walmart sell externals, therefore downward pressure on prices compared to internal drives.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#28

Post by Stratoscope »

simondotau wrote: post #15
adt2bt wrote: post #10

It’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.

That's what "an open secret" means: something that may be thought to be secret but really isn't.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#29

Post by snowwrestler »

ACAVJW4H wrote: post #4

Apple and Google need to give people a chance to manage their own data.

As far as I know, you can manage your own data with Apple devices if you want to.

By that I mean, storage in iCloud is optional. You can back up Macs locally pretty easily with Time Machine and you can back up iPhones to Macs locally as well (which then gets backed up via Time Machine). You can encrypt Time Machine and iPhone backups too if you want.

Is it as easy as using iCloud for backups, photo syncing, etc.? No, but that’s because iCloud is not just dumb storage, it’s a hosted software application (several, really).

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