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.