Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position.

He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data. He need to get his data out. Trying to get my data out of Google, I've gotten ~1TB out in ~1 week. This is about a year's worth of time to not lose it.

The facts are not "even less inflammatory."

A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company.

They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they withdrew the unlimited service he was using?

I'm no fan of Google, and I agree with you that a good service would have offered an at-or-slightly-above-cost data export for that volume of data... but he's deliberately misrepresenting the situation here (either that or is painfully naive)

Edit: as somebody else pointed out downthread, he also would have received numerous e-mails throughout 2022 telling him that the unlimited service was being shuttered

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/13321050/what-will-h...

"If I cancel my additional storage, will all the files/documents that took up the additional space, be deleted? Or will I still have access to them?"

"You will still have access to all your files but, if you have used all storage you won't be able to add or create NEW files until you have space available."

Which sounds like you're right, unless the Product Expert was wrong.

If your data is going to be deleted, it should be painfully obvious well in advance.

At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter if hidden in the terms of service or somewhere if it is made clear that the data will be deleted. It doesn't even matter if it is clear to @andrewmutz and @garblegarble that the data will be deleted[0]. What matters is if not thinking the data would be deleted is a reasonable interpretation. Full stop. It also matters that when explicit communication (unequivocally interpreted as slated for deletion) that the user was given 7 days, which was not even enough time, especially considering Google's egress rates.

There's a lot of this on HN lately and I'm not sure why. Communication is fuzzy people, I'm not sure why that's surprising. But when there's disagreement don't ask yourself which is right or wrong, but if a reasonable interpretation was made. Because communication is like an autoencoder: there's what's in your head (input), what you say (lossy compressed intermediate latent), and what is received (decompressed information with imputation). There's too many attempts to defend a believed objective reality which just is absurd (ironically making the view less objective).

And, importantly, RTFA

[0] Obviously these two are reading between the lines. It is not a bad interpretation and we often should practice this, especially to be on the safe side, but it's clear that there is inference, so what's wrong with the comments is their strong assertions that the communication was obvious. One may also make the argument that Techdirt isn't telling the full story or timeline, but that's also a different issue and inferential.

In what world would it be reasonable to expect Google to pay thousands of dollars per year indefinitely to store your data for free?

This conversation cannot be had unless you will read the article and look at the screenshots.

> to store your data for free?

Where was it said that this was free? Per the article

> So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage

Please RTFA before responding. It really isn't that long. Maybe 1.5 TikTok videos for the attention impaired.

I RTFA before the first comment I made on the subject. As I wrote in a direct reply to you elsewhere on this thread, I was in the same shoes. No need for the silly screenshots - I saw those same emails in my own inbox. But I guess I don’t know anything. since I only had to reduce my usage by 20TB and not 200.

Per the article what? Sure, OP paid google a bunch of money over the years. So did I. The offer was never “Pay us a flat fee for infinite capacity, forever”. Moreover, it was a renewing annual/monthly contract.

You have an exit clause, at the end of the term - so do google. They gave plenty of warning.

I completely feel for the OP’s loss of their data, but they still have the option of adding more seats to their account in order to avoid this loss.

Where was it said that this was free? Where you expect google to keep his hosting his data indefinitely despite him not paying them the cost of this storage. This was OK under the old deal as it was subsidized by the low usage customers, but this policy ended - no more subsidies. He can add 40 seats at ~$20/S/M. That’s pretty expensive - I couldn’t afford it. Hence prepared myself once the writing was on the wall.

This is not mentioned in the article but it is mentioned in other comments, including mine, that he was given plenty of warning (at least a year out) that this plan would end. Then another 60 days after it already ended when his files were kept while he was paying substantially less than the cost of service. Why would anyone assume they keep doing this indefinitely, essentially for free, is beyond me.

You are welcome to go back to your tiktok videos. Personally, I dont even know how the app looks, nor any of its clones, eg reels.

>> In what world would it be reasonable to expect Google to pay thousands of dollars per year indefinitely to store your data for free?

Expect condescending comments when if you state things that are outrageous. Especially after responding to a comment that actively demonstrated that they did not read the article. If you disagree that this is a reasonable interpretation maybe clarify that. But this is also all you said, so I'm not sure what you expect me to read it as.

I think there is also sufficient reason to believe you did not read the chain of comments either. This is kinda like jumping into the middle of a conversation while having been zoned out. Sufficient evidence because you are revisiting something already discussed. If you would like to argue that his interpretation was unreasonable you should have provided reasoning to it. Don't play the victim here. You gave a low quality, emotional, and exaggeratory comment. No matter how good the argument is in your head, you can't expect a high quality response nor be upset when someone makes a quip remark. (idk why I'm even responding this one tbh)

__There was no ad hominem attack.__ I responded to your claim, and by quoting the article. I have not dismissed your claim based on your character nor even attacked your character. But I'll concede that I made a slight and my comment was condescending (see above for reasons). Additionally, my slights are not subverting the argument nor detracting from it. If you need clarification, an ad hominem attack is "you should ignore anything [insert user] has to say because they are dumb and voted for [insert political enemy]". See how it doesn't respond to what you said, moves the conversation away, and now places a new standard which must be rebutted which is not actually related to the subject matter? That's what makes it a logical fallacy. We have none of those qualities. Yet now here we are, not talking about the article or the contents...

You, on the other hand, did in fact make a logical fallacy. But that's already been addressed and we need not be more explicit nor derail the conversation further.

> This is not mentioned in the article but it is mentioned in other comments

Pro tip: do not assume the person you are replying to has read every comment under a post. You may assume they have read the direct chain of comments leading to the current point, but no more. If you are tired of saying the same thing maybe instead of saying "as I've already commented" maybe link your comment. Or chill, because frankly this isn't an issue of high importance and you don't have to really defend either situation because none of have a real horse in the race so idk why emotion is high. You should also only assume the context of the direct thread. If you want to claim that the author is hiding truth and that there was in fact clearer explicit ample warnings given, do so here, or provide a reference to your other comment. You cannot assume I am going to read through or search all >500 comments or search your username. Because frankly, I'm responding to what you said, not who you are. If your context is everything you said, including other comments unrelated to this direct chain, the contextual issue is with you not me.

tldr: low quality replies don't get high quality responses and I'm not going to search for every comment you made

i.e. that support site is mostly user to user help, which is perhaps an indictment on google in general, but sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says".

I think we're looking at very different things.... there's a screenshot of a literal official email from Google, under the Google Workspace Team. Not sure where you're getting "Google product experts". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

if you're referring to something else, I missed that reference, so my apologies then.

I do think google gave sufficient time to move off. I also don't think a "workspace" being in read only mode was ever meant to be a permanent position for that google workspace. i.e. it was meant that "we weren't going to suddenly delete you data if you were over quota, but its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".

though if you can point to the official email from google (I'd have to find the ones they sent me, unsure if I kept or deleted them).

> i.e. it was meant that "...its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".

In person to person language I think we can rely on inference because there's good feedback mechanisms to resolve (like was done here). But in corporate communication I don't think you have the same luxury. Especially when you're a corporation that has no person to talk to to resolve misunderstandings. Instructions must be explicit and to such a degree that no reasonable person could misinterpret. It's why they hire all those lawyers and that's what a court of law would hold them to. I think given the emails shown that there's reason to believe his data would not be deleted until the explicit 7 day notice.

The account was given 60 days grace on May 11, 2023.

It’s currently December 15, 2023.

Google Enterprise (Unlimited) accounts are subject to the same 750GB/day limits (I have one of these accounts, my account has also gone RO).

As of today, it’s been 218 days since the notice that the account was over quota and in grace period.

In 218 days, you can download (assuming 100% efficiency) 163TB.

The user has >200TB stored in their drive.

The math doesn’t check out.

EDIT: > As of today, it’s been 218 days since the notice that the account was over quota and in grace period.

Up until that point, the user was still contracted to, and paying for, an unlimited storage solution. Any suggestions that the onus is on the user to be migrating their data out while still paying for a working solution is insane. The onus is on the provider to give the user time to migrate after the terms have changed. Unless we consider Google to be the Sith, in which case, yes, pray they don’t change the terms of the deal any more.

in about 2 months, I was able to get out over 100TB a data (using a 500mbps connection, wasn't downloading 24/7 but close to somewhere in the 25-50% of the time, and that math does check out).

If you are still “figuring this out”, I daresay it is simply because you haven’t used the paid service and seen the frequent nagging emails about the transition.

Which is entirely likely, given that Google's "Product Experts" aren't employees with access to internal communication channels, they're just volunteers working for internet points.

7 days to download 200TB+ does not seem reasonable.

Did you even do the math before that tripe escaped your fingers?

I doubt he expected Google to store his data forever, and I don’t see anything indicating that this is what he expects. Forever is a straw man.

It would be reasonable to expect some kind of migration / off-boarding plan, and it’s Google’s responsibility to facilitate that after pulling the plug on services they previously committed to providing.

> Even for Google Podcasts which is being terminated, users who don't pay have gotten notifications for well over a year that the service was going to shutdown

Uh, no. It hasn't even been 3 months since the shutdown was announced—and I personally only learned about it a few days after the announcement by a chance conversation with someone who mentioned it in person. (This was thankfully well after I had already gotten what personal data of mine I could out of the app and migrated to another player precisely due to the lackadaisical approach user data handling by whomever is responsible for Google Podcasts. It was notable for being one of the Google services that doesn't make user data available through Google Takeout.)

    Recently we announced that Google Podcasts will be discontinued next year. We wanted to reach out directly with more information on what to expect.
    
    For now, nothing is changing, and you can continue to use Google Podcasts as normal. Over the coming months, podcasts in YouTube Music will be made available globally and we will start rolling out tools that will enable you to transfer your podcast show subscriptions from Google Podcasts. In YouTube Music, you will be able to listen to your podcasts just like you did on Google Podcasts, no paid subscription required. If YouTube Music isn’t for you, there will also be an option to download a file of your show subscriptions, which you can upload to an app that supports their import.
    
    We acknowledge that this is a big change and want to thank you for being a loyal Google Podcasts user. We’ll reach out directly with more details over the coming months. In the meantime, if you have questions, please check out our Help Community here.

    Sincerely,
    The Google Podcasts team

I was trying to say that we have well over a year in advance to prepare for the google podcast service to terminate.

If you ignore emails that is on you, not the service.

Oh yeah? That's a weird thing to write instead of just saying, "I admit that I wasn't telling the truth."

PS: Even with your moving the goalposts, September to April still isn't "well over a year".

>September to April

You seem to be not telling the truth, perhaps you should admit that yourself.

Sure. That's what it is. He's a grifter, grifting Google to try to shame them into giving him a quarter of a petabyte of storage for free. He knew all along that his data would be deleted, and waited to the last second because he figures this is a sure thing and he'll get to keep it forever. You caught him. I can't believe we all fell for it.

It's not as if non-technical people (and technical ones too!) can't be confused or overwhelmed, and he should have been able to telepathically read Google's collective hivemind that "goes into read-only mode" means "we'll delete all the shit you don't have room or time to put anywhere else".

Like I mentioned above, even the Google podcast service is giving users over a year to prepare for the shutdown, and provides a method to transfer any data you have out of the app. If they take much precaution with a podcast app that few people even use, I guarantee they sent multiple emails to this person urging them to prepare for this.

If you don't check your email or just ignore it, that is not the service providers fault. Expecting a free service to bend over backwards for you even when they told you repeatedly to prepare for this is silly.

>I can't believe we all fell for it.

You fell for clickbait and exaggerated or fabricated stories from someone who either ignored their mail or waited til last minute and are now whining.

Google stated that it would remain in read-only mode and that’s the end of it. It’s bad enough they reneged on their agreement to store unlimited data for x amount of money, but according to you people need to be soothsayers to figure out that a company will reneg on their promise to maintain the data?

And none of that even takes into account that even 60 days wouldn’t be enough to download all that data.

Just stop it. Google is in the wrong and to add insult to injury they don’t provide any means of reaching a customer support representative to mitigate issues caused by their own incompetence.

Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.

This is a very unfair characterisation. He paid for an enterprise plan that was specifically targeted at enterprises with exceptionally high storage needs.

We don't know how much storage other enterprises in that target group were using. Comparing it with typical storage requirements of consumers makes absolutely no sense.

Also, it's not very interesting if he was in the top 0.1% because someone always is. That doesn't make it freeloading.

Google should have been smart enough to not say "unlimited" if they don't mean it.

These types of businesspeople should be fired urgently and with prejudice.

All those rules at a buffet are just codifying ethics because the business has learned that it's stupid to trust people.

Until these got abused, my guess by pirate crowd to store huge media collections (eg search “plex gdrive”), and the plan went away. Did google promise they would keep this plan up forever?

Unlimited does not mean infinite and does not mean forever. It means you are getting access/capacity as you need, without “needing to worry about details” /presuming reasonable usage/. They were not fired as a customer. No limits were imposed. Until google decided to end it for everyone, likely specifically due to customers as above.

What if someone stored 200PB on their “unlimited” account? Would you expect google to give a 5 year warning to make sure someone had enough time to download their data to their laptop?

When customers exploit any concept of free, even the bathroom in a fast food restaurant, that starts a culture where businesses give you a code so you can pee. You can call this being up-front or honest, but I call it the depletion of goodwill.

Lots of business need gigabytes. Lots of business need terabytes. That's a 1000x difference. That ratio is not very buffet-like!

People who need terabytes of cloud storage are not like people who try to scam buffets by taking home food in their pants. They are not like people who do unspeakable things to the free bathroom. They are just people with lots of data. There are business that have lots of data. It is a common business problem in today's world.

Specific common sense amount is an unreasonable demand. How long should a customer be allowed to stay in a buffet? Is it an hour? 1:30? 3 hours? I don’t know. Maybe? Depends.

Is it reasonable to come in, pay once, and stay for a month in the restaurant (if it was a 24/7 establishment)? Probably not.

I actually have cloud storage customers at my company. If you asked me what an unreasonable amount of cloud storage consumption was, I would have a really hard time coming up with a number. A petabyte, I guess? We have customers that store kilobytes, and others that store many terabytes. Frankly we'd love a petabyte customer, because we actually charge people for storage, like any sane B2B storage offering. Some things are not meant to be unlimited.

I'm not "sneaking" it in - I'm saying it outright. When Google (or anyone else competent in the art) is designing and provisioning a service, they have a numbers they use to estimate user resource-usage percentiles: unlike journalists, infra engineers don't have the luxury to pretend storage space is free or infinite.

When you win too much at a casino, or eat too much at a buffet, or stay too long at a McDonald's, or stay too long at the gas pump, they will all ask you to leave. There are common-sense limits to most services. Free-service tiers on internet services are not exempt. Extreme usage threatens the business model.

Right, and not all commodities have workable "unlimited" business models. The fact that somebody wants it to be a business model doesn't mean it should be one.

It's possible to offer honest unlimited plans. The all-you-can-eat buffet is one example. Just write it down somewhere that there's a time limit and that each individual person has to pay, and just like that you've imposed a practical limit without imposing a literal one.

Google Fiber competes with Comcast in my area, and they're happily able to advertise "unlimited gigabit Internet". Which is awesome. It's good marketing, and not dishonest: Their competitor imposes a type of limit which they do not impose (a monthly consumption limit of 1 TB). Of course, we know that there is still an effective limit in place: You can still only consume at the rate of 1 GiB/s. It's right there in the name of the plan.

But "unlimited storage" is just dishonest, especially when you're selling to businesses. Some businesses need cloud storage for documents, others need it for storing RAW video. There's nothing unreasonable about a few hundred TB unless you're just totally oblivious to the cloud storage business.

Essentially I think you're defending a somewhat dishonest marketing technique. What is lost by putting a 10 TB limit on the plan? I guess it wouldn't sell as well? Because it's not a lie? Maybe it's less "flexible" (i.e. Google can't just go change it whenever they feel like it). It's not like I can't see why that's good for Google, I just can't see why it's good for their customers. If there's a limit, just say it. Your customers would certainly appreciate knowing. And for crying out loud I do not care that being just a little bit dishonest about it makes customers excited and gets more sales.

The guy in TFA should be a warning to others: you cannot trust other machines to handle your data responsibly. They'll turn on you and demand a ransom when it's convenient. Self-host, and own your infrastructure.

Not sure if it works with the 'drive' but does with google cloud storage: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-trans...

But more importantly these devices are only for uploading to GCP, not exporting data from.

It's not clear what Google is doing here is even legal. If a company is holding my property, they're usually required to make reasonable efforts to return it.

A former employer will usually ship your things back to you, for example, or find other ways to return them. Simply tossing things you had in your office in the trash is illegal.

A lost-and-found is where there's little or no business relationship and you didn't ask for the stuff.

If we have a formal relationship where you're holding on to my stuff or vice-versa as part of that relationship, you are generally required to return my stuff and I am required to return yours when the relationship ends. If I am working for you, and you have my tools at the office, you need to return them to me. If it's impractical for me to pick them up (e.g. I left them in an office in Alaska), that means you need to ship them to me at your cost. If a contractor has your data, and you don't renew the contract, they need to reasonably provide it back to you. If you are leaving a relationship and your ex has a bunch of stuff at your house, you need to return it. Etc.

That's very different from someone losing something on your property.

I suspect, in this case, if both sides had equal legal budgets, Google would lose a court case. Now, testing that is very impractical since legal budgets aren't equal, but from a pure justice perspective, that's how it works out.

Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy.

Google clearly made a mistake in offering an "unlimited plan" so it makes perfect sense that they're going to discontinue it, and offer 60 days before the data becomes read only. If it was just that, there wouldn't be any article.

The fact that they regret offering an unlimited plan doesn't, however, give them the right to tell him that they're going to give him 60 days before the data becomes read only but it won't be deleted and then suddenly tell him that actually his data is going to be deleted in 7 days, which isn't sufficient time to transfer it elsewhere.

I also very much agree that the monopolistic behavior you're mentioning is not a think we should just go accepting and even more, not be victim blaming. It feels really weird to me that people are blaming the reporter. You know, a 1.6 trillion dollar company vs well... nearly anyone else.

For reference, the standard scam before was to offer $40/month for e.g. 1GB of data. At that point, you'd pay a crazy amount for each additional MB of data. This was horrible with very fast data, where you could accidentally burn through the whole quota with a misclick e.g. grabbing a large download.

Unlimited with throttle is super-friendly in comparison. I need data in case of an emergency -- enough to send and get emails and have GPS. I don't need 4k video streaming in an emergency. I don't want a $1000 bill for that. It keeps me in a sensible position, without requiring unlimited liability for the carrier.

My cell network (not Fi) has crazy fast internet (I'd throttle it if I could, t avoid overusing it).

If I go over some amount, it goes to 3G speeds (probably 200kbps or similar).

If I were to run at 3G speeds -- continuously, peak speed -- for a month, I couldn't e.g. hit a terabit of data. Ergo, there is a cap, and it's short of 100GB. You cannot get to 100GB be because of the throttle.

I think this is very good behavior, but it is capped.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38521408

Is this not exactly what has happened? He was clearly threatened harshly, and... the data isn't yet deleted?

It sounds like he (I think reasonably) believed that would be the new reality after the grace period: that he couldn’t write new files, but that his existing data would be accessible indefinitely in read-only form.

Sure, it’s clear from the context that Google vaguely wants him to stop being a headache for them. But planning for a read-only future is very different from planning for your data to be vaporized. As GP points out, Google could get eviction done in the same timeframe but save considerable face if the initial correspondence had said “you’re using way too much, it’s against our TOS, and we’re deleting your data in 30 days,” then given him a 30-day “reprieve” when the deadline drew near.

How exactly is that not a harsh threat? Sounds like a harsh threat to me. They were nice before, he didn't comply, now they're jerks. But it remains just a threat unless they actually wipe the data. Which they won't, because he's surely downloading it right now while we yell about it on HN.

He didn’t comply with what? Show me where in Google’s communications where it said they were going to delete his data.

And there’s no practical way to download that amount of data within seven days, just based on the bandwidth this would require. The situation would be totally different if they gave him six months notice for the deletion.

The poster upthread was trying (vainly, I guess) to make a distinction between the two.

Google initially told him that there was no hard deadline for getting the data off—just that his drive would be read-only as long as it was over the limit.

Then, 6 months later, they told him he had 7 days to get it off or it would be wiped.

No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.

I think the answer is that Google did in fact target companies with exceptionally high storage needs. They were just assuming that everyone who had lots of data would also spend a lot on other services and that didn't pan out.

A better comparison is probably a restaurant promising unlimited coffee refills for life, forgetting to make it conditional on ordering food as well. Then some office worker who never eats breakfast turns up every morning for three double espresso refills.

In your analogy it would be Amazon setting up an S3 front on their corporate unlimited Google account. That didn't happen, it was just someone with more data than average. Google knows very well what the distribution looks like.

Contrast this "unlimited" with how gmail was rolled out – gmail didn't offer unlimited email storage, it just offered a number orders of magnitude greater than everyone thought was realistic at the time.

    Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)

    Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.

I've experienced this first-hand and they're pretty fair about it. I believe they asked me to upgrade to Enterprise once I was serving something like >10-20TB per month of images / audio files (this was several years ago though!)

> if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files

Lots of sites have images. When exactly can I start to expect paying? Will this unspoken limit change in the future? Will I be notified when it is? As-written, it doesn't seem that way since it's opaque.

I imagine it pretty much comes down to "did this one thing that an individual is free hosting suddenly become popular or are they constantly taking the piss/running a biz off free".

They have an internal metric - I just wish it was public. How can I make a business decision on cost without this?

Support is part of the cost that is rolled into that pay-per-usage fee IMO.

I have no problem with banging on Google for offering "unlimited" things without telling you what the limits actually are. But at some point, you have to expect some level of knowledge and sophistication from the users. I think accumulating 237Tb of data is well past the point where you should not just take "unlimited" at face value, ask hard questions about exactly what the limits of what they're offering are, and move to a better supported service, even if it costs some money.

It's probably also time to re-think - do you really need 237Tb? That's a huge amount of data. Is this like raw 4k HD video of every interview you've ever done, uncut? Maybe it's time to cut down on things a bit.

If Joe Blow's computer shop down the street offered "unlimited storage" then normies would understand that to be bullshit. But when Google gives that offer, it's taken literally because Google. And this is Google's own damn fault, their PR teams built Google's reputation to impossible heights deliberately.

Lesson being: do not rely on devices or services that rely on a third party. They absolutely will screw you; it’s only a matter of time.

If you do not believe this, then I would say that you have not been around this industry long enough. There may be rare exceptions, but this should be your rule if you care about the longevity of your software and data.

You can't expect customers to go into this as battle-hardened as their opponent.

If you don't own the hardware and software stack, you don't own the service.

Sure, we could boycott. How often is that ever effective in this modern age? Is it ever, because I don’t think I ever heard of such outside of history books?

Our lawmakers are corrupt and wholly in the pocket of those who would stand to benefit from perpetuating this shameful status quo. From my perspective, there ain’t damn thing we can do to fix it (or a thousand other problems), unless we are ready to start holding them accountable. I think that will take putting some of their heads on pikes.

Absolutely. The word "unlimited" has been misused by so many companies (especially ISP and mobile) that anyone who has their eyes open should expect it to mean limited.

Also if there is a deal that is exceeding better than other options, don't be surprised when the rules change later.

Remus says it better in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38628966

"Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account."

I don't see how can this be seen as "taking advantage of a system".

Thats highly subjective to the point of meaningless.

Every single person who had these 100+ TB plans knew it was unsustainable. When you have that much data you know how much it costs for hard drives to store that much data.

If the article had actually stated the amount the guy paid per month (what,$20-$60?) everyone would know that he should've known this was coming.

We had to move a bunch of data off gdrive too, which did little for our opinion of Google's business customer support and was a PITA I didn't need, but the first warnings were in 2002 some time and we were nowhere near as egregious in usage as some of the/r/datahoarder crowd that had multiple petabytes hiding in the lowest cost Gsuite legacy pricing.

That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable).

If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your quota it will get deleted in 180 days" I'd consider this entire post to be a waste of space - but that's not what happened, and I'm very sympathetic to his situation.

otherwise it says, verbatim:

  Hello,

  Your account was previously placed in a 14 day grace period because you exceeded your pooled storage limit.

  The pooled storage grace period expired on May 25, 2023 and your account is now in a “read-only” state. In this state services are impacted, including users not being able to upload new files or create new Google Docs, Sheets, Slides or Forms. Learn more about the features that are currently impacted.

  To prevent any further disruption to services, you can free up or get more storage.

  Sincerely,

  The Google Workspace Team

Why do you think this?

This was a paid service until Google changed the terms; afterwards, Google claimed that the files would merely be read only (indefinitely), not deleted. After THAT, they then gave the user 1 week to deal with 250 terabytes.

Read it again you understand that properly.

How much would a TB cost on S3?

It is able to provide services very cheaply and it is for that very reason that paying customers are attracted to it - and of course, even if a service is cheap, paying for a service creates a different relationship between the service provider and the customer than does a relationship where the customer freeloads. In my view, if this had been a free service the terms of which had changed, there wouldn't be the same scope for outrage. But this was a paying customer, even if he didn't pay as much as you think would have been reasonable - or would have been obtained - elsewhere in the market. Google voluntarily chose those prices for its unlimited plan for competitive reasons and in its own corporate interests. That's on Google, as was Google's subsequent unconscionable behaviour.

In Australia, I suspect this sort of behaviour would provoke very close scrutiny by our antitrust and consumer protection regular, the ACCC. We don't seem to have the same problem with regulatory capture that the US does currently. At the very least here the consumer would have arguable claims under the Australian Consumer Law relating to consumer guarantees and misleading and deceptive conduct in trade or commerce.

Does it say somewhere in terms and conditions?

If Google unilaterally changed its TOS and updated those terms by saying the account would go 'into a read only state' without any further details (both of which in fact happened), the user is entitled to assume that such a read only state will be the new status quo. Google should have specified a time limit or specified that the read only state would be revocable on with no or short notice, at the company's discretion. By staying silent on that matter, Google's communications were misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead or deceive the user of the product.

This really isn't rocket science.

Also, this was a paid subscription.

What are you talking about?

>Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account.

Because people with that much data know how much it costs to buy hard drives to store that much data.

Ask any of them how Google was supposed to make money off of them as a customer and watch them go for a gold in mental gymnastics.

It's not at all unreasonable to think a company might offer a service where they make a profit on the average customer, but make a loss in some edge-cases. It's not such an uncommon model.

When you use the actual numbers instead of a theoretical argument it falls apart even quicker. These are message board arguments, not ones you'd make with a straight face in person.

Trust in Google might be near zero on HN these days but they still have a pretty good reputation with the general public. Expecting every non-technical user to see through the BS feels pretty wrong to me. I mean, what's the point of consumer protection laws if they don't push companies to be honest?

Otherwise its false advertising.

Edit: the real mistake here is trusting google, a company with a track record in messing up with their customers (from retired products to accounts frozen without any hope of appeal).

I can't even find that they're a tech reporter given that:

> The footage Burke obtained and shared with other journalists was obviously embarassing for the Fox brand. And that’s saying something, considering what Fox is willing to publish and air of its own free will and volition. A pair of videos featuring unreleased footage of a Kanye West interview allegedly illegally obtained by Tim Burke featured the rap star saying things even more abhorrent than his usual blend of sexism, bigotry, and conspiracy theories.

They certainly don't seem like someone with an expert's understanding of cloud storage costs, do you have evidence to the contrary?

Agreed that this is a crisis but it is not impossible.

You can use 'rclone' - running on your own system or hosted elsewhere - to move data between cloud providers.

You don't rely on your own bandwidth - they talk directly to one another:

  rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever

  ssh [email protected] rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever

I am, admittedly, hand-waving away the actual configuration of those "remotes" as they are called, which involve your login and/or API keys, etc. - here is an example of what that config might look like:

https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html

----

Can rclone sync directly from drive to s3 Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems just fine.

Note that it effectively downloads the file and uploads it again, so the node running rclone would need to have lots of bandwidth. ----

This guy realistically had plenty of time to figure it out, the real problem is they don't want to pay $$$ for somewhere else to host the files and have now reached the point it has become a problem.

Most “independent journalists” I know aren’t operating on the kind of household budget where they can handwave that kind of bill away.

You're not storing any data on rsync.net - you're just using our 'rclone' that is built into the platform.

The minimum is $9/mo. Or less if you ask about the HN discount.

That seems like incredible value for that kind of connectivity. Thank you for broadening my toolset. I can immediately think of a few little projects where such a technique will be useful.

Had a very similar experience with google, except with maybe 20tb rather than 200, and no data loss.

They gave warnings at least a year in advance about the transition to google workspace from google for business or however it was called before. It was quite clear that this transition would eventually be mandatory and that it did not include unlimited space for a flat fee.

I punted on the transition for as long as possible, and when it finally arrived I temporarily added some accounts until I removed the excess data (mainly old backups I did not need anymore).

Nothing in life is unlimited and taking such a promise at face value appears to me as being willfully naive. Relying on such an offer as your main storage is begging for trouble. Expecting this to happen is precisely why I only stored backups there.

You don’t need to be an expert to do the math, consider that just to store the data, without any redundancy and without it being constantly spinning would have retailed at at ~ $4K using the cheapest drives (~25 8tb drives), and would have cost them ~$1/h or ~$700 to constantly run at CA electricity prices (~8W idle per drive). And this before redundancy, backups, bandwidth, etc. This is obviously unsustainable and will eventually end.

Same goes eg for dropbox, who offered “unlimited” storage for their business plan until fairly recently but now have the same limit of 5tb/acct as Google.

Who in their right mind would rely on such an obvious abuse of what was meant by “unlimited” to store the only copy of their life’s work?

Also apparently it wasn't his only copy - his others were taken, and now he's about to lose the last one.

I agree it would have been nicer of them to store an archive after they stop paying. I disagree that they reneged on their offer - despite being disappointed that the deal ended, would I expect it to be offered forever, especially given the potential for abuse? Of course not. Frankly I’m surprised it lasted this long.

I'm getting my information from here though. If you don't mind linking to the relevant part about him getting a year's warning about deletion...

What are your thoughts on false advertising? What part of "unlimited" in the advertisement should be allowed, if the resource itself is not unlimited?

However, advertising is not contract, and I wouldn’t want to hear the legalese of a contract whenever someone tries to sell me something (actually perhaps I would, maybe it would reduce the amount of ads One has to endure, but that’s beside the point as it isn’t a norm outside, perhaps, the medical industry).

I don’t consider this to be such a case. Was he capped at how much he would be able to store (other than by allowed bandwidth/traffic)? Was he promised this would last forever? Was he not given a warning a year in advance that this is ending?

No resource in this universe is unlimited, so your choice is either to be a pedant about what that means and then raise an uproar when your deliberate misunderstanding of colloquial language breaks, or attempt to understand specifically what is implied by the promise.

Dude uploaded over 237 TB, they must have some really long years where you live.

What I believe happened (as happened to many other people as can see from rclone forum) is that some people decided that they were going to simply go into "overage" mode, as that assumed that google would keep their data around when over quota, just it be locked into read only mode (so the data would remain, but just be readable, they couldn't add anything to it).

Google decided that this wasn't something they were going to support, so people who went into read only mode, have now been getting the letters that their data is going to be deleted.

i.e. they have been for months paying google for an account that they knew is over quota.

200TB is fairly easily extractable over 3 months from google drive if one plans correctly. You have a 10TB download quota a day, which one would need a gigabit/s connection to hit. If you have only 250megabit connection, it will take 80 days. Bumping up on the 3 month warning I had, but still doable especially if one filters out unnecessary things.

Very poor communication from Google.

If the journalist in question sees this, or someone knows them, I am happy to assist in a migration at no cost. If someone from Google sees this (HN Google support), it would be swell if the delete lifecycle could be paused while this migration is facilitated.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing

[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

[3] https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault

B2 does mention a "capacity bundle", saying 250TB/year is $19.5K - but that's $1.5K more than the monthly pricing for the same capacity so it doesn't seem like they have any meaningful long-term pricing discounts.

You make it sound like he could have chosen to keep paying Google under a different plan, but I can't find any way for him to pay Google to keep the data for him short of creating 100+ dummy "users" in his workspace to get their 2TB each (which I'm sure Google would totally be okay with) [0].

Google is firing him as a customer, which is their prerogative, but they're doing it on a timeframe that means he can't actually get the data out in time. That's what the (actual) headline says, and those are the facts.

[0] https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

The short timeframe now is because the user did nothing in over half a year to resolve the problem.

Google could have more clearly communicated that read-only state was temporary, but assuming it was permanent seems wildly optimistic and naive.

Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data.

Google makes plenty of bad choices, but this seems like a problem that Burke made entirely for himself.

That's not clear at all.

> If he continues to do nothing

What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a technical data migration.

At this point, all he can probably do is start deleting files to avoid account cancellation. If he wanted to move all the data elsewhere, he had over half a year to do that.

How can you possibly think that over half a year of free service isn't enough of an accommodation? In what world does it make sense to assume that having your subscription terminated and you storage put into read only mode means it is OK to just leave it there and do nothing if you want to keep it?

He took full advantage of an amazingly good deal on a unlimited storage plan, then when it was cancelled, continued to assume he could just leave the data there for free. Google could legally just have pulled the plug on him for continuing to abuse a service he wasn't paying for.

The standard S3 tier, sure, but Deep Glacier would be about $250/month. Retrieval can be up to 12 hours but that shouldn't really be a problem for long term archiving. As with anything AWS, egress can kill you, but you can sidestep that with something like Snowball, and really that's only an issue if you need to egress everything to migrate the archive.

Going by AWS's website[0], a 50 TB Snowball is $200, so you'd need to drop $1000 for five Snowballs to hold that data.

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-peta...

>And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. And finding (and paying for) multiple backup services that can handle 250 TBs of data is likely pretty cost prohibitive.

This was a pretty big story back then: https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2023/08/10/tim-burke-fbi...

though the names in that URL probably gives the real reason behind this "investigation". Rich people got caught with their pants down and we know laws don't apply to them

Ofc you can argue that a Youtuber goes into such a contract willingly. This case is much more egregious as a series of "I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.

Buying the drives would cost at least $5k

assuming it all goes into frequent access tier, which this shouldn't as this is an archive. just by enabling the automatic tiering is going to be more like 1000/month

and if it's would instead end up organized into glacier as it should it's gonna be more like 300$/m

which is not dirt cheap, but still. it start giving the prospect of maintaining a home archive with manual disk rotation and scheduled data verification some second thought.

Throw in a case of beer, and maid services to clean up your living room afterward, and you'd still make budget.

ETA: OK maybe more like 10-12k it would be.

> "Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News. As we noted, this seemed like a pretty big 1st Amendment issue. Burke is also facing bogus CFAA charges because he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content."

Even if Burke had built a box, the maid service and beer would be the most helpful (but would not solve his actual issue).

And he has made no attempts to fix that.

20 TB drives on newegg seems to be available for $310 to $360. If you use erasure coding w/ 30% overhead that's 18 +3 drives or $7.5k in drives alone, pre chassis.

Having a DR replica living somewhere outside your house probably gets this well over $12k, even if that replica is glacier or similar.

But yes - I realized my mistake in tossing off that comment offhand.

You just expanded it. It's still basically the same.

> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.

230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore.

Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.

But if its your "lifes work" i would assume the value there is more than just the cost of storage. That the person storing it would have thought about ownership and egress options a bit further out.

Like i use workspace for all sorts of stuff. But its google, they can and may just axe your account for any reason. So i have backups of all things at all times and worst case, i just move my email/drive whatever to another service along with the domain, which I own (and he appears to as well)

Im not excusing google at all. But at some point you have to take some accountability. Not having a backup plan and just trusting google or ANY company to faithfully keep your lifes work for you seems slightly....naive.

>We’ve written a few times about independent journalist Tim Burke. Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News.

It just says his electronic devices were seized. Not that backups were included here, though it is implied.

Event still the FBI raid occured in July [1]. Backups are N-1. So he was down to nill back in July and didnt seem to act from there.

Also based on the dates in the screenshots provided, he went into grace period on the Google Drive data ALSO in July..

So I say again....its his lifes work. Its invaluable to him but its just data to anyone else. Its incumbent on him to make sure this doesnt occur some how, some way. Even on backblaze that would be 20k/year. I would be having that on multiple disks at multiple sites that I control. But that is just me.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/27/journalist-tells-fbi-to-...

Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

No, the morale of my story is not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people.

> Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

That isn't an edge case thought, was it?

But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse.

> That isn't an edge case thought, was it?

If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.

I might be, but I am not going to be flaming the shit out of Google about it. I've been the edge case many times in scenarios just like this and I knew I was taking full advantage and eventually it would have to stop.

> If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.

Lots of people were in roughly the same boat during COVID. There would have been thousands of people taking pictures of their child to send to doctors every day. People need non-urgent medical attention every day, that is not an edge case. Taking pics to send to your doctor during covid was not an edge case.

You would need at least 11 or 12 of these, running you $4,799.88 for the latter, plus tax and shipping, or one month of S3 storage in storage hardware alone.

I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court.

It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.

Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time.

Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.

Obviously the cellular provider hates this but they can’t remove something I’m paying for and haven’t broken the contract. They do try to get me off the plan several times a year offering new phones fully paid if I switched.

Fuck them, I paid for it and I’m not going to leave. It’s not my fault a multi billion dollar corporation didn’t get one over me.

I’m glad I live in an area with good protections against this corporate abuse.

Absolutely disgusting what Google has done. I’ll keep this in mind 5 years from now when I have the power to spend real money on budgets and ensure that I never give Google a cent of it.

It takes decades to build a reputation and minutes to destroy it. Google has destroyed theirs.

We use Alibaba Cloud, GCP, and most of all AWS. About December last year, Alibaba Cloud had a full zone outage as their datacenter provider had complete air-conditioning failure. One of the first things to go were the switches plugged into Express Connect (their feature to allow you to have direct links to their cloud through your network provider) and we had backup access set. We didn't get all of our stuff shut down but it helped.

But developing and maintaining backup access costs something. When we egress from S3 to our on-prem cluster, that's a cost. Vendor continuity and substitutability is just a cost like that. It's up to the guy managing this to model each of these risks and no enterprise vendor will sign an unlimited liability contract so you're going to have to land somewhere reasonable here. I always make sure to have exit clauses for us, and I try to ensure vendor exit clauses are what I'm comfortable with and appropriately priced.

Ultimately, you'll just have to read what you sign and have good counsel. But that's just what's worked for me. If you find the blacklist model more successful, more power to you.

Sure, but you're missing the main point of the story, which is the seven days they gave him to download everything.

> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3

According to the S3 Glacier pricing I see, it would be less than $900/month. It would cost less than a $5000 one-time payment to buy enough USB storage for the full 237 TB.

> and he doesn't want to pay that

No, the story doesn't say that.

They were moved to a new storage subscription in mid-2022 and while they were over the limits, Google ignored it up to this point.

I somehow doubt google drive would even support that level of egress.

I'd be surprised if it doesnt support it. Its google after all. Despite their shitty customer support, their engineers dont mess around

If it's excessive, then Google shouldn't have offered an unlimited data plan. They could have called it a 100 TB plan, but they chose to call it unlimited to make it sound better and then canceled it once people took them up on the offer. Regardless of whether that kind of action is legal, it's a shady business practice.

For that matter, there's nothing wrong with Google discontinuing the plan going forward, but they had plenty of options for making the transition more fair and building consumer trust without hurting their bottom line too much. For example, they could have converted his account to a 250TB account and tripled its price, at which point he wouldn't be in immediate danger of losing his files but would be pressured into gradually moving to a more cost effective solution.

Right, which is why they discontinued it.

They offered unlimited, not unlimited forever.

I have a tough time believe that they didn't give any warning and then kicked them off the service.

It was unlimited. If they didn't want it to be unlimited, it should have had a limit on it.

It’s also reasonable that companies products change. And maybe it doesn’t last forever, fair enough. But if your product is backup, and you pull the rug with a 7 day grace period, of course people are going to be upset and warn others not to trust you.

Why do you think this?

Seriously I'm all on board with giving Google the much grief that they deserve - but I also would expect someone claiming victim here to have more of a claim than abusing a "unlimited" account and getting mad about it. Yes 100% Google should be holding onto their data or offering them the ability to pay for the larger data tier - that part is BS.

Get mad at the FBI for raiding you, get mad that you didn't think of another cloud service to store with or pay for an appropriate service (0.07$/TB [my rough calc] is dirt cheap to the point of suspect). I also have to assume that the individual, former anonymous hacker has some wherewithal to be suspect of 'unlimited' packages from large corporations.

There's gotta be more to this story -- it smells off.

> Because they are using 237 Tb in an unlimited service from Google

Google's a trillion dollar company. A popular saying amongst Googlers is "I don't know how to count that low". They're used to big numbers.

I work at a much smaller company. We are not a trillion dollar company. Even we, when offering an unlimited service, ask ourselves: "What happens if someone takes us up on this offer?"

It's not a loophole, it's what he paid for.

It's fine to stop offering an unlimited service. We did! My only beef with Google's conduct here is the 7 days of notice prior to deletion.

I've followed Mike Masnick's reporting in other cases. He seems like an even-handed, fair journalist. I trust that he's not hiding the ball, nor letting the other journalist mislead him about the situation.

I also have past professional experience that leads me to believe Google does what's easiest for Google, not what's best for their customers.

In one case, Google suspended a Google Certified Publishing Partner's GAM account for several hours with no notice. The partner had several years of history with Google, did $100M/year of revenue with them, and had an assigned Google rep who did weekly calls with them.

Google reactivated the account, but only after significant disruption to the partner.

I agree that it's good to be a critical consumer of news, but eh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably Google being blissfully ignorant of the impact they have on their users.

So, not excessive. 237 TB does not exceed unlimited. What am I missing here?

>they knew they had found a loop hole in google policy.

What, exactly, is this loop hole?

The victim is "taking advantage" of an advertised feature of the service they paid for, and has done nothing wrong. The fault lies entirely with Google for advertising unlimited storage, knowing full well that no such thing exists. Same with every other cloud storage service that once advertised unlimited storage. Just because someone who understands how computer storage works could probably figure out that it wasn't really unlimited doesn't make it not false advertising.

He did do that. The FBI raided his house and took all the drives. In the middle of trying to get them back (it’s unclear if he’ll be able to), Google terminated his storage. If this had happened at a different time he could’ve just backed up to a different (likely more expensive) service. But that’s not an option that’s open at the moment or possibly ever.

update: Not Free but feels like taking advantage of enterprise storage (0.07 $/TB) close to free.

It's curious how hard you keep pushing in this flagrant lie in this thread when the article explicitly and repeatedly makes clear that he was paying Google for Enterprise level storage and on top of that did indeed have local first, except all that got taken from him by the FBI. Yet for some reason you insist on claiming he wasn't paying and was somehow abusing cloud-only. Why?

https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/942777-no-more-unlimit...

> Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.

For instance, suddenly out of nowhere they are only telling people with a 7 day heads up that they will reclaim google voice numbers, and only with a single email.

I've used the service for over a decade and they never bothered to "monitor usage" or anything like this.

Thankfully I think due to US law they can't immediately re-issue them, but you have to claim them under a new phone number or such.

Very disturbing policy shifts at the company.

I was in a similar boat a few years ago. Had about 70 TB of archives and backups on Google Drive and was forced to scramble to move these somewhere else when they terminated the unlimited plan.

I don't see how it's less of a concern that he has 200+ TB of video. Perhaps don't advertise a limited resource as unlimited; then you won't get people like this guy.

He deserves the ability to get the data off his account. Google acting like their hands are tied are simply being malicious.