An update to storage policies across your Google Account • Hacker News Board

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#271

Post by pirocks » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:13 AM UTC

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…

A premise one hears fairly often is that online advertising sucks, but it's a necessary evil to get all this cool free stuff from Google. So if the cool free stuff is less cool and less free that raises questions about whether there should still be online advertising. I don't actually subscribe to the above, it's just something you hear again and again.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#272

Post by rektide » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:15 AM UTC

rektide wrote: post #3

I used to tell my relatives to use Google Photos, so we wouldn't all lose their photos. I no longer tell them to use Google Photos. Edit: Some of my relatives are growing old. There's a lot of talk of backups & storage. But none of that is going to preserve the digital memories we have shared, after they die. All the old URLs that have been shared will, not rot & wither, but one day just up and vanish. Up to the big…

This is such a rude body of people. These downvotes come off to me as so unempathic, so cruel.

The promise was free unlimited storage & sharing of photos. Now, years latter, you change the deal. People planned to die with this, they read the words on the tin & said, yes, I wish to share photos in a way that will last. Yes, I want to give URLs to people with my photos that they will be able to use.

It's so heartless, so disappointing that such cruel negative people persistenly downvote & leave shitty comments like "you need to pay for it." (This thread here is not popular enough to attract those comments.) This is one of the persistent indicators to me that people in this community need help, need healing, and that there's so few around to show care & concern & support each other just frightens us all further. HN, you have a reputation, and this is it.

The god damned library of Babel is on fire people. The Library of Alexandria, a vast index of humanity, is getting torched. After years of promises that this would not happen. People's willingness to be reasonable over this matter is ghastly, is immoral, & wrong. People who are ok with, who are unsympathetic to this book burning, they scare the pants off me. There's a lot of them out there. A lot of them in here.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#273

Post by Axsuul » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:16 AM UTC

simias wrote: post #227

sorenjan wrote: post #7

From the email I got from Google a few minutes ago: > Summary of the new policies (effective June 1, 2021): > • If you're inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos, we may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive. Google One members who are within their storage quota and in good-standing will not be impacted by this new inactive policy. > • If you exceed your storage limit for 2…

In the blog post they mention that they store over 4PB of data every single day, I can't blame them try trying to rationalize this a bit. I'm really curious to know how much data they'll be able to expunge on January 1 2023, when the 24month deadline expires. It might end up being the biggest "rm" in computer history.

That 4PB is likely heavily compressed into TBs

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#274

Post by wccrawford » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

brnt wrote: post #60

xiphias2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the reason I signed up for GMail in 2004 was that they promised that they keep my emails forever

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

They started with 1GB, and promised it would grow with you and that you would never run out of space.

At that point, it was just email, though, and not other files.

Despite that, I still managed to run out of space a while back and had to start deleting emails that I didn't care about. I was quite disappointed in them.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#275

Post by phendrenad2 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

Now is the time to pay for your stuff. Email isn't free, why do you want it for free?

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#276

Post by phendrenad2 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:20 AM UTC

jamesfe wrote: post #30

What's another good email provider? I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.

Hey.com , protonmail, bith are great

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#277

Post by Kye » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:20 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #160

karmasimida wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is reasonable. Delete some filter emails won't take you 10 minutes

It's not that easy. I have 15 years of emails, including deeply personal stuff. I've deleted all the unread mailing lists. I've deleted the big files. I've gone through numerous social and advertising emails and mass-deleted. Yet I'm stuck on like 14.98 Gb and every time I hit the threshold, Gmail starts bugging me to do more. How can I even tell if I have that much email? They could just be saying "oh, you have 14.9…

Did you empty the trash? Trash counts. Same for Drive.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#278

Post by phendrenad2 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:22 AM UTC

foxhop wrote: post #146

Deadman switch activated. Let's just say Google doesn't delete your data they just orphan your access to the data with the assumption that you have abandoned the account, this is the great culling. All the people who have died their data must have been absorbed enough that Google doesn't think keeping the emails around is worth it. Will someone build us a way to heartbeat our Google accounts to keep them prevent them…

Hmm good point, Google would never actually delete data. Goes against their whole business model of "mine a huge pool of data with ever more sophisticated ML algos and sell the results to whoever will pay".

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#279

Post by koyote » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:30 AM UTC

sorenjan wrote: post #7

From the email I got from Google a few minutes ago: > Summary of the new policies (effective June 1, 2021): > • If you're inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos, we may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive. Google One members who are within their storage quota and in good-standing will not be impacted by this new inactive policy. > • If you exceed your storage limit for 2…

> If you're inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos,

Maybe it's the engineer in me, but doesn't that imply that even if you're active in Gmail and Drive, they'll delete your data because you are not active in Photos? i.e. shouldn't that be an 'and' instead of an 'or'?

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#280

Post by owenmarshall » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:33 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #201

eins1234 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More important than the current email provider you happen to use is controlling your email _address_, and this means using a domain you control. It enables for a surprisingly pain-free email migration experience as I found out not too long ago, where all you have to do is point the DNS records to the new provider and do an IMAP import from your old email provider, and everything will just work as you'd expect. If I w…

Yes, you can get a domain, but it would depend on yet another email address, right? And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.

It is a best practice to separate your registrar email from a domain you have, yes.

Fastmail makes this easy for me: I have an @fastmail.fm email from them that I have only ever provided to my domain registrar and I’ve set my MUA to scream and shout loudly if it ever gets mail.

That + using Fastmail for all my domains makes this seamless for me.

> And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.

I’ve had one gmail account nuked by Our Benevolent Overlord’s AI for no rhyme or reason. At least it was unimportant, but it still happened - and I have zero recourse to get it back.

Losing control of my domain or a paid email service? That’s entirely on me ;)