Unlimited did mean unlimited though. There was probably some sort of limit but this guy never in fact hit it. But Google stopped offering unlimited storage (probably because of people like this who would store 100s of TB). They notified him of this months before discontinuing the service and he apparently made no effort to find a different storage solution, maybe because it would be really expensive to store that much data in the cloud anywhere else. Did he think they would just continue to store the data indefinitely? That doesn't strike me as a reasonable assumption to make.

He was told that after the grace period ends, his account would become "read-only". Interpreting "read-only" as "I will still have read access to the data" is not unreasonable. I'm guessing that neither of us would have trusted it, but HN readers are not representative of the population as a whole. Google should have provided explicit notice of their intention to delete the data a reasonable amount of time in advance, accounting for the amount of data involved. I don't think that a week is reasonable in any case, but it is especially unreasonable when hundreds of TB of data need to be moved.

Sure, I agree that they should have been more explicit when they discontinued the service and said that they would delete data over the new limit at some point. But I don't think you have to be an HN reader to understand that if you stop paying for a service eventually the service provider will stop providing it. Like did this guy really think that the data would just stay in "read-only" mode forever?

They don't stop charging you because your account is over limit.

Unlimited does. And it should.

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.

If you read the article you will learn that he did have a backup, but it is currently in the FBI’s hands. He wasn’t relying solely on google.

Thats not really what the article says.

>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-...

While they had unlimited they didn’t have a problem. But at a certain point someone is going to do the maths and realise the 1% who fully take advantage and go massive in an unlimited offer cost more than you make from the others.