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Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

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Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#41

Post by whatamidoingyo »

tedivm wrote: post #24

People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in the startup world, and I'd rather host all my content in us-east-1 than rely on google. * I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error, * I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and…

> * I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen,

I've heard of this happening to a lot of people. I hate using Adsense, and have mainly disabled it in the past, but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic and always think, "darn, I should have kept Adsense running".

I'm wondering if it's worth slowing down my sites and annoying users to eventually get to $100 to see if I'll be able to cash it out. It's getting close to $100, so it's hard to deactivate.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#42

Post by AlexandrB »

moduspol wrote: post #31
wkat4242 wrote: post #2

This is one of the reasons i dont like cloud. I only use it for (encrypted) backups and temporary sharing. Not for important stuff. Also i dont want my account or data to be randomly deleted due to vague terms and conditions or policies.

I trust cloud just fine--I just don't trust unsustainable business models. You can store data on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure and pay per GB per month. They price it at a level that's profitable to them, and I pay for it. "Unlimited, at fixed (or no) cost, forever" is not a sustainable business model. If you're one of the outliers, you risk issues like in OP. If enough people are outliers, then they'll eventually have…

> I trust cloud just fine--I just don't trust unsustainable business models.

You never know what some beancounter at a megacorp thinks is "sustainable". Putting your data in the hands of a third party is certainly convenient, but shouldn't be relied on if you care about the data sticking around.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#43

Post by DeathArrow »

brookst wrote: post #5
wkat4242 wrote: post #2

This is one of the reasons i dont like cloud. I only use it for (encrypted) backups and temporary sharing. Not for important stuff. Also i dont want my account or data to be randomly deleted due to vague terms and conditions or policies.

I use cloud for everything, but that’s because I did some reflection and realized that I don’t actually have any digital data that would be catastrophic to lose. Annoying, sure. But whatever. I can’t think of a single digital artifact that would be so terrible to lose that it’s worth maintaining highly redundant storage at multiple locations myself.

I do have code and lots of photos. And I use good old hard drives to store them. Cloud storage just for backup.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#44

Post by stephc_int13 »

I think that "the cloud" should not be considered to be a safe long-term storage. It can be used as redundancy backup, but if you really need to keep your data, you should take care of that yourself.

This is not a technical issue, but an ownership issue. Google is mostly an ad company and as such they don't really treat you as users but as a product.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#45

Post by martijnvds »

gwervc wrote: post #33
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

> And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. I was about to say 'you should have other backups', but the FBI is a very powerful persistent threat, and might be the more important problem.

Startup idea: SaaS portal to trigger FBI raid on RAID disks, acting as a free replicated permanent archival storage. Retrieving the data is out of scope of the MVP.

A raid-RAID?

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#47

Post by UseStrict »

blibble wrote: post #14

I think the best advice you can give anyone for tech in the 21st century is to never, ever rely on any Google services or products

Agreed, I use their services, but I absolutely do not depend on them. They can't be trusted.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#48

Post by xeromal »

toss1 wrote: post #26

1) Physical Media that YOU physically own & control. 2) Off-Site Backups Regardless of the threat, whether it is just bad media, house fire, ordinary thieves, or the FBI, relying on some cloud service as your only backup is a plan to fail. If it is a threat if someone reads the backups, encrypt. Sure, as a supplemental convenience, use Google or something. But as the only backup of your life's work? I feel really bad…

He had backups. The FBI took them from multiple locations

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#49

Post by moduspol »

AlexandrB wrote: post #42
moduspol wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust cloud just fine--I just don't trust unsustainable business models. You can store data on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure and pay per GB per month. They price it at a level that's profitable to them, and I pay for it. "Unlimited, at fixed (or no) cost, forever" is not a sustainable business model. If you're one of the outliers, you risk issues like in OP. If enough people are outliers, then they'll eventually have…

> I trust cloud just fine--I just don't trust unsustainable business models. You never know what some beancounter at a megacorp thinks is "sustainable". Putting your data in the hands of a third party is certainly convenient, but shouldn't be relied on if you care about the data sticking around.

You never know when you'll have a fire, software bug, or critical disk failure. It's at least as good of a backup location as any other.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#50

Post by TomK32 »

ofrzeta wrote: post #29

Google charges USD 0,15/GB for egress traffic out of GCP. That's USD 36864 for 240TB. Am I right? EDIT: Actually egress seems to be 0,08. So roughly half of what I wrote.

Just looking at the cheap 20TB disk drives available here in Austria, the disks alone add just over 4000 Euros to that, and then you still need a machine to host 12 drives, I see one QNAP for 12 disk for only 1500 Euros. But it has only a 2x10Gb connection. Slimming down the data sounds like the first thing to do here.
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