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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

#401

Post by justin_oaks »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #299
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…

Just to be put the record straight: Google is an advertising company with hobbies. And like for many of us hobbies change over time, so do Google's hobbies. There's somewhere a website with all the products killed by Google for various reasons, some even after a few months.

The website you're referring to: https://killedbygoogle.com/

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

#402

Post by x0x0 »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #380
faeriechangling wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Support doesn’t scale so Google doesn’t want to do it out of greed and immaturity.

If any given user needs x support hours a week, and their business pays for > x support hours a week, then support scales. I guess as you scale up a business you want to get leaner and you accept lower margins, hoping to make it back by volume? Maybe that's what you mean?

I assume he/she meant scale == grows (mostly independently) of human hours. Support can never scale; only fixing your software so that it doesn't trigger support needs scales.

Otherwise, each support request linearly requires human time.

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

#403

Post by tylervigen »

I find the actions of Google here are as troubling as every other commenter. However, I cannot fathom managing 200TB on Google Drive. It's just such a terrible cloud platform experience for managing that much data. It is clearly design for "typical" consumers who have a few gigabytes at most; moving, modifying, downloading, and uploading files is all bottlenecked.

Personal anecdote: Once I was using Google Collab to process a few thousand images. I needed to move the photos (less than one GB) to a new folder. It took over an hour, and appeared to process the moves in JavaScript in my web browser.

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

#404

Post by thinkharderdev »

rkagerer wrote: post #139
that_guy_iain wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" You just expanded it. It's still basically the same. > It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing hi…

Unlimited means unlimited. Too often what gets lost in the phrase "edge case" is that there's a human being on the other end. They should do the decent thing and work with him and anyone else storing more data than can be practically downloaded to come up with a workaround or extension. Imagine if your bank closed your account and forfeited your money because they couldn't dole it out to you fast enough.

Unlimited did mean unlimited though. There was probably some sort of limit but this guy never in fact hit it. But Google stopped offering unlimited storage (probably because of people like this who would store 100s of TB). They notified him of this months before discontinuing the service and he apparently made no effort to find a different storage solution, maybe because it would be really expensive to store that much data in the cloud anywhere else. Did he think they would just continue to store the data indefinitely? That doesn't strike me as a reasonable assumption to make.

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

#405

Post by flavius29663 »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #104
andrewmutz wrote: post #51

The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying fo…

> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" You just expanded it. It's still basically the same. > It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing hi…

So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.

Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

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

#406

Post by JimDabell »

boringg wrote: post #179
mmstan wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account." I don't see how can this be seen as "taking advantage of a system".

"Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account." Thats highly subjective to the point of meaningless.

It was Google who set the price and service limit, not him, so I don’t think there’s any room here to argue that the price he was paying was unfairly low.

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

#408

Post by sllabres »

boringg wrote: post #179
mmstan wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account." I don't see how can this be seen as "taking advantage of a system".

"Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account." Thats highly subjective to the point of meaningless.

Can you explain, why this is subjective/meaningless? Apparently he paid the amount that Google wanted for the unlimited service?

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

#410

Post by crooked-v »

amf12 wrote: post #165
cedilla wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google offered "as much storage as you need" for the Workspace account, without attaching a condition on a required number of seats. It's not a loophole if a customer takes them up on the offer. I'm usually sympathetic with businesses who failed to appreciate how much power very few power users really have, but this is Google we're talking about. Their sales and legal department is larger than 90% of tech companies.…

As with any subscription, there is a time bound to it, after which either side can refuse to renew it. The account was never "unlimited for life". Let's assume it's AWS storage. After you stop paying (renewing) would you still expect to keep your data forever free of cost?

> after you stop paying

The difference here is that Google was the one who fired him as a customer, and did so on a timeframe tight enough to make it functionally impossible to actually get all his data back.

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