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Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

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Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#41

Post by mirimir »

rocky1138 wrote: post #35
mirimir wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I did see that. But I don't understand why Google would do that. For most users, aren't Google Docs files a substantial part of their usage? Or do people mainly store backups?

FTA "A single google doc can store about a million characters. This is around 710KB of base64 encoded data." This means that in order to reach the limit of the drive space given away for free, they'd need something like 15,000 Google Doc files (15GB) if they counted toward your space limit. I doubt a lot of paying customers even reach that. The real limit (file size) is reached by binaries. Videos and PDFs, usually.

I see.

But then, I suspect (as others note) that Google will notice when you have 50GB of Google Docs full of base64.

Seems an iffy way to store stuff.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#42

Post by lathiat »

yunyu wrote: post #32
userbinator wrote: post #21

Base85 would probably be a better choice for storing binary as text, since it has a ratio of 5:4 instead of 4:3. On the topic of "unusual and free large file hosting", YouTube would probably be the largest, although you'd need to find a resilient way of encoding the data since their re-encoding processes are lossy. I like the "Linux ISO" and "1337 Docs" references ;-)

Here is an implementation of arbitrary data storage using YouTube videos: https://github.com/dzhang314/YouTubeDrive

I love that this exists

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#43

Post by u801e »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #22
userbinator wrote: post #21

Base85 would probably be a better choice for storing binary as text, since it has a ratio of 5:4 instead of 4:3. On the topic of "unusual and free large file hosting", YouTube would probably be the largest, although you'd need to find a resilient way of encoding the data since their re-encoding processes are lossy. I like the "Linux ISO" and "1337 Docs" references ;-)

Why not yEnc? 1-2% overhead and it's been in use on UseNet for binary storage for a very long time.

The nice thing about yEnc is that it only has to escape NUL, LF, CR, and the escape character itself '=', so it essentially uses all but 3 characters out of the 255 possible values.

While this works over NNTP, SMTP and IMAP (and possibly POP), I'm not sure if it will work over HTTP if any of the servers use the Transfer Encoding header.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#44

Post by nemosaltat »

BlackRing wrote: post #40
nemosaltat wrote: post #37

Anyone remember Gdrive? I can’t find it now, but I think it was probably early or mid 2000s. It let you store files as a local disk (FUSE) via Gmail attachments.

I remember using it back in 2005 iirc, and it was amazing. The files had a label called gmailfs.gDisk which is how it could keep the "file system" separate from the rest. Now Google generously offers Drive with 15Gigs of space.

Yes! That’s the one.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#45

Post by ohyeshedid »

reaperducer wrote: post #27

Base64 is such a wonderful gift. Back when the commercial internet was just getting its act together there were companies that would give you free online access on Windows 3.1 machines in exchange for displaying ads in the e-mail client. (I think one was called Juno.) The hitch was that you could only use e-mail. No web surfing. No downloading files. No fun stuff. But that's OK, since there were usenet- and FTP-to-em…

That's really slick.

The original Juno ad server proxied the ads from the internet to the email client, and the proxy was wide open for several months. The first time I ever accessed the open internet at home was by dialing into the email service and bouncing through the proxy. I believe it was closed due to it being shared in the letters section of a hacker zine.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#46

Post by sircastor »

wmichelin wrote: post #5

Someone is going to notice a few accounts with insanely high storage usage, and then comes the ban-hammer. Enjoy losing your Google account!

I think that depends on their tools and how they evaluate data usage. If the reporting states that the accounts are using very little storage because it's using the same measuring stick that the client does them it's invisible. The question comes up during an audit of the system when the disk usage doesn't match the report. Then again, if this is used by few people it may just look like a margin of error.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#47

Post by nefitty »

judge2020 wrote: post #15
Scaevolus wrote: post #13

You can also just use GSuite with a few users to get unlimited Google Drive storage. https://support.google.com/a/answer/139019?hl=en#6_storage

That references "for education", but it's also true for GSuite Business (and enterprise, but not basic). You'll need to be paying for at least 5 users, or $60/month.

Here's the business info: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#48

Post by mo5 »

reneberlin wrote: post #2

I think in the long run, the user could risk the complete google-account if they begin rating the uploads a violation of TOS. I advise a totally seperate account when using this tool. But anyways, something inside me likes it. Nicely done. Good job :)

I'm kinda scared to try it since google could mass ban all of the accounts if they want to, but sure is a great job from the dev.

I didn't know this was plausible.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#49

Post by pestaa »

joebergeron wrote: post #11

Me and a friend came up with a similar idea of a sort of distributed file system implemented across a huge array of blog comment sections. Of course you’d need a bunch of replication and fault tolerance and the ability to automatically scrape for new blogs to post spammy-looking comments on, but I thought it was a pretty funny and neat idea when we came up with it.

The thought of a distributed MySQL cluster accessed over various versions of WordPress-as-a-database-layer just makes me happy and confused.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#50

Post by fheld »

Scaevolus wrote: post #13

You can also just use GSuite with a few users to get unlimited Google Drive storage. https://support.google.com/a/answer/139019?hl=en#6_storage

relevant video on this unlimited plan and the way it is capped.

https://youtu.be/y2F0wjoKEhg

tl;dw Upload is limited to 750GB per day per account

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