this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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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 (www.techdirt.com)
submitted 11 months ago by cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 264 points 11 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] cogman@lemmy.world 148 points 11 months ago (11 children)

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.

[–] Subverb@lemmy.world 29 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] trafficnab@lemmy.ca 53 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Yeah it's definitely shitty if they really only give 7 days notice that your account is going from read-only to suspended and deleted, but after basically not paying your cloud storage bill for like 6 months this is a pretty predictable outcome

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[–] ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 11 months ago (3 children)

He did pay for the service though. They just decided to stop charging him for it.

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[–] PuddingFeeling907@lemmy.ca 150 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Google is an untrustworthy business partner. Why should anyone invest in their projects.

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[–] pachrist@lemmy.world 124 points 11 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] WaterWaiver@aussie.zone 36 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

4.5PB holy shit. You need to stop using UTF2e32 for your text files.

I'd be paranoid about file integrity. Even a 0.000000000022% (sic) chance of a single bitflip somewhere along the chain, like a gentle muon tickling the server's drive bus during the read, could affect you. Did you have a way of checking integrity? Or were tiny errors tolerable (eg video files)?

[–] quinkin@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

They were using rclone so all of the transfers would be hash checked. Whether the file integrity on either side of the transfer could be relied upon is in some ways a matter of faith, but there a lot of people relying on it.

[–] Diplomjodler@feddit.de 26 points 11 months ago

Wow. That's a lot of "homework".

[–] BlackPenguins@lemmy.world 25 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Don''t even need an ec2 instance if all you do is moving the data to Amazon s3. rclone can do direct cloud-to-cloud transfer, the data won't hit the computer where the rclone running, so it should be very fast. You're going to have an eye watering s3 bill though. Once the data in an s3 bucket, you can copy them to glacier later.

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[–] ABluManOnLemmy@feddit.nl 22 points 11 months ago

AWS is very expensive. There are other compatible storage options, like Backblaze B2 and Wasabi, that are better for this use case

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[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 100 points 11 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] funnystuff97@lemmy.world 61 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pachrist@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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".

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[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 98 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Wait, journalist, 233 terabyte? Just what in the fuck did his life's work consist of?

[–] alexdeathway@programming.dev 77 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Npm packages in docker

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 24 points 11 months ago

Liftoff app cache folder.

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[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 73 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

raw recorded video

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[–] BlackPenguins@lemmy.world 59 points 11 months ago (2 children)

A Call of Duty update.

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[–] bigkahuna1986@lemmy.ml 51 points 11 months ago

My node_modules folder

[–] Wizzard@lemm.ee 34 points 11 months ago

Log files from a local SQL server.

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[–] electric@lemmy.world 78 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] WallEx@feddit.de 40 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well, he did ignore that he wasn't paying for storage for half a year and did nothing to prevent data loss. Even ignored the grace period. That is at least negligent.

[–] kirk782@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)

He assumed that Google assured him that his current data would be safe. But saying that your account will move into read only mode doesn't equate to keeping those much TBs of data on server forever.

Though I have a question. Was this unlimited service that Google offered was a one time payment thing(seems unlikely, since only couple of cloud providers like pCloud do so and that too on a much lesser scale) or a recurring subscription thing? If it was the later, then it is naive to believe that a for profit corporation would keep that much data without raking in money.

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[–] Syrc@lemmy.world 55 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MrSilkworm@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (9 children)

"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

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[–] Iapar@feddit.de 43 points 11 months ago

Guess he could make reporting on tech giants pulling this shit his new lifework.

[–] SeaJ@lemm.ee 38 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] Extrasvhx9he 38 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Goddamn hope this story gets somebody at google's attention. Off topic, even though it was mentioned in the article, what ended up happening to the dad's account, was it reinstated? I can't find an update

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

deleted

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[–] unreasonabro@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago (2 children)

from "don't be evil" to stunts like this in basically no time flat. #capitalism!

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[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

I'm speechless

Googs IS the LastPass of everything!

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[–] throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 19 points 11 months ago

I'm not trying to blame him, but more than 200 TB of data on cloud storage? Holy cow, I wouldn't even trust it to store more than 5 GB of data.

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