Google is an untrustworthy business partner. Why should anyone invest in their projects.
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
Submitted 11 months ago by cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
PuddingFeeling907@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Rognaut@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Right? Why the fuck did this guy trust them with his data? This sounds like a personal problem to me.
UnculturedSwine@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Right, blame the customer for the business not holding up their end of the bargain after the fact.
candyman337@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Yeah, I used to love Google products, then they started killing things, and more things, and more quickly. And yeah, I’m done. Desperately hoping something other than android and IOS gets mainstream acceptance, because sure it’s here not, but there’s no guarantee they won’t just kill it 5 years from now for some wild reason.
bamboo@lemm.ee 11 months ago
If Google tried to kill Android, there’d be a handful of companies that would keep it going. I could see Samsung doing so, possibility in partnership with Microsoft, but I bet it would be the end of AOSP.
pachrist@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Just some advice to anyone who finds themselves in this specific situation, since I found myself in almost the exact same situation:
If you really, really want to keep the data, and you can afford to spend the money (big if), move it to AWS. I had to move almost 4.5PB of data around Christmas of last year out of Google Drive. I spun up 60 EC2 instances, set up rclone on each one, and created a Google account for each instance. Google caps downloads per account to 10TB per day, but the EC2 instances I used were rate limited to 60MBps, so I didn’t bump the cap. I gave each EC2 instance a segment of the data, separating on file size. After transferring to AWS, verifying the data synced properly, and building a database to find files, I dropped it all to Glacier Deep Archive. I averaged just over 3.62GB/s for 14 days straight to move everything. Using a similar method, this poor guy’s data could be moved in a few hours, but it costs, a couple thousand dollars at least.
Bad practice is bad practice, but you can get away with it for a while, just not forever. If you’re in this situation, because you made it, or because you’re cleaning up someone else’s mess, you’re going to have to spend money to fix it. If you’re not in this situation, be kind, but thank god you don’t have to deal with it.
WaterWaiver@aussie.zone 11 months ago
4.5PB holy shit. You need to stop using UTF2e32 for your text files.
I’d be paranoid about file integrity. Even a 0.00000000002% chance of a single bitflip somewhere along the chain would affect you. Did you have a way of checking for flipped bits? Or were the files somewhat resilient anyway (eg video files)?
quinkin@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They were using rclone so all of the transfers would be hash checked. Whether the file integrity on either side of the transfer could be relied upon is in some ways a matter of faith, but there a lot of people relying on it.
soren446@lemmy.world 11 months ago
[deleted]Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world 11 months ago
And Senpai has 4.5 PB! I didn’t know you could fit that many tentacle dicks into a sassy little 11 year old server!
Diplomjodler@feddit.de 11 months ago
Wow. That’s a lot of “homework”.
BlackPenguins@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m just curious how someone even gets to 4 Petabytes of data. It’s taking me years to fill up just 8 TB. And that’s with TV and movies.
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 11 months ago
Don’'t even need an ec2 instance if all you do is moving the data to Amazon s3. Just use rclone and it’ll do direct cloud-to-cloud transfer, the data won’t hit the computer where the rclone running, so it should be very fast. You’ll going to have an eye watering s3 bill though.
bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Server side copies will only be attempted if the remote names are the same It sounds like that’s only for storage systems that support move/rename operations within themselves, and isn’t able to transfer between different storage providers.
ABluManOnLemmy@feddit.nl 11 months ago
AWS is very expensive. There are other compatible storage options, like Backblaze B2 and Wasabi, that are better for this use case
Reddfugee42@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Seems a few thousand is worth it for your life’s work
Evotech@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Jesus
How much do you pay for that in aws
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
Isn’t AWS the most expensive service to leave?
shalafi@lemmy.world 11 months ago
tl;dr: Google fucked him proper. But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his “life’s work”, risk free.
I store my shit on Google Drive. But it’s only 2TB of offsite backups, not my primary.
Time and again I’ve learned the past 25-years, no one gives a shit about their data until they lose it all. People gotta get kicked in the fork so hard they go deaf before they’ll pay attention.
funnystuff97@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Naive, perhaps, but if a company advertises a service, they better fucking deliver on that service. Sure, I wouldn’t store all of my important documents solely on a cloud service either, but let’s not victim blame the guy here who paid for a service and was not given that service. Google’s Enterprise plan promised unlimited data; whether that’s 10 GB or 200 TB, that’s not for us nor Google to judge. Unlimited means unlimited. And in an article linked in the OP, even customer service seemed to assure them that it was indeed unlimited, with no cap. And then pulled the rug.
And on top of that, according to the article, Google emailed them saying their account would be in “read-only” mode, as in, they could download the files but not upload any. Which is fine enough-- until Google contacted them saying they were using too much space and their files would all be deleted. Space that, again, was originally unlimited.
Judge the guy all you want, but don’t blame him. Fuck Google, full stop.
pachrist@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The problem here is that Google’s “unlimited” plan was real, but it was for the G-Suite Enterprise product, which they discontinued. Two years ago, they started moving everything and everyone to a new product offering, Google Workspace. The Enterprise plans there have unlimited* data, and that asterisk is important, because it specifies that unlimited is no longer unlimited, which is dumb. It’s a pool of data shared between users, and each user account contributes 5TB towards the pool, capping at 300 users. From there, if I remember correctly, additional 10TB chunks cost $300/month.
I feel bad for this guy, but the writing has been on the wall for years now. Google has changed their account structure and platform costs to discourage this type of use.
PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee 11 months ago
But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his “life’s work”, risk free.
Google made a promise they didn’t keep and articles like this are the consequence of that.
It’s not ideal, but it still feels better than “let them lie and then blame their victims for believing it”.
mriguy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yes, that’s true, but it’s also true that Google has a long history of discontinuing services suddenly, so expecting them to keep this particular promise was extremely naive.
ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I feel like a tl;dr should mention the FBI. You summed up the headline.
Extrasvhx9he@lemmy.today 11 months ago
In fairness their backups were taken by the FBI so they at least had something besides Google. In hindsight the offsite backup would of protected them from both the FBI and Google if he stored them at a trustee’s home
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Or the trustee would get their home raided and devices taken, too.
BlackPenguins@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yes, this. I don’t trust ANYONE on the Internet. If you want something forever you download it yourself and back it up. Even tech giants like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit will not be here forever. YouTube will just delete your videos that have been up for 13 years without warning.
Isthisreddit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
He clearly cared about his data, don’t equate this man to the people who don’t really think about it and don’t actually back their stuff up (and come crying to everyone when their 10 year old disk dies)
People like to say to use the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which is really good advice, but it does NOT scale, trust me. I guarantee you I have more disposable income than this journalist (I assume that because journalists make shit money), and when I looked into a 3-2-1 solution with my meager 60TB of data, the cost starts to become astronomical (and frankly unaffordable) for individuals.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Wait, journalist, 233 terabyte? Just what in the fuck did his life’s work consist of?
alexdeathway@programming.dev 11 months ago
Npm packages in docker
elbarto777@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Liftoff app cache folder.
Octopus1348@lemy.lol 11 months ago
That would take 2 years to upload.
nutsack@lemmy.world 11 months ago
recorded video?
Laitinlok@lemmy.laitinlok.com 11 months ago
It’s simply stupid to not compress to h265 before uploading it.
BlackPenguins@lemmy.world 11 months ago
A Call of Duty update.
ohlaph@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s only one map though, where’s the rest?
Cannacheques@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
No not my Gary’s moods lol
Wizzard@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Log files from a local SQL server.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 11 months ago
JPGs
phx@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Raw high-def video and image files? But yeah, there’s unlimited and then there’s kinda pushing the limits of what’s reasonable. 233TB is more than the contents of some orgs’ datacenters
linearchaos@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yeah, there are show a day YouTube production companies with a team of editors running years off a petabyte.
Certainly not impossible, but probably more of an article in the writing than an actual journalist in distress
electric@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Lot of didn’t-read-the-article-itis in here. FBI seized his physical storage, cloud was the only option for the journalist and it did not make financial sense to pay for multiple cloud backups. Google is entirely the bad guy here.
WallEx@feddit.de 11 months ago
Well, he did ignore that he wasn’t paying for storage for half a year and did nothing to prevent data loss. Even ignored the grace period. That is at least negligent.
kirk782@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
He assumed that Google assured him that his current data would be safe. But saying that your account will move into read only mode doesn’t equate to keeping those much TBs of data on server forever.
Though I have a question. Was this unlimited service that Google offered was a one time payment thing(seems unlikely, since only couple of cloud providers like pCloud do so and that too on a much lesser scale) or a recurring subscription thing? If it was the later, then it is naive to believe that a for profit corporation would keep that much data without raking in money.
Dieinahole@kbin.social 11 months ago
Well, google And the fbi
Syrc@lemmy.world 11 months ago
a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over. At the time, I dubbed it Google’s “big, faceless, white monolith” problem, because that’s how it appears to many customers.
Hey, sounds like pretty much every corporation in 2023!
I hate so fucking much how little customer service companies are allowed to have.
unreasonabro@lemmy.world 11 months ago
from “don’t be evil” to stunts like this in basically no time flat. #capitalism!
Iapar@feddit.de 11 months ago
Guess he could make reporting on tech giants pulling this shit his new lifework.
SeaJ@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Jesus. Even downloading at 1 Gbps, it would take a few weeks to download all that data. I don’t think Google’s Transfer Appliance works for retrieving data.
Extrasvhx9he@lemmy.today 11 months ago
Goddamn hope this story gets somebody at google’s attention. Off topic, even thought it was mentioned in the article, what ended up happening to the dad’s account, was it reinstated? I can’t find an update
praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Considering that even with one of the cheapest storage services, B2, 250ishTB is about $1500/month whereas Gsuite seems to be about less than $200, I would’ve never guessed that I can use it as is for a long time.
Extremely shitty of google to do this though. What a shame.
throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 11 months ago
I’m not trying to blame him, but more than 200 TB of data on cloud storage? Holy cow, I wouldn’t even trust it to store more than 5 GB of data.
capital@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Storing that much data on Wasabi would cost about $1,700/mo.
If it’s that important, rent a VPS, connect Rclone to Google Drive and Wasabi, and transfer.
Even 1 Gb/s would get it done in under 3 days and VPSes are usually faster than that.
I hope someone has already made this suggestion to him.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
I’m surprised they even allowed that much to be uploaded. Even if it is “unlimited”, that must be against some sort of fair usage agreement.
If you need to archive over 250TB of data, you should get a tape drive.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m speechless
cyd@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If the company run by a hallucinating AI it couldn’t be any flakier.
yonerboner@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I had this happen to me. They haven’t threated to delete my account yet. I have about 50TB. I built a 170TB (raw) NAS for $2000 and transferred it all, only took about a week or so to download everything on my gig fiber.
wahming@monyet.cc 11 months ago
On one hand, Google sucks. On the other, users like this are why we can’t have nice things.
Laitinlok@lemmy.laitinlok.com 11 months ago
techdirt.com/…/journalists-ask-doj-to-stop-treati…
Idk what you mean by unauthorised access to the video if you gain access to the password of the database or simply it wasn’t password protected at all. Simply scrapping the site and reading html files or using scan the network connections to find the original footage is not hacking.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
Where is crystal storage when you need it? 😢
Grofit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
All people who think this is a good read should Google about the Bitcasa saga, that was a wild ride.
outer_spec@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Man brings forth innumerable things to nurture Google Drive. Google Drive has nothing good with which to recompense Man. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.
- Zhang Xianzhong, after getting all his documents deleted
Heresy_generator@kbin.social 11 months ago
This is every fucking business story right now:
- Company offers good product or service at price that competition can't compete with
- Competition fails because they can't compete
- Now that the old competition is gone and the company's product or service has a market dominant position new competition faces massive barriers to entry
- It turns out the company's product or service was never profitable or sustainable with the features that were offered and they lied about having a path to profitability
- With no competition, the company either starts raising the price of the product or service, removing previous features, paywalling previously free features, or all of them at the same time
- People rush to defend the company that has engaged in shitty, bad-faith business practices from the start and blame their customers instead
It's the last part that's most depressing.
7fb2adfb45bafcc01c80@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I have a problem with Amazon Drive going away for non-photos on December 31st.
For a while, they had unlimited storage and you could use a Linux API to access it – I stored 8TB of data.
Then they set a quota, but for those over quota it was read-only. Oh, and Linux access no longer works.
Now they’ve set a deadline to have everything off by December 31st, but the Windows app still doesn’t work (constantly crashing) and I see no way to get my files.
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 11 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.
cogman@lemmy.world 11 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 11 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.
Kbobabob@lemmy.world 11 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?
Doug7070@lemmy.world 11 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.
trafficnab@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
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
mammut@lemmy.world 11 months ago
mammut@lemmy.world 11 months ago
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 11 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.
pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 11 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 11 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 11 months ago
He did pay for the service though. They just decided to stop charging him for it.
andthenthreemore@startrek.website 11 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.
time_lord@lemmy.world 11 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 11 months ago
233TB. Damn, I thought that was GB until I reread it.