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
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.
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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They keep charging you the original rate presumably, which now only gives you X TB of storage, not unlimited, and as he did not move to increase the amount of storage his plan has (by paying more), he was essentially underpaying his bill the entire time
I’m not sure what sort of pricing he would have with Enterprise (it’s “call for quote”), but the cheapest published way to get the 250TB or so of cloud storage he needs would be to pay $900/mo for a Business Plus plan with 50 users
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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.
Where are you getting that they stopped charging him? The email in the article says his subscription will be stopped, which I interpret to mean he was paying
Correct, I had the same GSuite setup (for the purpose of keeping backups) and they kept billing me even after they set my drive to read only. They only stopped when I decided to cancel the account myself. IIRC the minimum was around $10/mo. Technically you were supposed to have 5 employees in your GSuite “company” at $10/mo per license, but they didn’t really check, so I just had myself as the sole employee.
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.
To be fair to the guy, over the summer the FBI literally raided his home, took every single electronic device, and are (still?) refusing to give any of it back, so I’m willing to give him a pass if his home network infrastructure isn’t currently up to snuff
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.
Google is an untrustworthy business partner. Why should anyone invest in their projects.
Right? Why the fuck did this guy trust them with his data? This sounds like a personal problem to me.
Right, blame the customer for the business not holding up their end of the bargain after the fact.
Exactly. I have modified the deal, pray you are paying enough before I modify the deal again
They absolutely suck for it, but it’s also a bit on the level of putting your head in a well-peppered crocodile jaw
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.
If Google tried to kill Android, there’d be a handful of companies that would keep it going. I could see Samsung doing so, possibility in partnership with Microsoft, but I bet it would be the end of AOSP.
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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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)?
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.
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.
Wow. That’s a lot of “homework”.
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.
AWS is very expensive. There are other compatible storage options, like Backblaze B2 and Wasabi, that are better for this use case
Seems a few thousand is worth it for your life’s work
Jesus
How much do you pay for that in aws
Isn’t AWS the most expensive service to leave?
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.
I heard there was a process for requesting additional data, but you have to actually pay for the 5 users and they’ll bump it a few TB every couple months on request. That’s from people reporting their experience with support, so it might not be totally consistent.
I kind of get it though, people hear “unlimited storage” and then don’t even make an effort to be efficient with that space, and just want to keep everything forever. There’s a real cost to that storage, and it’s higher than many think since it’s not just a single HDD like many would have sitting on their desk but a series of arrays/pools and all the related systems to ensure reliability and uptime. They probably did some calculation where 99% of users would be profitable even with their “unlimited storage” and eating it on the other 1% was a reasonable advertising cost. Over time that calculation changed and they had to update the service.
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”.
I feel like a tl;dr should mention the FBI. You summed up the headline.
In fairness their electronics were taken by the FBI so they at least had something besides Google. In hindsight the offsite backup would of protected them from both the FBI and Google if they stored them at a trustee’s home
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.
Wait, journalist, 233 terabyte? Just what in the fuck did his life’s work consist of?
Npm packages in docker
Liftoff app cache folder.
That would take 2 years to upload.
raw recorded video
It’s simply stupid to not compress to h265 before uploading it.
Tell me you don’t know shit about professional video production without telling me you don’t know shit about professional video production.
that’s not what videographers do with their raw footage
For people authoring original content who may end up having the only copy of a given piece of news-relevant data in their possession, using a lossy compression method to back it up sort of defeats the purpose. This isn’t stashing your old DVD collection, this is trying to back up privileged professional data.
https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/master/lossless.html
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265#Losslessencoding
I want to clarify that it supports lossless compression as well.
If it’s good it’s good 😊
A Call of Duty update.
That’s only one map though, where’s the rest?
No not my Gary’s moods lol
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
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.
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.
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.
Iirc it was a subscription, but I could be wrong. Having unlimited data with a one time payment doesn’t sound like a Google thing to do. There are running costs.
Presumably it was GSuite/Google Workspace. While they advertised unlimited storage if you paid for 5 accounts, it wasn’t really enforced so you could pay something like $20/month and get unlimited storage on G-drive. There was a daily cap on how much data can be moved, but that’s fine for hosting incremental backups like many that took advantage.
Well, google And the fbi
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.
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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’m pretty sure he was paying - the deletion email mentions that his subscription would be cancelled.
Yeah he was probably paying like $10/mo for a really basic GSuite organization with unlimited data. I know because I did that for a few years with some TBs of backups. When I first set the account up, I knew with certainty that Google would eventually cut me off because yeah that kind of service is worth way more than $10/mo in reality.
I’ve been getting emails for months saying I’m over the limit. I can’t remember if they ever said specifically they would delete my data because I stopped paying for it before it got to that point. Kind of crazy IMHO to assume Google will store so many TBs forever for only $10/mo. Still, would be real nice of them to give this guy a little more time to download his data.
It’s not ridiculous when that’s the service they offered. The courts should honestly stick them to their word (small companies have been driven out of business for much less) but we all know that’s not happening in a corporatocracy like this.
True. To be fair, I believe the original terms required you pay for a minimum of 5 employees (so $50/mo). No great love for Google here, and I would love to see the courts make them honor something like this if they did indeed advertise falsely.
Yeah, that’s my main issue - having a 1 week deadline for deletion sprung on you when it’s not physically possible to extricate the data in that timespan is rough.
You’re right, that’s a paid plan. I guess my point was more that you need to look out for your own interests a bit. If his storage has been read-only for the past 6 months then that would be a strong clue to do something about it.
Probably, but A) dude literally had his hardware yoinked by the cops and B) there was no reasonable schedule shared with the user re: data deletion.
I wish googles “read only” notification said “we will delete your data after 3 months of read-only status”, just to allow folks to properly plan. If you told me the only penalty was my data will be read only, and kept accepting my money, I would assume everything is okay.
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 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
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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.
Guess he could make reporting on tech giants pulling this shit his new lifework.
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.
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?
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.
If the company was run by a hallucinating AI it couldn’t be any flakier.
