Google is an untrustworthy business partner. Why should anyone invest in their projects.
Yeah, I used to love Google products, then they started killing things, and more things, and more quickly. And yeah, I’m done. Desperately hoping something other than android and IOS gets mainstream acceptance, because sure it’s here now, but there’s no guarantee they won’t just kill it 5 years from now for some wild reason.
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.
Goddamn hope this story gets somebody at google’s attention. Off topic, even thought it was mentioned in the article, what ended up happening to the dad’s account, was it reinstated? I can’t find an update
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Maybe they’ll help him retrieve the data. Presumably the servers haven’t been used for something else yet. Then again maybe not. When you control how most people get their news who cares if one reporter gets mad?
It isnt just one that is going to have an issue with this.
But again why would Google care? They lobby like everyone else, and half the politicians don’t understand what cloud storage is. If no laws tell them they have to do something they won’t unless it benefits them.
Google cares whether people pay for and use their services. And if enough people view their products as unreliable beta software, they’re going to be less willing to use them. Especially if they have anything of importance on Google’s hardware.
It’s not more than a percent of their users either.
That percent probably nets them more profit than all the free accounts combined. What Google is doing is short sighted and it is going to hurt them.
I’m speechless
Googs IS the LastPass of everything!
So is the journalist, after losing all their documents.
Dark dude 🌚
Edit: also, he should not be storing private sources’ names in ANYTHING Google can axe-cess Perhaps its for the best
Damn didn’t even think about that. Do you think they at least encrypted their files?
Considering that even with one of the cheapest storage services, B2, 250ishTB is about $1500/month(that’s more than $5500/m in S3!) whereas Gsuite seems to be about less than $200, I would’ve never guessed that I could use it as is for a long time.
Extremely shitty of google to do this though. What a shame.
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.
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.
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”.
If the company was run by a hallucinating AI it couldn’t be any flakier.
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.
On one hand, Google sucks. On the other, users like this are why we can’t have nice things.
Google not including an upper limit clause is why we can’t have this nice thing.
If they subscribed for unlimited, you can’t blame someone for using it.
Why not? We live in a society. Fair use and tragedy of the commons are not unknown concepts to us.
Unlimited does not mean “there’s a limit but we won’t tell you what it is until you reach it”. Corporations need to stop using it that way.
It’s really not hard to avoid false advertising. Just tell people what you’re actually prepared to offer. Figure it out before selling it.
To be fair, I would agree it was false advertising if Google was terminating accounts of large users. However, they ended the entire plan / service, with significant notice, so it’s less ‘false advertising’ and more ‘we can’t afford to do this, because jackasses’.
They put users of the entire plan in read only mode with, as far as I can tell, no deadline in sight. When a deadline was finally enforced, it was within a week, which is not significant notice at all for data deletion.
Being told “your data will be read only” and then, without notice, being given a deadline to extricate your data that is physically impossible for most users is not much different from having your account deleted. Both will inevitably have the same outcome.
So what exactly is your justification for blaming someone for using a service as advertised?
According to the concept, should a number of people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to over-use it
Emphasis on bold. Seems like they shouldn’t have advertised it as unlimited and should’ve provided a finite cap.
The line shouldn’t be drawn at “wherever I arbitrarily decide due to tragedy of the commons”. If you say it’s unlimited, honor it, or at least let folks graciously exit the platform.
I wonder if the terms and conditions had such a limit tucked away.
at least let folks graciously exit the platform.
Are you aware the plan was sunsetted two years ago? How much time do you need to graciously exit?
As for finite, due to the laws of physics there’s obviously a limit. If I try backing up the entire Internet it’s obviously not gonna happen.
Are you aware the plan was sunsetted two years ago? How much time do you need to graciously exit?
Based on the article, it seems like folks were just told that their data would be put into read only. How much notice was given for data deletion?
As for finite, due to the laws of physics there’s obviously a limit. If I try backing up the entire Internet it’s obviously not gonna happen.
How’s a consumer supposed to know the limit if you advertise unlimited? Sounds like an explicit cap should’ve been written into the fine print. Why are you supporting “unlimited, but I will cut you off whenever I feel like it” versus, for example, what cellular plans typically advertise: “unlimited, but you get deprioritized after x gigs”
The former just seems to be not consumer friendly.
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.
I’m surprised they even allowed that much to be uploaded. Even if it is “unlimited”, that must be against some sort of fair usage agreement.
If you need to archive over 250TB of data, you should get a tape drive.
Come on, if it’s unlimited it’s unlimited, not “unlimited but only if you use less than limit”
Idk what you mean by unauthorised access to the video if you gain access to the password of the database or simply it wasn’t password protected at all. Simply scrapping the site and reading html files or using the tools from the browser to scan the network connections to find the original footage is not hacking.
People have served time in prison for simple URL incrementing on public websites.
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I have a problem with Amazon Drive going away for non-photos on December 31st.
For a while, they had unlimited storage and you could use a Linux API to access it – I stored 8TB of data.
Then they set a quota, but for those over quota it was read-only. Oh, and Linux access no longer works.
Now they’ve set a deadline to have everything off by December 31st, but the Windows app still doesn’t work (constantly crashing) and I see no way to get my files.
Rclone?
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.
Wow. That’s a lot of “homework”.
