Yes, Amazon is to blame here as well. They shouldn't have offered unlimited service.

At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy.

I don't get why if they don't mean unlimited just say up to 20TB/mo.

Possibly because there actually wasn't any limit. Maybe if a handful people were exceeding $LOTS TB, they don't care, but if 60% of users exceed $LOTS TB, the service becomes unsustainable. In this case, the service really is unlimited (there genuinely is no limit that you're not allowed to go over), and if you wanted that effect, advertising a limit would be net negative — a high limit would encourage the "too many users use a lot" case and lead to the same result we get now where the plan has to be canceled for unsustainability, and a low limit would defeat the purpose.

Because it isn't linux iso's.

were they being serious, I can't tell.

@vitalysh

> At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy.

Because if you are a self-proclaimed data hoarder, do you have the time to sort through and selectively classify your hoard to "encrypt this ISO don't encrypt that tarball" on a file-by-file basis across many terabytes?

How much would be saved by deduping anyway? If they're not deliberately making it easy/redundant, even if you got 300TB down to 100TB or such, a single order-of-magnitude reduction doesn't fundamentally change the economics of "unlimited."

Blame data hoarders, but don't blame encryption.

I store a bit of data at home (only ~20TB). Really easy to sort. There are plenty of apps that do it for you. This extension with those keywords in filename goes to this directory. Others to another dirs.

I only have my pictures and personal data in AWS cloud, encrypted. They way I set it up? Point rclone to relevant directories and skip the rest.

Except Amazon revoked rcloud's key a while back.

Any recommendations on the "plenty of apps" that sort your data for easy searching?

As someone completely unfamiliar with this space, this prompted me to do some reading into this rclone issue. I'll record it here for anyone else similarly curious.

It seems that as of a few months ago, two popular (unofficial) command line clients for ACD (Amazon Cloud drive) were acd-cli[1] and rclone[2], both of which are open source. Importantly the ACD API is OAuth based, and these two programs took different approaches to managing their OAuth app credentials. acd-cli's author provided an app on GCE that managed the app credentials and performed the auth. rclone on the other hand embedded the credentials into their source, and did the oauth dance through a local server.

On April 15th someone reported an issue on acd-cli titled "Not my file"[3] in a user alleged that they had received someone else's file from using the tool. The author refered them to amazon support. The issue was updated again on May 13th with another user that had the same problem - this time with better documentation. The user reached out to [email protected] to report the issue.

Amazon's security team determined that their system was not at fault, but pointed out a race condition in the source for the acd-cli auth server (sharing the auth state in a global variable between requests...) and disabled the acd-cli app access to protect customers.[4]

In response to this banning, one user suggested that a workaround to get acd-cli working again would be to use the developer option for local oauth dance, and use rclone's credentials (from the public rclone source).[5] This got rclone's credentials banned as well,[6] presumably when the amazon team noticed that they were publicly available.

To top this all off, the ACD team also closed down API registration for new apps around this time (which seems to have already been a strenuous process). I suppose the moral of the story is that OAuth is hard.

[1]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli [2]: https://github.com/ncw/rclone [3]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 [4]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [5]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [6]: https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazo...

I hope this (and the many more examples) put a stop to this "unlimited" bs. You can't say people were abusing a service that throws that keyword for marketing reasons.

That is very selective of them. While their marketing materials said "unlimited", people chose to ignore the ToS which stated that they wouldn't tolerate abuse and that abuse was basically whatever they determined it to be.