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

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.

Google is an untrustworthy business partner. Why should anyone invest in their projects.

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.

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.

Wait, journalist, 233 terabyte? Just what in the fuck did his life's work consist of?

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.

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.

The root problem is that Google offered unlimited storage as an option in the first place. That at least should have given a clear stated cap on uploads. The guy should have been more proactive since May too, no one really is fully in the right here.

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.

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

from "don't be evil" to stunts like this in basically no time flat. #capitalism!

Considering that even with one of the cheapest storage services, B2, 250ishTB is about $1500/month(that's more than $5500/m in S3!) whereas Gsuite seems to be about less than $200, I would've never guessed that I could use it as is for a long time.

Extremely shitty of google to do this though. What a shame.

I'm speechless

Googs IS the LastPass of everything!

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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On one hand, Google sucks. On the other, users like this are why we can't have nice things.

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

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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.

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.