Had? He still has that option.

Just buy 48 seats of Google Workspace Business Plus to get 240 TB pooled storage.

237 TB is a lot of storage, 864 USD/month is actually pretty cheap to store it all in the cloud. For comparizon, Backblaze B2 costs 6 USD/TB which works out to 1422 USD/month.

As much as I despise Google, this is simply a case of RTFM.

Source? None of the emails shown said anything about buying additional space.

The first email shown in the article ends with the call to action of "get more storage" and a link. Pretty obviously that would be buying additional space, not getting it for free.

(But it would cost something like $5k-10k/month, not the ~$10/month that he seems willing to pay.)

The second one has a link labeled "free up or get more storage."

I suspect it links here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/12005619?sjid=1774262812...

Pretty clear blackmail. "We are gonna delete your data before you have a chance to download it, unless you pay us thousands of dollars"