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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

#341

Post by kfogel »

I'd like to point out https://Permanent.org/, ahem. It made the front page here a while back (not posted by me), and it's relevant here: you pay a one-time payment for permanent storage -- that's right, your stuff will stay right there even if you're "inactive for 2 years".

(Disclosure: My company does some consulting work for Permanent. When I received the notice today from Google of their storage policy change, I realized that the reason it sounded weird to me was that I'd gotten accustomed to Permanent's model.)

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#342

Post by ehsankia »

wccrawford wrote: post #274
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.

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.

> you would never run out of space

You do see how that can't possibly applying to literally everyone, right? You can't use the argument that "they said it would grow with me" to store 1TB of emails and be surprised when they start charging you.

15GB is a lot. Even if you receive 5 emails with 1mb attachments every single day, that's still almost 10 years. With normal text emailed, you will never run out until you die. Most cloud providers give 5GB. It's fair to say that it has grown with you to a reasonable storage size. If you need more than 15GB, it's fair to say you're beyond that.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#343

Post by reitanuki »

rococode wrote: post #67

Yahoo Mail does the same with only a 1 year threshold and regardless of how much data you use. Don't log in for 12 months = lose everything. Sadly found this out the hard way - most of my childhood email accounts were wiped :'( Now they're also disabling email forwarding for free users which I've been relying on for a decade to catch occasionally relevant emails. Might really be forced to shell out the $3.49 a month…

I just yesterday set up fetchmail[1] to fetch e-mail from yahoo over POP and deposit them in a self-hosted mailbox (for my partner's longstanding Yahoo e-mail address). It may be worth a look; it can fetch from IMAP or POP and spit them out to LMTP or SMTP. (N.B. it didn't work with IMAP on Yahoo for me, but using POP was no problem).

edit: Perhaps my /etc/fetchmailrc file can be a useful starting point for someone[2].

[1]: https://www.fetchmail.info/

[2]: https://hastebin.com/raw/ororunutev

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#344

Post by tsjq »

xiphias2 wrote: post #40
kelchm wrote: post #16

Headline seems inaccurate/ misleading to me. Quote from Google in the article: > If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos Honestly that seems far more generous than I’d expect — why should Google (or any other company) be expected to store your data indefinitely if you stop paying them?

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

That time, Google's motto was "do no evil" .

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#345

Post by tsjq »

kfogel wrote: post #341

I'd like to point out https://Permanent.org/ , ahem. It made the front page here a while back (not posted by me), and it's relevant here: you pay a one-time payment for permanent storage -- that's right, your stuff will stay right there even if you're "inactive for 2 years". (Disclosure: My company does some consulting work for Permanent. When I received the notice today from Google of their storage policy change, I…

That's nice. #TIL , and I visited the website.

Qn. Does it allow a paid user to delete their uploaded files ?

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#347

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #230
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/

I have read about users who are receiving someone else's mail. They have some account that has been set to forward mail. It then appears that either (a) Google assigns the address to someone else (perhaps due to inactivity) or (b) someone else keeps inadvertently typing this email address. The mail gets forwarded to some other user. If this is true, this calls the whole notion of "Gmail security" (and more generally…

Google suggests available addresses when signing up to Gmail. Perhaps they could try to address the problem of mispellings and typos by at least warning the user about the Levenshtein distance from similar, already registered addresses, and the potential for misdirected email as a result.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#348

Post by square_usual »

kmonsen wrote: post #340
int_19h wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".

+1 for Vivaldi. I can promise you the people behind it just want to make a great browser.

I tried Vivaldi for a long time, but a couple of things drew me back to Firefox eventually. The biggest problem was that it kept signing me out of Google for some reason. I've seen threads about this elsewhere, so I'm not the only person facing it. Then, the containers feature in Firefox was very useful as I have multiple "identities" in different spaces, so I could isolate them in their own containers to prevent spillover.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#349

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

With profits at $160 billion in 2019 and a user base of $4 billion people, they make roughly $40 per user per year.

If a 14TB hdd costs them $200/year to run, 15GB of storage would run about $.21/year. Does that sound right? If storage was that inexpensive I would think think they wouldn't be restrictive.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#350

Post by znpy »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #329
est31 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to work on a certain Google product and I remember thinking a petabyte was big when our raw content store crossed that milestone. Now Linus Tech Tips can put that much storage in a single box.

Thanks for posting that, most people don't realise how much compute/storage you can actually put on a single rack cabinet nowadays.
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