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An update to storage policies across your Google Account

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Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#231

Post by est31 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #170
dataflow wrote: post #4

> "If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos," the company said. That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it? Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

Wow, 4.3 petabytes a day . Operating at Google's scale these days is just nuts.

One of the advantages of being on an exponential growth curve is that this figure has been way lower in the past. Just go back 5 years and it's only a fraction of that. 5 more years and it's even lower. The gmail/drive/etc. data that come from Google's first decade of existence probably fit into those 4.3 petabytes.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#232

Post by eli »

est31 wrote: post #185
PlugTunin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that 30-day window was ridiculous. I lost my hotmail in 2006 after exclusively using gmail for 6 weeks. I'd like to know the origins of the policy. Who decided that if someone goes a few weeks without checking their email that they're either dead or no longer interested in using the internet?

It was a different MS back then, cloud services were still new, and companies were still figuring it out. Maybe the reasoning was to keep people afraid from using hotmail alternatives in fear of losing their accounts.

Or less charitably, they were trying to sell the premium accounts where that doesn’t happen.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#233

Post by Jarwain »

fletchowns wrote: post #198
metric10 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if they did this for Workspace accounts. Deleting data from a organization would be a disaster for Google. I.e. an account may be at a center of a lawsuit or subject to data retention laws. Indeed, this says no: https://support.google.com/a/answer/38173?hl=en

Hmmm is my G Suite account different from a Workspace account? I got this email a few weeks ago saying I hadn't logged in for awhile and they were going to delete my data: https://i.imgur.com/XAEXQWb.png

It's the same product; G Suite was just rebranded to Workspace

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#234

Post by dannyw »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #35
kllrnohj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the users are inactive they aren't seeing ads. Google isn't a charity, why would they pay for storage that isn't being used? Also, somewhat morbidly, dead people don't really need their photos and emails hosted perpetually.

They don't, but as a society we would all benefit from some way to archive at least some of that. Future historians will curse us for not leaving behind letters, photos, etc. (which is especially ironic given how much more of them we're each generating).

People can choose whether they want their data retained after death. A default opt out sounds good.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#235

Post by tomhoward »

xiphias2 wrote: post #106
brnt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They promised 1GB, had a counter that slowly increased and thens settled at 15GB, as I remember.

Sure, but I’m right now paying for 1TB space, and I can easily forget for example if a credit card expires. Google makes enough money from my subscriptions to at least write my data to a tape when I stop paying, so that I can access it again even 10 years later when I start paying again.

There's no way they can justify devoting resources (i.e., staff, machines, tapes, storage space) and maintaining processes to do this when they're delivering services for billions of users, especially given that, as someone else has said, for privacy reasons people would assume/expect that expired data is automatically deleted.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#236

Post by laurent92 »

laumars wrote: post #110

I’m often the first to criticise Google but what they’re doing here isn’t exactly unprecedented. Free online mail providers have been removing inactive users since the 90s. Cloud storage providers remove inactive free users. A lot of companies even have a far more aggressive time line (pretty sure 90s Yahoo Mail was in the region of months rather than years) so 2 years seems pretty generous to me. At the end of the d…

Gmail doesn’t provide a way to delete the big emails. They just let you go over limit, you don’t know what is consuming resources, and you get charged for it.

So, like AWS.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#237

Post by fletchowns »

dannyw wrote: post #225
fletchowns wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm is my G Suite account different from a Workspace account? I got this email a few weeks ago saying I hadn't logged in for awhile and they were going to delete my data: https://i.imgur.com/XAEXQWb.png

Are you a paying customer?

No, this is a free account from way back when (2010 maybe?)

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#238

Post by Cyph0n »

geek_at wrote: post #130
dataflow wrote: post #4

> "If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos," the company said. That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it? Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

oh damn. I've created an account for my newborn son on my (free) google workspace domain and send him emails every few weeks with updates and photos. He'll receive the account when he's like 12. Will these be deleted too?

I recently had an idea for a similar service that uses a storage account of your choosing as a backend. The plan was to market it as a “vault” for your emails and attachments.

Basically, you get an email address, and any email you send to it is streamed to a storage account of your choosing, with optional minimal processing (e.g., convert your emails into Markdown prior to storage).

I spent a while setting up the mail processing backend using Postfix + a mail filter written in Rust.

I ultimately ended up scrapping the project because:

A) It didn’t seem like there was a large enough market of paying customers.

B) There already are a few services that do something like this, but with a focus on attachments.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#240

Post by tehabe »

geek_at wrote: post #130
dataflow wrote: post #4

> "If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos," the company said. That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it? Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

oh damn. I've created an account for my newborn son on my (free) google workspace domain and send him emails every few weeks with updates and photos. He'll receive the account when he's like 12. Will these be deleted too?

Emails already counted against the 15 GB quota for free accounts. So no change there.
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