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 for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. Now, the account is scheduled for termination since he's not paying for a valid current account.
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 his video files before his account terminates.
Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position.
He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data. He need to get his data out. Trying to get my data out of Google, I've gotten ~1TB out in ~1 week. This is about a year's worth of time to not lose it.
The facts are not "even less inflammatory."
A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company.
Crisis (!?) is a bit dramatic.
Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy.
No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.
OT, but this is why I am skeptical of Cloudflare right now. Am I right to be concerned?
you're only skeptical of CF now? They've been garbage for years in terms of service and support
It has just seemed like people are big fans of the "free, unlimited" plans here. I use a provider that is pay-per-usage personally, which seems more sustainable.
Support is part of the cost that is rolled into that pay-per-usage fee IMO.
I've worked at multiple places that unfortunately paid for CF services (and support), and have consistently had trouble with them. And that doesn't include just general CF service instability for end users.
Ditto. We got locked into a long-term Cloudflare contract and regretted it immensely. So much stuff that’s beta quality, broken promises, terrible support. Looks great on the surface, until you need to actually rely upon it.
Cloudflare covers this in their terms of service:
In other words, if you serve HTML / CSS / JS you'll be fine. Too much of anything else and at some point they will ask you to pay.I've experienced this first-hand and they're pretty fair about it. I believe they asked me to upgrade to Enterprise once I was serving something like >10-20TB per month of images / audio files (this was several years ago though!)
R2 has similarly misaligned pricing, and I don't think it comes with comparable ToS limitations: You pay per request, and not proportional to data egress. So theoretically you could use it to distribute huge files very cheaply. Assuming there is no maximum request duration, it could even be used with a long running connection to download a video as it's being watched.
Yes. They will flip on their customers sooner or later. It might be years. And so long as you are prepared to bail when the time comes, you may as well keep taking advantage. But if it's critical infrastructure, make sure you have a failover plan ready.
I challenge you to go to any restaurant that has "unlimited refills", back up a tanker trunk and fill your truck. I don't think any court would enforce "unlimited" for that situation. I'm not sure this storage one is all that different
In fact all you can eat buffets ban people from showing up after they completely break the system.
All-you-can-eat is not the same as unlimited.
I feel like this isn't the best example, such restaurant can say that its only unlimited if you drink it in-house, in plain view. You almost never can take out food or drinks in all-you-can eat restaurants.
But restaurants explicitly ban doing that. Even all you can eat restaurants don't let you take out food. Google never hinted at having a maximum limit. Theres no reason to believe or expect that unlimited actually means some arbitrary limit that google just came up with after you signed up. Your analogy would've been better if the journo tried hosting a file share service using his drive account as a back end or something but that's not what happened
Sounds like you just made Google's case for them. They provided the service. They cancelled it. Not their problem what happens with customer data afterwards.
Agreed.
Contrast this "unlimited" with how gmail was rolled out – gmail didn't offer unlimited email storage, it just offered a number orders of magnitude greater than everyone thought was realistic at the time.
Google clearly made a mistake in offering an "unlimited plan" so it makes perfect sense that they're going to discontinue it, and offer 60 days before the data becomes read only. If it was just that, there wouldn't be any article.
The fact that they regret offering an unlimited plan doesn't, however, give them the right to tell him that they're going to give him 60 days before the data becomes read only but it won't be deleted and then suddenly tell him that actually his data is going to be deleted in 7 days, which isn't sufficient time to transfer it elsewhere.
Yeah usually the thing about deadlines is that you should communicate them as harshly as possible, then let them slip when they do arrive. I.e. they want people off the service voluntarily and deal with the tiny fraction that refuses.
Is this not exactly what has happened? He was clearly threatened harshly, and... the data isn't yet deleted?
He wasn’t threatened harshly. He was told his data would become read-only, which he took at face value and assumed his data would remain safe. Then suddenly he was told the data would be deleted within seven days.
How exactly is that not a harsh threat? Sounds like a harsh threat to me. They were nice before, he didn't comply, now they're jerks. But it remains just a threat unless they actually wipe the data. Which they won't, because he's surely downloading it right now while we yell about it on HN.
I was referring to the making it read-only.
And there’s no practical way to download that amount of data within seven days, just based on the bandwidth this would require. The situation would be totally different if they gave him six months notice for the deletion.
He didn’t comply with what? Show me where in Google’s communications where it said they were going to delete his data.
No; the opposite happened.
Google initially told him that there was no hard deadline for getting the data off—just that his drive would be read-only as long as it was over the limit.
Then, 6 months later, they told him he had 7 days to get it off or it would be wiped.
Right, exactly. "He has 7 days or it would be wiped" is a threat, not a punishment. Was the data wiped or not? What are you willing to bet that we'll actually see a followup claiming the data was wiped? Almost certainly he's going to download the thing onto $3k of SSDs and get off the service, which is what everyone wants.
Moving 237.22 TB in 7 days requires ~3.14 Gbps of bandwidth, assuming that the clock starts ticking the moment that he actually starts moving data. In practice, the requirements would be even higher (subtracting out the time between notice being sent and read, plus time to actually set up alternative storage). Does Google even provide that level of read throughput to Google Drive customers?
In this case, the initial notification (reproduced in the article) didn’t threaten to delete the files. Instead of communicating the threat harshly, it said that after 60 days his account would be placed in “read-only” mode.
It sounds like he (I think reasonably) believed that would be the new reality after the grace period: that he couldn’t write new files, but that his existing data would be accessible indefinitely in read-only form.
Sure, it’s clear from the context that Google vaguely wants him to stop being a headache for them. But planning for a read-only future is very different from planning for your data to be vaporized. As GP points out, Google could get eviction done in the same timeframe but save considerable face if the initial correspondence had said “you’re using way too much, it’s against our TOS, and we’re deleting your data in 30 days,” then given him a 30-day “reprieve” when the deadline drew near.
Perhaps it was a mistake, but offering unlimited was a competitive advantage. Others working with the economies of storage had limits or priced based on usage; having unlimited would be a great way to draw in customers. I'm highly skeptical of tech companies effectively price dumping, harming competition, and then coming out and saying "Oops, that wasn't sustainable. Here are the new terms." I'm of the mindset that if you offered an unlimited plan you should have to grandfather in customers that bought into that plan.
I hardly think it's fair to say that they were 'taking advantage'. If Google says unlimited, should the typical person really expect that to be taken away? That's a really bad look for Google. "If we offer something that's good value to you, expect it to be taken away suddenly in the future." Those are not the actions of a company I would want to rely on.
With modern connected devices, I absolutely do expect for features (or even total functionality) to be removed on a whim by the manufacturer. Cloud services are no different.
Lesson being: do not rely on devices or services that rely on a third party. They absolutely will screw you; it’s only a matter of time.
If you do not believe this, then I would say that you have not been around this industry long enough. There may be rare exceptions, but this should be your rule if you care about the longevity of your software and data.
You see why this is horrific UX and people have good reason to complain about it tho right?
You can't expect customers to go into this as battle-hardened as their opponent.
People have excellent reason to complain about it. But we should still be prepared.
If you don't own the hardware and software stack, you don't own the service.
You may be factually correct, but as a paying customer, this is not acceptable.
Absolutely. The word "unlimited" has been misused by so many companies (especially ISP and mobile) that anyone who has their eyes open should expect it to mean limited.
Also if there is a deal that is exceeding better than other options, don't be surprised when the rules change later.
Remus says it better in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38628966
Most unlimited services operate like all you can eat buffets. There is some secondary constraint that keeps usage bounded. I.e. the person's ability to eat food.
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.
Wait, so its his fault that he did not pay Google more? "Just in case" money?
He probably wouldn’t have been able to even if he wanted (barring using multiple accounts, which comes with its own problems, including an increased risk of Google taking it as a reason to shut the accounts down).
Can you explain, why this is subjective/meaningless? Apparently he paid the amount that Google wanted for the unlimited service?
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.
Also they've been giving out these warnings for months. I'm sympathetic to the guy with the seemingly abusive legal actions from Fox but this storage problem did not just spring from nothing into the final crisis stage.
We had to move a bunch of data off gdrive too, which did little for our opinion of Google's business customer support and was a PITA I didn't need, but the first warnings were in 2002 some time and we were nowhere near as egregious in usage as some of the/r/datahoarder crowd that had multiple petabytes hiding in the lowest cost Gsuite legacy pricing.
That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable).
If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your quota it will get deleted in 180 days" I'd consider this entire post to be a waste of space - but that's not what happened, and I'm very sympathetic to his situation.
There are dated messages in the article showing this going back to at least July 2023. So yes, your second case is closer to what appears to have been the sequence of events.
Are there? Do you see any message from July 2023 explicitly saying that his data will be deleted with a deadline for such deletion?
No unfair advantage: if you say “unlimited” then you MUST expect and allow the occasional statistical outlier that uploads 237TB of data.
Otherwise its false advertising.
Edit: the real mistake here is trusting google, a company with a track record in messing up with their customers (from retired products to accounts frozen without any hope of appeal).
Yeah Google made a mistake, being online so long, having a huge legal team. They should know there is 0.1 - 1% users to will conciously or unconciously misuse your system and drive your cost up. Better to have fair use limits from the start.
Wait, so Google lied about selling an unlimited storage plan and the response is to punish a person for believing them? Sounds to me like the wrong party is being punished here.
Trust in Google might be near zero on HN these days but they still have a pretty good reputation with the general public. Expecting every non-technical user to see through the BS feels pretty wrong to me. I mean, what's the point of consumer protection laws if they don't push companies to be honest?
Why do you think this?
He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota.
They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they withdrew the unlimited service he was using?
I'm no fan of Google, and I agree with you that a good service would have offered an at-or-slightly-above-cost data export for that volume of data... but he's deliberately misrepresenting the situation here (either that or is painfully naive)
Edit: as somebody else pointed out downthread, he also would have received numerous e-mails throughout 2022 telling him that the unlimited service was being shuttered
The six-month grace period notice pretty clearly states his data would be read-only, while the seven-day notice seems to be the first time destruction is even mentioned. I think we can both agree that there's a world of difference between data being read-only and being destroyed. I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it.
7 days to download 200TB+ does not seem reasonable.
No, I agree. Sorry, my phrasing there was poor. I meant: it is completely reasonable to say that "he has seven days to download it", not that it is completely reasonable for him to only have seven days.
I see what you mean; thanks for clarifying.
'to say that...' is discussing which of the statements in the article is a better interpretation, 7 vs 60. It is not making any claims about the reasonableness of the 7 days to download the soon to be deleted data.
based on the rest of the comment, I'm guessing GP missed a negative like "don't", or "isn't", or "not", etc
I was curious what the context of "grace period" is for Google Drive and found this:
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/13321050/what-will-h...
"If I cancel my additional storage, will all the files/documents that took up the additional space, be deleted? Or will I still have access to them?"
"You will still have access to all your files but, if you have used all storage you won't be able to add or create NEW files until you have space available."
Which sounds like you're right, unless the Product Expert was wrong.
Which is entirely likely, given that Google's "Product Experts" aren't employees with access to internal communication channels, they're just volunteers working for internet points.
The fact that this comment chain is about 7 deep trying to figure out whether the customer was given enough notice or not I think is also evidence that Google has a terrible UX for this anyway.
If your data is going to be deleted, it should be painfully obvious well in advance.
It's very funny to me that people keep falling for this clickbait/ragebait nonsense. All you have to do is put Google in the title and people won't even bother to check into the facts, they just start raging.
At first I found this frustrating because of the amount of misinformation being propagated but now it's just goofy to see people fall for it over and over.
Even for Google Podcasts which is being terminated, users who don't pay have gotten notifications for well over a year that the service was going to shutdown, even the app has a little pop-up saying it. There is no way this person wasn't aware of what was going to happen, they would have had several emails at least, and I would be surprised if the google drive client didn't notify them of what would happen well ahead of time.
Sure. That's what it is. He's a grifter, grifting Google to try to shame them into giving him a quarter of a petabyte of storage for free. He knew all along that his data would be deleted, and waited to the last second because he figures this is a sure thing and he'll get to keep it forever. You caught him. I can't believe we all fell for it.
It's not as if non-technical people (and technical ones too!) can't be confused or overwhelmed, and he should have been able to telepathically read Google's collective hivemind that "goes into read-only mode" means "we'll delete all the shit you don't have room or time to put anywhere else".
I doubt he expected Google to store his data forever, and I don’t see anything indicating that this is what he expects. Forever is a straw man.
It would be reasonable to expect some kind of migration / off-boarding plan, and it’s Google’s responsibility to facilitate that after pulling the plug on services they previously committed to providing.
Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.
A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company.
This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.
Not for a freeloader who was in the top 0.1% of usage without paying a dime. Those types of users should be fired urgently and with prejudice by small businesses. I wouldn't expect an all-you-can eat buffet to pack several dozen to-go boxes because a "customer" now wants to leave the premises with several trays-worth of food.
I haven't seen any buffet advertize itself as offering "unlimited" food, but rather they say "all-you-can-eat" and then typically clearly clarify on the door and the front desk something like "on our premises, in under 2 hours".
Google should have been smart enough to not say "unlimited" if they don't mean it.
I wonder if TOS had some clause on reasonable use. Or spelled out the timeframe they can terminate the contact.
He was paying though?
Not for the last several months, not for nearly 250TB of data.
The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced to make a U-turn and lose some face in the process.
These types of businesspeople should be fired urgently and with prejudice.
Offering it as an option at the customer's expense seems like a fair way of avoiding burning a user.
Backblaze does this
Google has an option to have hardware shipped to you that can hold 480TB uncompressed.
Not sure if it works with the 'drive' but does with google cloud storage: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-trans...
"Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position."
Agreed that this is a crisis but it is not impossible.
You can use 'rclone' - running on your own system or hosted elsewhere - to move data between cloud providers.
You don't rely on your own bandwidth - they talk directly to one another:
... and if you don't want to bother even installing rclone, you can run it somewhere it is already installed: Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google <--> aws are capable of).I am, admittedly, hand-waving away the actual configuration of those "remotes" as they are called, which involve your login and/or API keys, etc. - here is an example of what that config might look like:
https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html
(Minimum rsync.net) is still (237.22TB x 1024 x $0.006/GB =) $1457/month.
Most “independent journalists” I know aren’t operating on the kind of household budget where they can handwave that kind of bill away.
Perhaps they ought to invest in tape drives and (encrypted) offsite backups at friends' homes. If they want convenience of always-available data, they have to pay for that
This still requires Google Drive be able to serve your 237 TB at over 3 gbps for the full 7 days. In my experience this is not the case with cloud storage offerings.
This guy realistically had plenty of time to figure it out without a fancy transfer method though. The real problem is they don't want to pay $$$ for somewhere else to host the files and have now reached the point it has become a problem.
I wasn't aware that rclone could create a direct connections and had a quick skim through the documentation where I found this in the FAQ (https://rclone.org/faq/)
----
Can rclone sync directly from drive to s3 Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems just fine.
Note that it effectively downloads the file and uploads it again, so the node running rclone would need to have lots of bandwidth. ----
Sure, let's blame the victim here!
I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Google is in the wrong on their response but, come on, let's be reasonable human beings and stop saying 'victim blaming'.
Why do you think this?
Because they are using 237 Tb in an "unlimited" service from Google. And based on the mechanism they are using to pay for it (enterprise account with one seat) - they knew they had found a loop hole in google policy. (r/datahoarders)
Seriously I'm all on board with giving Google the much grief that they deserve - but I also would expect someone claiming victim here to have more of a claim than abusing a "unlimited" account and getting mad about it. Yes 100% Google should be holding onto their data or offering them the ability to pay for the larger data tier - that part is BS.
Get mad at the FBI for raiding you, get mad that you didn't think of another cloud service to store with or pay for an appropriate service (0.07$/TB [my rough calc] is dirt cheap to the point of suspect). I also have to assume that the individual, former anonymous hacker has some wherewithal to be suspect of 'unlimited' packages from large corporations.
There's gotta be more to this story -- it smells off.
You talk about loopholes three times in this comment.
Google's a trillion dollar company. A popular saying amongst Googlers is "I don't know how to count that low". They're used to big numbers.
I work at a much smaller company. We are not a trillion dollar company. Even we, when offering an unlimited service, ask ourselves: "What happens if someone takes us up on this offer?"
It's not a loophole, it's what he paid for.
It's fine to stop offering an unlimited service. We did! My only beef with Google's conduct here is the 7 days of notice prior to deletion.
I've followed Mike Masnick's reporting in other cases. He seems like an even-handed, fair journalist. I trust that he's not hiding the ball, nor letting the other journalist mislead him about the situation.
You should question the story a bit more. You think Google only gave 7 days? That seems super suss.
Yes, why wouldn't I think that? As I said, I trust Mike Masnick.
I also have past professional experience that leads me to believe Google does what's easiest for Google, not what's best for their customers.
In one case, Google suspended a Google Certified Publishing Partner's GAM account for several hours with no notice. The partner had several years of history with Google, did $100M/year of revenue with them, and had an assigned Google rep who did weekly calls with them.
Google reactivated the account, but only after significant disruption to the partner.
I agree that it's good to be a critical consumer of news, but eh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably Google being blissfully ignorant of the impact they have on their users.
So, not excessive. 237 TB does not exceed unlimited. What am I missing here?
What, exactly, is this loop hole?
If it's excessive, then Google shouldn't have offered an unlimited data plan. They could have called it a 100 TB plan, but they chose to call it unlimited to make it sound better and then canceled it once people took them up on the offer. Regardless of whether that kind of action is legal, it's a shady business practice.
For that matter, there's nothing wrong with Google discontinuing the plan going forward, but they had plenty of options for making the transition more fair and building consumer trust without hurting their bottom line too much. For example, they could have converted his account to a 250TB account and tripled its price, at which point he wouldn't be in immediate danger of losing his files but would be pressured into gradually moving to a more cost effective solution.
They offered it for 10 years and then probably realized that people were taking advantage of the position and then tried to phase it out. Most likely with a lot of warning beforehand.
I have a tough time believe that they didn't give any warning and then kicked them off the service.
It was unlimited. If they didn't want it to be unlimited, it should have had a limit on it.
It was unlimited and they retained the right to exit the contract. If someone wants to pay for unlimited duration unlimited storage they should find a provider who does that.
Right, which is why they discontinued it.
They offered unlimited, not unlimited forever.
What number is 237 in excess of? That is the number that Google should have advertised, instead of “unlimited”.
I don't understand why people are stuck on the term unlimited here. It wasn't like he still had an unlimited plan but Google said "you are using too much data so we're going to delete it". They discontinued the plan so as of now he does not have an unlimited storage plan. I don't understand why this is complicated. Seems like he can either pay whatever it costs to store 237TB in Google Drive (probably a lot) or he can migrate to another storage provider. If he wasn't willing to pay whatever the cost for Google Drive is he should have started migrating his data when they discontinued the service.
The victim is "taking advantage" of an advertised feature of the service they paid for, and has done nothing wrong. The fault lies entirely with Google for advertising unlimited storage, knowing full well that no such thing exists. Same with every other cloud storage service that once advertised unlimited storage. Just because someone who understands how computer storage works could probably figure out that it wasn't really unlimited doesn't make it not false advertising.
They offered the service for 10 years and then sunset it.
237TB of unlimited data is a drop in the bucket.
Google offered unlimited storage, no? It’s reasonable to believe that they can do that since it averages out to a small amount per user, meaning most users overpay and the power users get peace of mind. Of course nothing is unlimited but a company like Google is perhaps best positioned in the world to offer that. And sure, if someone writes /dev/urandom at 1Gbit/s you could claim abuse, but for people working with video TBs of data is normal. 200+ is a lot but again averages out among users. In either case it’s extremely easy to avoid the word “unlimited” if you don’t intend to honor it for legitimate customers.
It’s also reasonable that companies products change. And maybe it doesn’t last forever, fair enough. But if your product is backup, and you pull the rug with a 7 day grace period, of course people are going to be upset and warn others not to trust you.
You just expanded it. It's still basically the same.
230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore.
Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.
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 does. And it should.
But if its your "lifes work" i would assume the value there is more than just the cost of storage. That the person storing it would have thought about ownership and egress options a bit further out.
Like i use workspace for all sorts of stuff. But its google, they can and may just axe your account for any reason. So i have backups of all things at all times and worst case, i just move my email/drive whatever to another service along with the domain, which I own (and he appears to as well)
Im not excusing google at all. But at some point you have to take some accountability. Not having a backup plan and just trusting google or ANY company to faithfully keep your lifes work for you seems slightly....naive.
If you read the article you will learn that he did have a backup, but it is currently in the FBI’s hands. He wasn’t relying solely on google.
Thats not really what the article says.
It just says his electronic devices were seized. Not that backups were included here, though it is implied.
Event still the FBI raid occured in July [1]. Backups are N-1. So he was down to nill back in July and didnt seem to act from there.
Also based on the dates in the screenshots provided, he went into grace period on the Google Drive data ALSO in July..
So I say again....its his lifes work. Its invaluable to him but its just data to anyone else. Its incumbent on him to make sure this doesnt occur some how, some way. Even on backblaze that would be 20k/year. I would be having that on multiple disks at multiple sites that I control. But that is just me.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/27/journalist-tells-fbi-to-...
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.
While they had unlimited they didn’t have a problem. But at a certain point someone is going to do the maths and realise the 1% who fully take advantage and go massive in an unlimited offer cost more than you make from the others.
The GP comment didn't "just expand it". There is a huge difference in the English language between "Life's Work Deleted" and "Life's Work Will Be Deleted." Past tense and future tense are very different things.
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.
You make it sound like he could have chosen to keep paying Google under a different plan, but I can't find any way for him to pay Google to keep the data for him short of creating 100+ dummy "users" in his workspace to get their 2TB each (which I'm sure Google would totally be okay with) [0].
Google is firing him as a customer, which is their prerogative, but they're doing it on a timeframe that means he can't actually get the data out in time. That's what the (actual) headline says, and those are the facts.
[0] https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
Google gave him 60 days after they fired him to continue using his account for free. After that they gave him another 5 months in read only mode to find a solution.
The short timeframe now is because the user did nothing in over half a year to resolve the problem.
Google could have more clearly communicated that read-only state was temporary, but assuming it was permanent seems wildly optimistic and naive.
Assuming that the read only state was permanent would be naive. Assuming that they would give him 60 days notice again before actually deleting his data isn't, except insofar as Google is a terrible company and he clearly didn't realize that.
Google held onto his data for him for over half a year after his plan was cancelled. Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time.
Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data.
Google makes plenty of bad choices, but this seems like a problem that Burke made entirely for himself.
That's not clear at all.
What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a technical data migration.
He already needed to have 5 users in his workspace to unlock unlimited storage.
He might actually have 5 people on his team. Adding 100+ more just for the 2TB each would almost certainly get his account flagged for suspicious activity.
My previous comment was not as informed as it should have been (because I opined after only read the title... a mistake, to be sure). I've edited it and will leave it at this being a very unfortunate situation to be in.
Completely agree with this. If it's your "life's work" - "free tier" storage is 100% not the place to put it.
update: Not Free but feels like taking advantage of enterprise storage (0.07 $/TB) close to free.
It's curious how hard you keep pushing in this flagrant lie in this thread when the article explicitly and repeatedly makes clear that he was paying Google for Enterprise level storage and on top of that did indeed have local first, except all that got taken from him by the FBI. Yet for some reason you insist on claiming he wasn't paying and was somehow abusing cloud-only. Why?
Sorry correction. 20$ a month for an enterprise account formerly unlimited - (which is pretty much free considering how much data is being used ~ 7 cents a TB if my calcs are correct). Now that account is a 100$ / 25 TB. for 273 == 1000 $/month.
https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/942777-no-more-unlimit...
It required at least 5 users to unlock unlimited storage from what I see online. $20 * 5 = $100. Not that it makes what he's getting any less than a steal.
From the article:
He did do that. The FBI raided his house and took all the drives. In the middle of trying to get them back (it’s unclear if he’ll be able to), Google terminated his storage. If this had happened at a different time he could’ve just backed up to a different (likely more expensive) service. But that’s not an option that’s open at the moment or possibly ever.
For 5k you could build a box to store that kind of data.
Throw in a case of beer, and maid services to clean up your living room afterward, and you'd still make budget.
ETA: OK maybe more like 10-12k it would be.
The guy's boxes were confiscated by the FBI, which was why he'd been forced onto cloud storage.
Earlier this year, becuase of some legal issues, his 'business critical' data was now only stored in one place, that was telling him it was locked, and over quota.
And he has made no attempts to fix that.
Sure. Make me read the article. lol
Because I was curious what drives cost today --
20 TB drives on newegg seems to be available for $310 to $360. If you use erasure coding w/ 30% overhead that's 18 +3 drives or $7.5k in drives alone, pre chassis.
Having a DR replica living somewhere outside your house probably gets this well over $12k, even if that replica is glacier or similar.
So I found 20tb drives as low as 270 (which is what I used for my own pricing out of a hypothetical build), but if you feel lucky you can get large capacity refurb drives for a lot less than brand new (I did this recently for scratch space on my NAS). A refurb 20tb can be had as low as 200, which gets you down to 4200.
But yes - I realized my mistake in tossing off that comment offhand.
As noted in the article,
Even if Burke had built a box, the maid service and beer would be the most helpful (but would not solve his actual issue).
This is all reasonable but you missed the bit where they gave him only seven days' notice.
They didn't; there were many emails throughout 2022 discussing "Important changes to your subscription" from the Google Workspace Team stating that unlimited storage plans were going away and that people were being moved to pooled storage across the entire account.
They were moved to a new storage subscription in mid-2022 and while they were over the limits, Google ignored it up to this point.
He says he believed the data would remain read-only. Did the emails make clear that the data was going to be deleted? If Google had already made that decision then they could have sent him the final warning two months ago.
Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. We just have half of the story.
To download that in seven days would require something like 3gbit/s
I somehow doubt google drive would even support that level of egress.
it happily chugs along at 1gbit for me, that's the max I can test.
I'd be surprised if it doesnt support it. Its google after all. Despite their shitty customer support, their engineers dont mess around
The standard S3 tier, sure, but Deep Glacier would be about $250/month. Retrieval can be up to 12 hours but that shouldn't really be a problem for long term archiving. As with anything AWS, egress can kill you, but you can sidestep that with something like Snowball, and really that's only an issue if you need to egress everything to migrate the archive.
Going by AWS's website[0], a 50 TB Snowball is $200, so you'd need to drop $1000 for five Snowballs to hold that data.
[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-peta...
It's about $20k to egress 250 TB from AWS, so you still come out way ahead.
Deep glacier is unviable for anything except partial retrieval.
Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it.
I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court.
It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.
I believe most companies don't offer unlimited plans anymore these days. And Google probably removed theirs because of use cases like this.
Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time.
Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.
Just like “unlimited vacation.” Whenever someone says it you know there is something going on and you aren’t going to like it.
S3 is not where this belongs. Backblaze B2 would be better and cheaper (~$1428/month) and no egress fees due to Cloudflare bandwidth alliance, the Internet Archive also has a private offering [3].
If the journalist in question sees this, or someone knows them, I am happy to assist in a migration at no cost. If someone from Google sees this (HN Google support), it would be swell if the delete lifecycle could be paused while this migration is facilitated.
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing
[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
[3] https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault
Rsync.net works out essentially the same ($6/month cheaper) on a monthly basis, but offers 10% and 15% discounts for 12 and 24 month options.
B2 does mention a "capacity bundle", saying 250TB/year is $19.5K - but that's $1.5K more than the monthly pricing for the same capacity so it doesn't seem like they have any meaningful long-term pricing discounts.
The bad part is that Google announced 60+ days before the change took effect that the account would become read-only. Nowhere did they state the account would be terminated, or could not indefinitely remain in a read-only state. Then, they suddenly spring a 7 day deadline to download all your data, with no previous mention.
Very poor communication from Google.
I'd assume it couldn't remain in read only forever. But yeah since it's data loss Google should be very loud about that eventuality. I was getting weekly emails from dropbox about my inactive account before they nuked it.
I think the bigger issue here is that 237.22TB is not trivial, yet, it is still a gargantuan task to actually get a hold of a human being at Google.
It would cost around $300 a month for archive tier storage, $5000 a month would be for standard ready access
Buying the drives would cost at least $5k
I agree, dang should fix the title, this one is falsely editorialized as saying the deletion already occured.
You cannot export 240TB in 7 days. And a journalist can be forgiven for not knowing what the market value of cloud storage is. Besides, Google offers many services for free (or below cost) in order to maintain their dominant market position. I don't think your take is fair to the journalist.
Thanks. I almost believed the headline. That looks more accurate.
He was definitely pushing it, but google is being extremely aggressive with timelines just to get resources freed up.
For instance, suddenly out of nowhere they are only telling people with a 7 day heads up that they will reclaim google voice numbers, and only with a single email.
I've used the service for over a decade and they never bothered to "monitor usage" or anything like this.
Thankfully I think due to US law they can't immediately re-issue them, but you have to claim them under a new phone number or such.
Very disturbing policy shifts at the company.
I am not a fan of "some else figured out that they could overcharge people" as a moral lesson.
Sure, but you're missing the main point of the story, which is the seven days they gave him to download everything.
According to the S3 Glacier pricing I see, it would be less than $900/month. It would cost less than a $5000 one-time payment to buy enough USB storage for the full 237 TB.
No, the story doesn't say that.
assuming it all goes into frequent access tier, which this shouldn't as this is an archive. just by enabling the automatic tiering is going to be more like 1000/month
and if it's would instead end up organized into glacier as it should it's gonna be more like 300$/m
which is not dirt cheap, but still. it start giving the prospect of maintaining a home archive with manual disk rotation and scheduled data verification some second thought.
For readers' reference, a "Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS 22 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive" costs $399.99.
You would need at least 11 or 12 of these, running you $4,799.88 for the latter, plus tax and shipping, or one month of S3 storage in storage hardware alone.