Yeah it’s definitely shitty if they really only give 7 days notice that your account is going from read-only to suspended and deleted, but after basically not paying your cloud storage bill for like 6 months this is a pretty predictable outcome
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google’s storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a “60 day grace period” ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.
He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn’t really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they’re going to delete his account in a week, which isn’t enough time to retrieve his data… because he didn’t do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn’t do anything during the grace period, and hasn’t done anything since the grace period ended.
I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he’s not paying that cost anymore.
trafficnab@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
mammut@lemmy.world 9 months ago
[deleted]trafficnab@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
They keep charging you the original rate presumably, which now only gives you X TB of storage, not unlimited, and as he did not move to increase the amount of storage his plan has (by paying more), he was essentially underpaying his bill the entire time
I’m not sure what sort of pricing he would have with Enterprise (it’s “call for quote”), but the cheapest published way to get the 250TB or so of cloud storage he needs would be to pay $900/mo for a Business Plus plan with 50 users
mammut@lemmy.world 9 months ago
[deleted]prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They discontinued the unlimited storage plan, so he can’t still be paying for the unlimited storage. I’m not a big fan of Google’s “I’m not seeing a return yet, better kill this product” approach, but it has been their MO for a long time. I think by now everyone doing business with them knows who they are.
mammut@lemmy.world 9 months ago
[deleted]atrielienz@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It is their customary response when a person quits the service, the plan is no longer offered etc that the data remains in read only mode for an unspecified period of time during which they do not any longer take payments for the service. This happened previously to people who exceeded the limit for Gmail free storage too. 15GB of storage free with a Gmail account but if you exceed that (say had Google One and exceeded that and then canceled your Google One subscription) your files wouldn’t automatically be deleted.
pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Exactly. People love to “cry foul” when Google does stuff like this but it’s completely unrealistic to think you can store 278 TB on Google’s server in perpetuity just because you’re giving them like $20-30/month (probably less, I had signed up for the Google for Business to get the unlimited storage as well, IIRC it was like $5-$10/month). It was known a while ago that people were abusing the hell out of this loophole to make huge cloud media servers.
He’s an idiot for saving “his life’s work” in one place that he doesn’t control. If he really cares about it that much he should have had cold-storage backups of it all. Once you get beyond like 10-20 TB it’s time to look into a home server or one put one in a CoLo. Granted, storing hundreds of TBs isn’t cheap (I had 187 TB in my server across like 20 drives), but it gives you peace of mind to know that you control access to it.
I have all my “important” stuff in Google drive even though I run my own media server with like 100 TBs but that’s because I tend to break stuff unintentionally or don’t want to have to worry about deleting it accidentally. All my important stuff amounts to 33 GB. That’s a drop in the ocean for Google. Most of that is also stored either on my server, the server I built for my parents, or pictures stored on Facebook.
trafficnab@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
To be fair to the guy, over the summer the FBI literally raided his home, took every single electronic device, and are (still?) refusing to give any of it back, so I’m willing to give him a pass if his home network infrastructure isn’t currently up to snuff
ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
He did pay for the service though. They just decided to stop charging him for it.
andthenthreemore@startrek.website 9 months ago
So, he paid for a period. Then the product was discontinued and they stopped charging him. So from then on, no he wasn’t paying. Google didn’t have to change it to read only, they could have just given notice and deleted it then.
Should they have made it clearer that the read only mode was a limited time thing and the data would be deleted at the end of that? Very probably.
papertowels@lemmy.one 9 months ago
Where are you getting that they stopped charging him? The email in the article says his subscription will be stopped, which I interpret to mean he was paying
Dempf@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Correct, I had the same GSuite setup (for the purpose of keeping backups) and they kept billing me even after they set my drive to read only. They only stopped when I decided to cancel the account myself. IIRC the minimum around $10/mo. Technically you were supposed to have 5 employees in your GSuite “company” at $10/mo per license, but they didn’t really check, so I just had myself as the sole employee.
time_lord@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Google didn’t tell him that they were going to delete the data until a week before. I think that’s the issue. It’s like when you tell someone a family member moved on, you need to use the word “die” or it’s open to interpretation. Google needed to straight up say that they were going to delete the data after 6 months, but they didn’t.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 9 months ago
233TB. Damn, I thought that was GB until I reread it.
cogman@lemmy.world 9 months ago
He was expecting a company that promised unlimited data to not reneg on their advertised product. Or to simply delete data they promised to store because it’s inconvenient for them.
Yeah, it costs money to store things, something Google’s sales, marketing, and legal teams should have thought about before offering an “unlimited” product.
Subverb@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Reminds me of the guy who paid a million dollars for unlimited American Airlines flights for life. He racked up millions of miles and dollars in flights so they eventually found a way to cancel his service.
zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 9 months ago
Because he let someone else use it to see a dying family member iirc, which was a breach of contract
Aleric@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Here’s the article. It’s because he booked under a false name a few times. He had unlimited flights for himself and a companion, it’s beyond me why he didn’t do everything in his power to not give American Airlines a reason to void his ticket.
Kbobabob@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m sure he was expecting these things, at least until they notified him of the change. After that it’s on him to find an alternative solution. Are you arguing that he was still expecting these things after being notified of the change in service?
cogman@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m saying that Google should not be allowed to sell a product with an advertised feature to gain advantage over competitors only to later change their mind and remove that feature when they deem it too costly.
A multibillion dollar advertising company should have to support the products they sell.
If you bought a car and one of the features sold was “free repairs for the life of the vehicle” you’d be rightly upset if a year later the dealer emailed you to say “actually, this was too expensive to support so we are cancelling the free repairs, but you can still pay us to repair your vehicle or we’ll sell you a new one, aren’t we generous!”
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 9 months ago
While I agree that it was Google’s mistake to offer this in the first place, there’s a decent chance that this specific guy is the reason Google decided to end unlimited storage.
Looking around at some storage pricing, he would have been paying over $2k per month to store that much data elsewhere. Maybe less if it was cold storage or archive (which would have meant accessing it wouldn’t have been as quick).
For your car repair example, it would kinda be like someone got that and then started going to every crash up derby they could find.
If your usage of an unlimited service is orders of magnitude above where the bell curve normally lies, you’re an asshole. And it’s a mistake to offer unlimited services because of assholes like that. It’s predictable, but they are still assholes.
AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
This is more like someone bursting into AT&T yelling, “YOU TOLD ME THIS PHONE HAD UNLIMITED DATA! WHY DOESN’T IT WORK!?”
…
“I HAVE TO PAY YOU EVERY MONTH FOR THE PHONE TO WORK!? WHAT A RIPOFF!! YOU SAID IT HAD UNLIMITED DATA! I’M CALLING THE COPS! WHERE’S YOUR PHONE?!”
Don’t worry about it. The police are already on the way.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 9 months ago
OP is using a strawman, but it’s a reasonable one. In an ideal world, if a company offers unlimited data, then changes its mind, the least they could do is, I don’t know, ship the users’ data in SD cards for free.
Eezyville@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
233TBs in SD cards?! Lmao!
Doug7070@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is the crux of it. Should people expect actual unlimited data? Maybe not, if you’re tech savvy and understand matters on the backend, but also I’m fairly sure there’s a dramatically greater burden on Google for using the word “unlimited”. If they didn’t want to get stuck with paying the tab for the small number of extreme power users who actually use that unlimited data, then they shouldn’t have sold it as such in the first place. Either Google actually clearly discloses the limits of their product (no, not in the impossible to find fine print), or they accept that storing huge bulk data for a few accounts is the price they pay for having to actually deliver the product they advertised.