The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"
The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. Now, the account is scheduled for termination since he's not paying for a valid current account.
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.
> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"
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.
He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota.
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
> 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.
Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.
I had a business account that was told they were cancelling the service. We were given 3 months or so notice.
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.
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?
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.
Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google <--> aws are capable of).
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:
The bad part is that Google announced 60+ days before the change took effect that the account would become read-only. Nowhere did they state the account would be terminated, or could not indefinitely remain in a read-only state. Then, they suddenly spring a 7 day deadline to download all your data, with no previous mention.
I'd assume it couldn't remain in read only forever. But yeah since it's data loss Google should be very loud about that eventuality. I was getting weekly emails from dropbox about my inactive account before they nuked it.
S3 is not where this belongs. Backblaze B2 would be better and cheaper (~$1428/month) and no egress fees due to Cloudflare bandwidth alliance, the Internet Archive also has a private offering [3].
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.
Rsync.net works out essentially the same ($6/month cheaper) on a monthly basis, but offers 10% and 15% discounts for 12 and 24 month options.
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.
> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state.
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.
Google gave him 60 days after they fired him to continue using his account for free. After that they gave him another 5 months in read only mode to find a solution.
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.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that
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.
You cannot export 240TB in 7 days. And a journalist can be forgiven for not knowing what the market value of cloud storage is. Besides, Google offers many services for free (or below cost) in order to maintain their dominant market position. I don't think your take is fair to the journalist.
I think everyone is also burying the HUGE wrench in the whole idea of storage preservation:
>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.
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
> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"
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.
Unlimited means unlimited. Too often what gets lost in the phrase "edge case" is that there's a human being on the other end. They should do the decent thing and work with him and anyone else storing more data than can be practically downloaded to come up with a workaround or extension. Imagine if your bank closed your account and forfeited your money because they couldn't dole it out to you fast enough.
The GP comment didn't "just expand it". There is a huge difference in the English language between "Life's Work Deleted" and "Life's Work Will Be Deleted." Past tense and future tense are very different things.
So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.
Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.
He was definitely pushing it, but google is being extremely aggressive with timelines just to get resources freed up.
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.
Yup. Youtubers have, are, and continue to be subjected to this. Can be booted out at a whim at anytime due to automation, with no hopes of getting any actual human to interact with unless they have dedicated line to staff (i.e. you're one of the huge 1M+ subscriber channels) or you make a big enough ruckus on social media. Your potential livelihood can be terminated by the whims of bots.
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.
> "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).
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.
The fault here still lies with Google. Why advertise the plan as "unlimited" if it is not actually unlimited.
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.
Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it.
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.
I believe most companies don't offer unlimited plans anymore these days. And Google probably removed theirs because of use cases like this.
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.
I make it a point to downvote people who think they are tone moderators. You could have submitted it yourself if you found it first.
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.
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.
For readers' reference, a "Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS 22 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive" costs $399.99.
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.
> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan
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.
I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Google is in the wrong on their response but, come on, let's be reasonable human beings and stop saying 'victim blaming'.
They didn't; there were many emails throughout 2022 discussing "Important changes to your subscription" from the Google Workspace Team stating that unlimited storage plans were going away and that people were being moved to pooled storage across the entire account.
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.
My previous comment was not as informed as it should have been (because I opined after only read the title... a mistake, to be sure). I've edited it and will leave it at this being a very unfortunate situation to be in.
> He can buy his own drives, with redundancy, for less than 2 months of that.
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.
Google deserves some hate here, but this problem is bigger than just them, and I think by being too narrowly focused on G we're missing a systemic problem. G is one of the worst offenders, but this is a cultural attitude/approach in most of tech. The idea is to acquire users by giving stuff away or making your service cheap, lock them in, then squeeze by ratcheting up the price. It's a playbook that has worked fantastically well and made a lot of people very rich, so it's not going to change overnight and/or without some pain.
I've started refusing business with these types of companies, and I tell them why. I'm sure none of it matters, but if I do it then I know that at least somebody is saying something.
An example: I would be one of the biggest buyer of Kindle books on the planet if they were DRM free. I'd still buy some things if I could use software to read it that wasn't invasively spying on me. It's nice that they make stuff cheaper by putting some of the data revenue into it (and even subsidizing it in some cases), but I'd much rather pay for something like Remarkable more but get a respectful product.
What is bad about the situation exactly? You get a service for below cost for some amount of time at which point you have to start paying what it actually costs. I can understand if the company manages to corner the market by selling below cost and then jacks up the price way above cost, but cloud storage is still an extremely competitive market and generally quite a bit cheaper than the cost of storing an equivalent amount of data on your own hardware (with the same availability)
It is literally anti-competitive, bad for consumers and competitor startups. How can an average startup compete if a rich company or VC backed startup has a business model of selling below cost to get market share? The fact that the big players are doing it makes it an oligopoly not a monopoly, but that's still bad.
This is a 100+ year old problem and has already been solved in other industries, but tech likes to think it is unique. It's a bad pattern to sell below cost to gain market share. Oil and steel companies were selling below cost to undercut competing startups in the 1900s, then raised prices when those competitors folded. It wasn't good for anyone other than the robber barons then either.
>I can understand if the company manages to corner the market by selling below cost and then jacks up the price way above cost,
That's usually what happens. And Google is no stranger to it given Youtube and to some extent Chrome (which is "free" but also being molded to more or less have DRM on the browser level).
Cloud is fortunatly still competitive, but I can't say the same for many other tech markets.
I would have strongly preferred if my reMarkable didn't come with a mandatory subscription. It's mandatory because you completely lose warranty service if you ever cancel it. The reason? I had been saving up to afford the device for five years and missed the introduction of their subscription by one. single. month. I'm stuck paying forever because I don't count as a "grandfathered" customer.
What's worse is that their customer service told me I'm eligible for unlimited free service, got me to cancel (and lose my warranty), then backpedaled and told me that I'm not actually eligible and on top of that I just lost my warranty.
I managed to get them to un-cancel it but that entire ordeal is just even fucking worse. I never want to deal with that company again, and will not be recommending their products.
unfortunately, the established players that got huge by offering free services and then raised the price would love for us to do something about this problem. it would help them widen their moat.
Startup idea: SaaS portal to trigger FBI raid on RAID disks, acting as a free replicated permanent archival storage. Retrieving the data is out of scope of the MVP.
Worse than that- even if you are adjacent to a crime that took place and not the suspect, they can also invade your privacy - rifle through all of your private data online and so on.
I had a friend who owns a PC repair shop who bought a laptop from another 'friend' that was sold to him illegally. (He did not know it was illegally stolen from the next state over) The state police came in (with FBI in tow) and seized all of his equipment. Every last computer (all of his own, as well as customers that had their pc in for repair) in the shop was checked over.
They held onto his equipment (along with 3 other customers) for 6 months, and he had to make do with a laptop to keep his business running. Fortunately, he had backed up his PC repair software to another location. Or he would have been out of business.
All because the FBI wanted to be thorough. Not because he was on suspicion of a crime.
And yet I see everyone here blaming Google and not the FBI. Until the day comes when Google is raiding your house and confiscating your data, it seems like the FBI is the bigger baddie here.
It appears that he had a Workspace account which offered “unlimited” storage for a time, predicated on the account type being multiuser businesses or education, with a per-seat fee. Google phased out the unlimited storage awhile ago (over a year) after people discovered a loophole where paying for one account still provided unlimited storage. Predictable abuse followed (see /r/datahoarders).
While I’m sympathetic to the user and skeptical of Google’s commitment to their customers, this doesn’t appear to be a straightforward case of someone getting Scroogled. If he were paying for the consumed storage as a standard Drive customer, this wouldn’t be happening.
Google offered "as much storage as you need" for the Workspace account, without attaching a condition on a required number of seats. It's not a loophole if a customer takes them up on the offer.
I'm usually sympathetic with businesses who failed to appreciate how much power very few power users really have, but this is Google we're talking about. Their sales and legal department is larger than 90% of tech companies. This was their mistake and their mistake only.
A week of notice to move ~250TByte out is definitely unreasonable. 250TiB in 7 full days is an average of over 3.6Gbit/s, assuming no transfer interruptions and that he started immediately (i.e. already had other storage options lined up, and started transferring the second the notification email was sent).
For a company like Google several Gbit/s constantly over a week, or even the tens of Gbit/s needed to finish in one day, is not troublesome, but for most other people/entities it is completely unrealistic. Getting that much storage with that much bandwidth to it is far from impossible, but it won't be cheap, especially given he'd need it right this second.
you can generate serviceAccounts in google cloud that act as clients for your google workspace with no additional cost. It's a neat hidden trick to circumvent the google quotas, but you need to write your own clients/wrappers to utilize that properly.
the unlimited plan was phased 7 months ago [0] so got few notices, with the final one 7 days before termination. so the guy with 250tb of data neglected that for half a year and now is surprised.
TFA suggests that the previous communication on the matter stated that the account would go read-only, not that any data would be lost. Do you have any evidence that suggests other notifications were sent between?
The thread you link to above says “People using anywhere from 5.??TB all the way to 152TB … got the email” but I assume that email is the one already mentioned which states large accounts are going read-only.
The FBI seized his computers back in August. He should have bought new hard drives and made a backup of his cloud storage starting back then, if that was so important.
They've skated by with this sort of completely insensitive handling of customers for years and my (completely anecdotal) recent experience is that less technical people are starting to take note. I have friends who have never cared about investing their entire digital lives in Google who are suddenly asking about de-Googling. I hope it prompts a change, but in the meantime I never recommend to friends or family they put anything solely in Google they can't afford to lose.
I don't know how many times this has to be repeated in the comments section: Don't depend on Google in production for anything.
The problem stems around that their culture is to break all existing backwards compatibility at any moments notice (You know, ""innovating""), their politics is to rapidly cancel projects and products due to infighting and power struggles, software development leadership is make things as expensive to maintain as possible by using the most impractical of languages and frameworks, and budgets are rarely given until a project gains executive attention, which is usually too late.
I find the actions of Google here are as troubling as every other commenter. However, I cannot fathom managing 200TB on Google Drive. It's just such a terrible cloud platform experience for managing that much data. It is clearly design for "typical" consumers who have a few gigabytes at most; moving, modifying, downloading, and uploading files is all bottlenecked.
Personal anecdote: Once I was using Google Collab to process a few thousand images. I needed to move the photos (less than one GB) to a new folder. It took over an hour, and appeared to process the moves in JavaScript in my web browser.
Readit News
The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. Now, the account is scheduled for termination since he's not paying for a valid current account.
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.
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
Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.
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.
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?
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.
Dude uploaded over 237 TB, they must have some really long years where you live.
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:
... and if you don't want to bother even installing rclone, you can run it somewhere it is already installed: Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google <--> aws are capable of).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
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.
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
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.
Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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.
Buying the drives would cost at least $5k
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I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court.
It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.
Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time.
Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.
I don't see how it's less of a concern that he has 200+ TB of video. Perhaps don't advertise a limited resource as unlimited; then you won't get people like this guy.
He deserves the ability to get the data off his account. Google acting like their hands are tied are simply being malicious.
assuming it all goes into frequent access tier, which this shouldn't as this is an archive. just by enabling the automatic tiering is going to be more like 1000/month
and if it's would instead end up organized into glacier as it should it's gonna be more like 300$/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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
I've started refusing business with these types of companies, and I tell them why. I'm sure none of it matters, but if I do it then I know that at least somebody is saying something.
An example: I would be one of the biggest buyer of Kindle books on the planet if they were DRM free. I'd still buy some things if I could use software to read it that wasn't invasively spying on me. It's nice that they make stuff cheaper by putting some of the data revenue into it (and even subsidizing it in some cases), but I'd much rather pay for something like Remarkable more but get a respectful product.
This is a 100+ year old problem and has already been solved in other industries, but tech likes to think it is unique. It's a bad pattern to sell below cost to gain market share. Oil and steel companies were selling below cost to undercut competing startups in the 1900s, then raised prices when those competitors folded. It wasn't good for anyone other than the robber barons then either.
That's usually what happens. And Google is no stranger to it given Youtube and to some extent Chrome (which is "free" but also being molded to more or less have DRM on the browser level).
Cloud is fortunatly still competitive, but I can't say the same for many other tech markets.
What's worse is that their customer service told me I'm eligible for unlimited free service, got me to cancel (and lose my warranty), then backpedaled and told me that I'm not actually eligible and on top of that I just lost my warranty.
I managed to get them to un-cancel it but that entire ordeal is just even fucking worse. I never want to deal with that company again, and will not be recommending their products.
I was about to say 'you should have other backups', but the FBI is a very powerful persistent threat, and might be the more important problem.
Perhaps you can eventually submit a FOIA request?
I see what you did there :)
I had a friend who owns a PC repair shop who bought a laptop from another 'friend' that was sold to him illegally. (He did not know it was illegally stolen from the next state over) The state police came in (with FBI in tow) and seized all of his equipment. Every last computer (all of his own, as well as customers that had their pc in for repair) in the shop was checked over.
They held onto his equipment (along with 3 other customers) for 6 months, and he had to make do with a laptop to keep his business running. Fortunately, he had backed up his PC repair software to another location. Or he would have been out of business.
All because the FBI wanted to be thorough. Not because he was on suspicion of a crime.
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While I’m sympathetic to the user and skeptical of Google’s commitment to their customers, this doesn’t appear to be a straightforward case of someone getting Scroogled. If he were paying for the consumed storage as a standard Drive customer, this wouldn’t be happening.
I'm usually sympathetic with businesses who failed to appreciate how much power very few power users really have, but this is Google we're talking about. Their sales and legal department is larger than 90% of tech companies. This was their mistake and their mistake only.
Let's assume it's AWS storage. After you stop paying (renewing) would you still expect to keep your data forever free of cost?
Things are free when people don't abuse it. Just be normal. Jesus.
>Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time”
For a company like Google several Gbit/s constantly over a week, or even the tens of Gbit/s needed to finish in one day, is not troublesome, but for most other people/entities it is completely unrealistic. Getting that much storage with that much bandwidth to it is far from impossible, but it won't be cheap, especially given he'd need it right this second.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937436
The thread you link to above says “People using anywhere from 5.??TB all the way to 152TB … got the email” but I assume that email is the one already mentioned which states large accounts are going read-only.
Maybe looking for other online providers at that point to store secondary copies would have been an option, but not a cheap one.
The problem stems around that their culture is to break all existing backwards compatibility at any moments notice (You know, ""innovating""), their politics is to rapidly cancel projects and products due to infighting and power struggles, software development leadership is make things as expensive to maintain as possible by using the most impractical of languages and frameworks, and budgets are rarely given until a project gains executive attention, which is usually too late.
Personal anecdote: Once I was using Google Collab to process a few thousand images. I needed to move the photos (less than one GB) to a new folder. It took over an hour, and appeared to process the moves in JavaScript in my web browser.