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Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

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Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#51

Post by neogodless »

GuB-42 wrote: post #41

There are several things that compound that - Storage price decreases near exponentially, while data usage also increases near exponentially, meaning that new data will always make the majority of your usage, no matter how long you and your users have been in place. - On Google scale, your are bound to have a lot of redundancy in data. Chances are that what you have in your Google drive, someone else has it. And larg…

> Chances are that what you have in your Google drive, someone else has it.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find this odd. Anything that is not unique to me, and can be downloaded again - I try not to have any copies of it taking up any of my space, local or in cloud storage. What I care about most are unique possessions - my (personal) photos, spreadsheets and documents. These are things I keep copies of both locally and online so that either could fail, but they still exist somewhere.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#52

Post by ghaff »

Spivak wrote: post #38
anoncake wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that they did not pay for their fair share of a limited resource but for an unlimited amount of it.

Can we please dispel this notion that “unlimited” means literally unbounded to the point of absurdity. Seemingly everyone understands that bottomless breadsticks doesn’t mean that Olive Garden literally has infinite breadsticks and that you’re not allow to show up with a semi and tell them to fill it up. Unlimited means that you don’t have a set quota and as long as your usage doesn’t cross over into genuine abuse of…

Personally, I'd prefer that companies not use terms that can't be literally true and that obviously must have some limitations to guard against someone who wants to upload data--e.g. high res video--to the cloud constantly.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#53

Post by lou1306 »

oefrha wrote: post #18
redm wrote: post #3

I launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006. While it is true that data accumulates as time goes on, it's not as big of an issue as described. Older data tends to be smaller, for example, photos were lower resolution. That is compounded by the fact that storage is getting cheaper. For example, the price for a 500GB drive in 2006 is the same as a 14TB drive price today. If your getting the same subsc…

I've long suspected that r/DataHoarder is why we can't have nice things, i.e. cheap online data storage that is slightly subsidized by the average user who only stores a little. Thanks for confirming from the point of view of a major storage provider.

> r/DataHoarder

To be honest, 99% of the posts there are about building your own NAS.

And I don't fully agree with the "we can't have nice things" narrative in the Google Photos case. How bad was Google hurt by the actions of these few "power users"? Before that, how much did they profit by driving out competition with their "unlimited" plan? (Which, by the way, was neatly integrated and advertised into their own mobile OS...)

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#54

Post by _flux »

pontus wrote: post #47
imtringued wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you still want to play that game then restrict the service in other ways. You could for example throttle user upload to 10mbit/s if they have uploaded more than 500GB per month. That way no single user can practically upload more than 3.5TB per month. The 2 petabyte abuse scenario would have been avoided while still being able to brag about some users storing 50TB of data on your platform.

A side note on this: I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data). In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges…

I think you missed that the speed limit would affect uploads after transferring 500G _per month_, not total? So in a year you would be able to store 6 terabytes. This would probably work out fine, because e.g. typical use of cloud storage is probably backups, and the first uploads are the largest.

I think some networks have operated in the way you want: you get full speed to some specified limit, and after that you are throttled (significantly). That works out fine to use the complete limit. On the other hand if you do want to use 15G, it's easier to do, when the block gets charged automatically.

I think it would be very hard to have a lawsuit about this if the contract includes these details.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#55

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

_flux wrote: post #54
pontus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A side note on this: I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data). In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges…

I think you missed that the speed limit would affect uploads after transferring 500G _per month_, not total? So in a year you would be able to store 6 terabytes. This would probably work out fine, because e.g. typical use of cloud storage is probably backups, and the first uploads are the largest. I think some networks have operated in the way you want: you get full speed to some specified limit, and after that you a…

You're still calling it unlimited while placing a limit. You've been clever about how you impose the limit, but it's still there.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#56

Post by pontus »

_flux wrote: post #54
pontus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A side note on this: I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data). In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges…

I think you missed that the speed limit would affect uploads after transferring 500G _per month_, not total? So in a year you would be able to store 6 terabytes. This would probably work out fine, because e.g. typical use of cloud storage is probably backups, and the first uploads are the largest. I think some networks have operated in the way you want: you get full speed to some specified limit, and after that you a…

Yeah, I know, it just reminded me of this general thought I've had for a while (that being said, it's still limited once you throttle it so the same argument would apply.)

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#57

Post by pnutjam »

Waterluvian wrote: post #9
concerned_user wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a simple google search on terms "github google takeout photos" gives a link to a script https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper plenty of other projects to use or get an idea for your own. Even if you are not a programmer writing a python script is not hard. The backblaze part you can automate with rclone or 10's of other commercial software or any from this page https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i…

Thanks. I've done all of that and is what I'm trying to avoid.

I use the google api and this, https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

I backup everything to my local server.

I also do some side work, feel free to email me if you would like me to help you set this up, if you have a server, we can do it all remotely. p n u t@ (borowicz).org, remove spaces and ()

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#58

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

GuB-42 wrote: post #41

There are several things that compound that - Storage price decreases near exponentially, while data usage also increases near exponentially, meaning that new data will always make the majority of your usage, no matter how long you and your users have been in place. - On Google scale, your are bound to have a lot of redundancy in data. Chances are that what you have in your Google drive, someone else has it. And larg…

>> 100 GB is actually an awful lot of data,

Absolutely not. It's about 10-15 average photoshoots (for arbitrary RAW image size of 25Mb) and no place for processed images or anything else.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#59

Post by pnutjam »

gravitas wrote: post #30
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I've done all of that and is what I'm trying to avoid.

The organization and data which is in that takeout is a complete mess of years of design changes from picasa -> photos, empty folders, duplicate date folders, hidden old crap from your Google+ account (like banner pics) which you can't see anymore to delete, just stuff everywhere inside those zip files. $0.02 if you ever have to actually deal with them, add time to first normalize what you unzip.

zip files suck for jpg, it's already compressed. If you're storing raw formats, it might help some.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#60

Post by jsmith99 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any good suggestion on an automated way to back up my entire google photos collection? Currently I use Google Takeout and then upload a ton of zip files to a backup like Backblaze. But it's tedious as heck and has me maintaining scripts to manage it. Which is the worst because I touch it once a year so I forget everything. I'd pay money for a business that handles this. I just want my photos safe fro…

Google Photos isn't 'safe' or versatile enough to be a good location for your master copy. It works better as a convienient photo browser with some backup and sharing features. There is a rclone backend for Google Photos but it has a few limitations due to the api. Theoretically you can use this to mount Google Photos locally but there are a few restrictions.
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