Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google’s storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a “60 day grace period” ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.
He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn’t really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they’re going to delete his account in a week, which isn’t enough time to retrieve his data… because he didn’t do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn’t do anything during the grace period, and hasn’t done anything since the grace period ended.
I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he’s not paying that cost anymore.
but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense
He was expecting a company that promised unlimited data to not reneg on their advertised product. Or to simply delete data they promised to store because it’s inconvenient for them.
Yeah, it costs money to store things, something Google’s sales, marketing, and legal teams should have thought about before offering an “unlimited” product.
Reminds me of the guy who paid a million dollars for unlimited American Airlines flights for life. He racked up millions of miles and dollars in flights so they eventually found a way to cancel his service.
Because he let someone else use it to see a dying family member iirc, which was a breach of contract
Here’s an article. It’s because he booked under a false name a few times. He had unlimited flights for himself and a companion, it’s beyond me why he didn’t do everything in his power to not give American Airlines a reason to void his ticket.
Update: here’s a really in-depth article written by his daughter that explains everything. Some of it was at American’s suggestion!
I went down a rabbit hole. Welcome to my warren.
It’s a fun rabbit hole
I’m sure he was expecting these things, at least until they notified him of the change. After that it’s on him to find an alternative solution. Are you arguing that he was still expecting these things after being notified of the change in service?
I’m saying that Google should not be allowed to sell a product with an advertised feature to gain advantage over competitors only to later change their mind and remove that feature when they deem it too costly.
A multibillion dollar advertising company should have to support the products they sell.
If you bought a car and one of the features sold was “free repairs for the life of the vehicle” you’d be rightly upset if a year later the dealer emailed you to say “actually, this was too expensive to support so we are cancelling the free repairs, but you can still pay us to repair your vehicle or we’ll sell you a new one, aren’t we generous!”
While I agree that it was Google’s mistake to offer this in the first place, there’s a decent chance that this specific guy is the reason Google decided to end unlimited storage.
Looking around at some storage pricing, he would have been paying over $2k per month to store that much data elsewhere. Maybe less if it was cold storage or archive (which would have meant accessing it wouldn’t have been as quick).
For your car repair example, it would kinda be like someone got that and then started going to every crash up derby they could find.
If your usage of an unlimited service is orders of magnitude above where the bell curve normally lies, you’re an asshole. And it’s a mistake to offer unlimited services because of assholes like that. It’s predictable, but they are still assholes.
For your car repair example, it would kinda be like someone got that and then started going to every crash up derby they could find.
No, it’s actually more like you bought the car because you know you’re going to rack up a million miles every year. Out of the norm but not an asshole move.
If Google didn’t want to lose here, they could have not had that feature.
200TB is a lot of data and a completely reasonable amount if you are doing a lot of filming. HD film takes up a lot of space, especially if it’s raw.
This sort of usage is so predictable I can’t imagine Google didn’t consider it when pricing things out. Heck, they advertised the unlimited storage space being useful FOR preserving photos and video.
Why give a company that spent 26 billion dollars making their search engine the default everywhere because they don’t want to spend the 1 million dollars it’d require to continue supporting a product they advertised. They could have ended new sign ups and just supported existing customers.
I don’t think someone should have to maintain an offer in perpetuity because they offered it once (though this differs from “lifetime” offers).
Google should be fucked directly for their anticompetitiveness. Unlimited offers should probably be regulated and forced to specify some limit, since nothing is truly unlimited (eg an unlimited internet connection is actually limited to max bandwidth * time in period). Or maybe they should drop the “unlimited” bit in general.
This is more like someone bursting into AT&T yelling, “YOU TOLD ME THIS PHONE HAD UNLIMITED DATA! WHY DOESN’T IT WORK!?”
…
“I HAVE TO PAY YOU EVERY MONTH FOR THE PHONE TO WORK!? WHAT A RIPOFF!! YOU SAID IT HAD UNLIMITED DATA! I’M CALLING THE COPS! WHERE’S YOUR PHONE?!”Don’t worry about it. The police are already on the way.
OP is using a strawman, but it’s a reasonable one. In an ideal world, if a company offers unlimited data, then changes its mind, the least they could do is, I don’t know, ship the users’ data in SD cards for free.
233TBs in SD cards?! Lmao!
While I agree SD cards are unfeasible, Google Cloud Services offers a Transfer Appliance. MSFT Azure Databox is a mere $350 for a round trip 100Tb NAS freight box. I think that something could have been arranged.
This is the crux of it. Should people expect actual unlimited data? Maybe not, if you’re tech savvy and understand matters on the backend, but also I’m fairly sure there’s a dramatically greater burden on Google for using the word “unlimited”. If they didn’t want to get stuck with paying the tab for the small number of extreme power users who actually use that unlimited data, then they shouldn’t have sold it as such in the first place. Either Google actually clearly discloses the limits of their product (no, not in the impossible to find fine print), or they accept that storing huge bulk data for a few accounts is the price they pay for having to actually deliver the product they advertised.
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They discontinued the unlimited storage plan, so he can’t still be paying for the unlimited storage. I’m not a big fan of Google’s “I’m not seeing a return yet, better kill this product” approach, but it has been their MO for a long time. I think by now everyone doing business with them knows who they are.
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It is their customary response when a person quits the service, the plan is no longer offered etc that the data remains in read only mode for an unspecified period of time during which they do not any longer take payments for the service. This happened previously to people who exceeded the limit for Gmail free storage too. 15GB of storage free with a Gmail account but if you exceed that (say had Google One and exceeded that and then canceled your Google One subscription) your files wouldn’t automatically be deleted.
Actually, I just read one of my emails from Google about their change from drive storage to Google one storage. It claims if I exceed my storage limit for up to two years my entire account will be deleted, not just my files. Effective June 1, 2021. I have a consumer account, but I’m assuming there is an equitable set of policies for gsuite/business users.
He did pay for the service though. They just decided to stop charging him for it.
So, he paid for a period. Then the product was discontinued and they stopped charging him. So from then on, no he wasn’t paying. Google didn’t have to change it to read only, they could have just given notice and deleted it then.
Should they have made it clearer that the read only mode was a limited time thing and the data would be deleted at the end of that? Very probably.
Exactly. People love to “cry foul” when Google does stuff like this but it’s completely unrealistic to think you can store 278 TB on Google’s server in perpetuity just because you’re giving them like $20-30/month (probably less, I had signed up for the Google for Business to get the unlimited storage as well, IIRC it was like $5-$10/month). It was known a while ago that people were abusing the hell out of this loophole to make huge cloud media servers.
He’s an idiot for saving “his life’s work” in one place that he doesn’t control. If he really cares about it that much he should have had cold-storage backups of it all. Once you get beyond like 10-20 TB it’s time to look into a home server or one put one in a CoLo. Granted, storing hundreds of TBs isn’t cheap (I had 187 TB in my server across like 20 drives), but it gives you peace of mind to know that you control access to it.
I have all my “important” stuff in Google drive even though I run my own media server with like 100 TBs but that’s because I tend to break stuff unintentionally or don’t want to have to worry about deleting it accidentally. All my important stuff amounts to 33 GB. That’s a drop in the ocean for Google. Most of that is also stored either on my server, the server I built for my parents, or pictures stored on Facebook.
Google didn’t tell him that they were going to delete the data until a week before. I think that’s the issue. It’s like when you tell someone a family member moved on, you need to use the word “die” or it’s open to interpretation. Google needed to straight up say that they were going to delete the data after 6 months, but they didn’t.
233TB. Damn, I thought that was GB until I reread it.
Just some advice to anyone who finds themselves in this specific situation, since I found myself in almost the exact same situation:
If you really, really want to keep the data, and you can afford to spend the money (big if), move it to AWS. I had to move almost 4.5PB of data around Christmas of last year out of Google Drive. I spun up 60 EC2 instances, set up rclone on each one, and created a Google account for each instance. Google caps downloads per account to 10TB per day, but the EC2 instances I used were rate limited to 60MBps, so I didn’t bump the cap. I gave each EC2 instance a segment of the data, separating on file size. After transferring to AWS, verifying the data synced properly, and building a database to find files, I dropped it all to Glacier Deep Archive. I averaged just over 3.62GB/s for 14 days straight to move everything. Using a similar method, this poor guy’s data could be moved in a few hours, but it costs, a couple thousand dollars at least.
Bad practice is bad practice, but you can get away with it for a while, just not forever. If you’re in this situation, because you made it, or because you’re cleaning up someone else’s mess, you’re going to have to spend money to fix it. If you’re not in this situation, be kind, but thank god you don’t have to deal with it.
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And Senpai has 4.5 PB! I didn’t know you could fit that many tentacle dicks into a sassy little 11 year old server!
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I’m just curious how someone even gets to 4 Petabytes of data. It’s taking me years to fill up just 8 TB. And that’s with TV and movies.
Seems a few thousand is worth it for your life’s work
Jesus
How much do you pay for that in aws
Wait, journalist, 233 terabyte? Just what in the fuck did his life’s work consist of?
raw recorded video
A Call of Duty update.
That’s only one map though, where’s the rest?
My node_modules folder
Log files from a local SQL server.
JPGs
Raw high-def video and image files? But yeah, there’s unlimited and then there’s kinda pushing the limits of what’s reasonable. 233TB is more than the contents of some orgs’ datacenters
Yeah, there are show a day YouTube production companies with a team of editors running years off a petabyte.
Certainly not impossible, but probably more of an article in the writing than an actual journalist in distress
tl;dr: Google fucked him proper. But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his “life’s work”, risk free.
I store my shit on Google Drive. But it’s only 2TB of offsite backups, not my primary.
Time and again I’ve learned the past 25-years, no one gives a shit about their data until they lose it all. People gotta get kicked in the fork so hard they go deaf before they’ll pay attention.
Naive, perhaps, but if a company advertises a service, they better fucking deliver on that service. Sure, I wouldn’t store all of my important documents solely on a cloud service either, but let’s not victim blame the guy here who paid for a service and was not given that service. Google’s Enterprise plan promised unlimited data; whether that’s 10 GB or 200 TB, that’s not for us nor Google to judge. Unlimited means unlimited. And in an article linked in the OP, even customer service seemed to assure them that it was indeed unlimited, with no cap. And then pulled the rug.
And on top of that, according to the article, Google emailed them saying their account would be in “read-only” mode, as in, they could download the files but not upload any. Which is fine enough-- until Google contacted them saying they were using too much space and their files would all be deleted. Space that, again, was originally unlimited.
Judge the guy all you want, but don’t blame him. Fuck Google, full stop.
The problem here is that Google’s “unlimited” plan was real, but it was for the G-Suite Enterprise product, which they discontinued. Two years ago, they started moving everything and everyone to a new product offering, Google Workspace. The Enterprise plans there have unlimited* data, and that asterisk is important, because it specifies that unlimited is no longer unlimited, which is dumb. It’s a pool of data shared between users, and each user account contributes 5TB towards the pool, capping at 300 users. From there, if I remember correctly, additional 10TB chunks cost $300/month.
I feel bad for this guy, but the writing has been on the wall for years now. Google has changed their account structure and platform costs to discourage this type of use.
But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his “life’s work”, risk free.
Google made a promise they didn’t keep and articles like this are the consequence of that.
It’s not ideal, but it still feels better than “let them lie and then blame their victims for believing it”.
Yes, that’s true, but it’s also true that Google has a long history of discontinuing services suddenly, so expecting them to keep this particular promise was extremely naive.
I feel like a tl;dr should mention the FBI. You summed up the headline.
Yes, this. I don’t trust ANYONE on the Internet. If you want something forever you download it yourself and back it up. Even tech giants like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit will not be here forever. YouTube will just delete your videos that have been up for 13 years without warning.
He clearly cared about his data, don’t equate this man to the people who don’t really think about it and don’t actually back their stuff up (and come crying to everyone when their 10 year old disk dies)
People like to say to use the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which is really good advice, but it does NOT scale, trust me. I guarantee you I have more disposable income than this journalist (I assume that because journalists make shit money), and when I looked into a 3-2-1 solution with my meager 60TB of data, the cost starts to become astronomical (and frankly unaffordable) for individuals.
Lot of didn’t-read-the-article-itis in here. FBI seized his physical storage, cloud was the only option for the journalist and it did not make financial sense to pay for multiple cloud backups. Google is entirely the bad guy here.
It sounds more like “Oh no, someone took your files? Well, you should upload everything you have to our server. Include anything we, I mean they, might have missed the first time. We’ll keep it safe. You can totally trust us not to send your data to anyone, just like we recently got caught doing…again.”
a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over. At the time, I dubbed it Google’s “big, faceless, white monolith” problem, because that’s how it appears to many customers.
Hey, sounds like pretty much every corporation in 2023!
I hate so fucking much how little customer service companies are allowed to have.
“I hate so fucking much how little customer service companies are allowed to have”.
It’s not a mater of how much customer service they’re allowed, rather than how much they choose to have. In most cases they choose to have close to none because it’s more profitable for them, so its in the best short term interest of their share holders. And yes, in most corporations, long term is thex quarter
I tried for 6 months to reset my Frontier Airlines password, I contacted their support line about it. They told me to do a password reset, so I did and it said my account was locked. So the support person said “Sorry it is locked, I can’t help now, try again tomorrow but contact us before you do the reset”
So I did. Waited 2 days just to make sure 24 hours had passed, contacted support, told them about the problem, they told me to do the password reset. So I did the password reset, account locked again. Their response "Sorry your account is locked, contact us again in 24 hours about this.
So I did. Waited 2 days just to make sure 24 hours had passed. Contact support, had them verify the account is current NOT locked. Which it wasn’t, so they told me to do the password reset, account is locked. Their response “Sorry your account is now locked, contact us again in 24 hours.”
Eventually I did realize what the problem was, which is kind of my fault, but the fact my 4 attempts to contact their support directly about this problem didn’t trigger some kind of “Maybe this is an issue I could bring up to the dev team” is kind of surprising. The issue is that if you try to reset your Frontier Airlines password with a password that is too long, say 20 characters instead of 16 (max), it just locks your account. No errors given on “sorry this doesn’t meet our requirements” just locked. CS tried nothing to look into it, just it says locked now, not our problem.
Limiting the length of a password (at least to something as low as 16 characters) sounds like an unnecessary, bad idea…
Placing any restrictions at all on what makes a valid password is an unnecessary, bad idea.
I think I agree, but short passwords like “x”, “69”, “420”, “abcd”, “12345” etc. would take a very short time to brute-force… Is your take that even if these are allowed, it will make all other passwords of the site more secure, since it adds more possibilities to the list where nothing can be disregarded when trying to brute-force any other password?
Yes that’s exactly it. When you reduce the total space of possible passwords you are giving a brute force attack unnecessary hints to improve their attempts with. A weak password will always be a weak password, so single digits or obvious or popular patterns should be avoided, but this should be a matter of user education rather than a hard and fast rule for account creation.
Which is a matter of how little they’re allowed to have. If there were some sort of minimums that might actual force them to be somewhat effective.
Instead it’s a race to the bottom of “your business is important to us, but nobody gives a fuck about your satisfaction”
That’s pretty heartless bro
from “don’t be evil” to stunts like this in basically no time flat. #capitalism!
How is Google getting rich off his free account?
No no. If a company isn’t spending more than it’s making, it’s 100% evil.
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Cloud storage like that cost $3-6k per month without egress fees, depending on service. He could’ve been a little more skeptical about the free offering. If you’re not paying you have no recourse.
I don’t know about google but being a free used doent change that you are a coustmer and that you will be affected by it. If you go to a public collage and you are getting a free education ,then arent you allowed to question the authorities?. Other than that the journalist is in the wrong too.
Jesus. Even downloading at 1 Gbps, it would take a few weeks to download all that data. I don’t think Google’s Transfer Appliance works for retrieving data.
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I was just checking and it’s $1,600/mo to transfer it over to wasabi but how long would that take? I really hope Google does the right thing but that is not their MO these days.
If the company was run by a hallucinating AI it couldn’t be any flakier.
Storing that much data on Wasabi would cost about $1,700/mo.
If it’s that important, rent a VPS, connect Rclone to Google Drive and Wasabi, and transfer.
Even 5 Gb/s would get it done in under 5 days and VPSes are usually faster than that.
I hope someone has already made this suggestion to him.
Edit: Forgot about the daily download limit… ugh. What a pain in the ass.
I’m speechless
Googs IS the LastPass of everything!
I had this happen to me. They haven’t threated to delete my account yet. I have about 50TB. I built a 170TB (raw) NAS for $2000 and transferred it all, only took about a week or so to download everything on my gig fiber.
Yo, Where do I send my resume?
Congratulations on having a spare $2k and access to gig fibre. We’re very proud of you.
All people who think this is a good read should Google about the Bitcasa saga, that was a wild ride.
That was indeed a fun story.
