1y ago

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

www.techdirt.com 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

Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ev…

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

164 comments

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.
- but I'm not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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?
- 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
- He did pay for the service though. They just decided to stop charging him for it.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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
- 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.
- 233TB. Damn, I thought that was GB until I reread it.

Google is an untrustworthy business partner. Why should anyone invest in their projects.
- Right? Why the fuck did this guy trust them with his data? This sounds like a personal problem to me.
  
  Right, blame the customer for the business not holding up their end of the bargain after the fact.
- 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 now, but there's no guarantee they won't just kill it 5 years from now for some wild reason.
  
  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.

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.
- 4.5PB holy shit. You need to stop using UTF2e32 for your text files.
  I'd be paranoid about file integrity. Even a 0.000000000022% (sic) chance of a single bitflip somewhere along the chain, like a gentle muon tickling the server's drive bus during the read, could affect you. Did you have a way of checking integrity? Or were tiny errors tolerable (eg video files)?
  
  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.
- Wow. That's a lot of "homework".
- 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.
- Don''t even need an ec2 instance if all you do is moving the data to Amazon s3. rclone can do direct cloud-to-cloud transfer, the data won't hit the computer where the rclone running, so it should be very fast. You're going to have an eye watering s3 bill though. Once the data in an s3 bucket, you can copy them to glacier later.
  
  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.
- AWS is very expensive. There are other compatible storage options, like Backblaze B2 and Wasabi, that are better for this use case
- Seems a few thousand is worth it for your life's work
- Jesus
  How much do you pay for that in aws
- Isn't AWS the most expensive service to leave?

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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".
  
  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.
- I feel like a tl;dr should mention the FBI. You summed up the headline.
- In fairness their electronics 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 they stored them at a trustee's home
  
  Or the trustee would get their home raided and devices taken, too.
- 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.
- 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.

Wait, journalist, 233 terabyte? Just what in the fuck did his life's work consist of?
- Npm packages in docker
  
  Liftoff app cache folder.
  
  That would take 2 years to upload.
- raw recorded video
  
  It's simply stupid to not compress to h265 before uploading it.
- A Call of Duty update.
  
  That's only one map though, where's the rest?
  
  No not my Gary's moods lol
- My node_modules folder
- Log files from a local SQL server.
  
  JPGs
- 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
  
  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

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- Well, google And the fbi
- It sounds more like "Oh no, someone took your files? Well, you should upload everything you have to our server. Include anything we, I mean they, might have missed the first time. We'll keep it safe. You can totally trust us not to send your data to anyone, just like we recently got caught doing...again."

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.
- "I hate so fucking much how little customer service companies are allowed to have".
  It's not a mater of how much customer service they're allowed, rather than how much they choose to have. In most cases they choose to have close to none because it's more profitable for them, so its in the best short term interest of their share holders. And yes, in most corporations, long term is thex quarter
  
  I tried for 6 months to reset my Frontier Airlines password, I contacted their support line about it. They told me to do a password reset, so I did and it said my account was locked. So the support person said "Sorry it is locked, I can't help now, try again tomorrow but contact us before you do the reset"
  So I did. Waited 2 days just to make sure 24 hours had passed, contacted support, told them about the problem, they told me to do the password reset. So I did the password reset, account locked again. Their response "Sorry your account is locked, contact us again in 24 hours about this.
  So I did. Waited 2 days just to make sure 24 hours had passed. Contact support, had them verify the account is current NOT locked. Which it wasn't, so they told me to do the password reset, account is locked. Their response "Sorry your account is now locked, contact us again in 24 hours."
  Eventually I did realize what the problem was, which is kind of my fault, but the fact my 4 attempts to contact their support directly about this problem didn't trigger some kind of "Maybe this is an issue I could bring up to the dev team" is kind of surprising. The issue is that if you try to reset your Frontier Airlines password with a password that is too long, say 20 characters instead of 16 (max), it just locks your account. No errors given on "sorry this doesn't meet our requirements" just locked. CS tried nothing to look into it, just it says locked now, not our problem.
  
  Which is a matter of how little they're allowed to have. If there were some sort of minimums that might actual force them to be somewhat effective.
  Instead it's a race to the bottom of "your business is important to us, but nobody gives a fuck about your satisfaction"
  
  duh.
  the point of saying allowed is that consumers and the market in general should not put up with it.

Guess he could make reporting on tech giants pulling this shit his new lifework.

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.

from "don't be evil" to stunts like this in basically no time flat. #capitalism!
- How is Google getting rich off his free account?
  
  No no. If a company isn't spending more than it's making, it's 100% evil.

Goddamn hope this story gets somebody at google's attention. Off topic, even though it was mentioned in the article, what ended up happening to the dad's account, was it reinstated? I can't find an update
- deleted
  
  Maybe they'll help him retrieve the data. Presumably the servers haven't been used for something else yet. Then again maybe not. When you control how most people get their news who cares if one reporter gets mad?

I'm speechless
Googs IS the LastPass of everything!
- So is the journalist, after losing all their documents.
  
  Dark dude 🌚
  Edit: also, he should not be storing private sources' names in ANYTHING Google can axe-cess Perhaps its for the best

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.

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 5 Gb/s would get it done in under 5 days and VPSes are usually faster than that.
I hope someone has already made this suggestion to him.
Edit: Forgot about the daily download limit.. ugh. What a pain in the ass.
- AWS S3 would be about $3.2k/month, or do Glacier for about $250. I doubt any individual alone is touching 250TB worth of files, so deep freeze seems like a good option. Then mirror into a different region for 2x the price and peace of mind.
  
  Retrieval times get tricky with Glacier though.
  I’d hate to be working on a story, especially with a deadline (if he has those), and be forced to wait on Glacier to retrieve a file.
  Hope it’s the one you need on the first try too…

If the company was run by a hallucinating AI it couldn't be any flakier.

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.
- I'm interested in more details if you want to share. What are the other specs/components of your machine? What OS and software do you run? How do you handle backups?
  
  I have a similar setup, but I don't store anything crucial there, my documents and stuff are on dropbox.
  I have 3 20TB drives, in what used to be my PC, running unraid on it, 1 drive is for parity, so it can tolerate 1 drive failure and I can easily add more drives down the line (I have a Be Quiet 900 Pro case or whatever with like 9 HDD slots).
  CPU is like i7-8700K or something, 32GB ram (which I should upgrade) and like a GTX 1080
  
  I got a lot of info from serverbuild.net for the build. It's mostly old server parts. Server MB, CPU, RAM, and drives. I run unraid with tons of different media management dockers for handling downloads for plex. Not super worried about backing up all the data since I can just download it again. Unraid uses parity drives so if something happens to a drive I can put a new one in and shouldn't lose any data.
- Congratulations on having a spare $2k and access to gig fibre. We're very proud of you.
- Yo, Where do I send my resume?

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.
- Come on, if it's unlimited it's unlimited, not "unlimited but only if you use less than limit"
  
  Everything is limited. Even "all you can eat" restaurants.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/10/journalists-ask-doj-to-stop-treating-url-alterations-as-a-federal-crime/
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 the tools from the browser to scan the network connections to find the original footage is not hacking.
- People have served time in prison for simple URL incrementing on public websites.

Where is crystal storage when you need it? 😢

All people who think this is a good read should Google about the Bitcasa saga, that was a wild ride.
- That was indeed a fun story.

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

On one hand, Google sucks. On the other, users like this are why we can't have nice things.
- If they subscribed for unlimited, you can't blame someone for using it.
  
  Why not? We live in a society. Fair use and tragedy of the commons are not unknown concepts to us.
- Google not including an upper limit clause is why we can't have this nice thing.

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.
- Rclone?

No way in hell I'd trust just one backup method for my data.
A 6 TB drive is less than $100 on Amazon and two cloud backups is like $30 extra a year.

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