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.
Because he let someone else use it to see a dying family member iirc, which was a breach of contract
Here’s an 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.
Update: here’s a really in-depth article written by his daughter that explains everything. Some of it was at American’s suggestion!
I went down a rabbit hole. Welcome to my warren.
It’s a fun rabbit hole
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.
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
AFAIK they keep charging you once it goes read-only. Does it say he quit paying? I’ve got an account that went read-only after the grace period, and they still bill it every month.
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
Where does it say he quit paying? I have a Google account in read-only mode from about the same time period, and they keep charging me for it.
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.
I realize that, but they don’t offer a read-only plan either. He’s been paying for something, whether it’s an official plan or not. If they sent an email saying that you can keep your data in read-only mode, and he kept paying the bill, they should’ve stuck with that.
I do realize it’s Google and they can’t be trusted to not fuck this up, but everyone is talking like this guy was just expecting Google to keep letting him access his data without paying a bill. The email they sent me basically said that I can keep paying my bill, and they’ll keep my data, but I can’t add any new data until I get under the quota. This is a plan that they offered to these people.
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.
Actually, I just read one of my emails from Google about their change from drive storage to Google one storage. It claims if I exceed my storage limit for up to two years my entire account will be deleted, not just my files. Effective June 1, 2021. I have a consumer account, but I’m assuming there is an equitable set of policies for gsuite/business users.
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.
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
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 was 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.
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.
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.
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.
For people authoring original content who may end up having the only copy of a given piece of news-relevant data in their possession, using a lossy compression method to back it up sort of defeats the purpose. This isn’t stashing your old DVD collection, this is trying to back up privileged professional data.
https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/master/lossless.html
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265#Losslessencoding
I want to clarify that it supports lossless compression as well.
Tell me you don’t know shit about professional video production without telling me you don’t know shit about professional video production.
that’s not what videographers do with their raw footage
If it’s good it’s good 😊
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah that’s a possibility but that massively depends on the level of surveillance the journalist is under but lets assume moderate. With that in mind, the only method I can think of would be physically hiding the drive/s in the other house (more paperwork needed for the alphabet people) in a place that would still be accessible, with permission of the owner of course. Don’t know how thorough raids are at looking for stuff but I can think of a couple places that may be sufficient if its poor to moderate job. Be screwed if they’re combing the entire place though so the journalist would have to rely on encryption
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.
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.
Limiting the length of a password (at least to something as low as 16 characters) sounds like an unnecessary, bad idea…
Placing any restrictions at all on what makes a valid password is an unnecessary, bad idea.
I think I agree, but short passwords like “x”, “69”, “420”, “abcd”, “12345” etc. would take a very short time to brute-force… Is your take that even if these are allowed, it will make all other passwords of the site more secure, since it adds more possibilities to the list where nothing can be disregarded when trying to brute-force any other password?
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.
Consumers and the market in general won’t face the customer service on average. We can’t expect the change to come from there.
My comment meant more that they should legally not be allowed to have a customer service that bad. Something like requiring at least X non-outsourced employees working on call centers for every Y customers the company serves. I’m pretty confident nowadays most companies don’t even have a single one.
Guess he could make reporting on tech giants pulling this shit his new lifework.
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.
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.
Cloud storage like that cost $3-6k per month without egress fees, depending on service. He could’ve been a little more skeptical about the free offering. If you’re not paying you have no recourse.
I’m pretty sure he was paying - the deletion email mentions that his subscription would be cancelled.
Yeah he was probably paying like $10/mo for a really basic GSuite organization with unlimited data. I know because I did that for a few years with some TBs of backups. When I first set the account up, I knew with certainty that Google would eventually cut me off because yeah that kind of service is worth way more than $10/mo in reality.
I’ve been getting emails for months saying I’m over the limit. I can’t remember if they ever said specifically they would delete my data because I stopped paying for it before it got to that point. Kind of crazy IMHO to assume Google will store so many TBs forever for only $10/mo. Still, would be real nice of them to give this guy a little more time to download his data.
It’s not ridiculous when that’s the service they offered. The courts should honestly stick them to their word (small companies have been driven out of business for much less) but we all know that’s not happening in a corporatocracy like this.
True. To be fair, I believe the original terms required you pay for a minimum of 5 employees (so $50/mo). No great love for Google here, and I would love to see the courts make them honor something like this if they did indeed advertise falsely.
Yeah, that’s my main issue - having a 1 week deadline for deletion sprung on you when it’s not physically possible to extricate the data in that timespan is rough.
You’re right, that’s a paid plan. I guess my point was more that you need to look out for your own interests a bit. If his storage has been read-only for the past 6 months then that would be a strong clue to do something about it.
Probably, but A) dude literally had his hardware yoinked by the cops and B) there was no reasonable schedule shared with the user re: data deletion.
I wish googles “read only” notification said “we will delete your data after 3 months of read-only status”, just to allow folks to properly plan. If you told me the only penalty was my data will be read only, and kept accepting my money, I would assume everything is okay.
I don’t know about google but being a free used doent change that you are a coustmer and that you will be affected by it. If you go to a public collage and you are getting a free education ,then arent you allowed to question the authorities?. Other than that the journalist is in the wrong too.
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 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
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?
It isnt just one that is going to have an issue with this.
It’s not more than a percent of their users either.
That percent probably nets them more profit than all the free accounts combined. What Google is doing is short sighted and it is going to hurt them.
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 can use it as is for a long time.
Extremely shitty of google to do this though. What a shame.
I was just checking and it’s $1,600/mo to transfer it over to wasabi but how long would that take? I really hope Google does the right thing but that is not their MO these days.
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…
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
Damn didn’t even think about that. Do you think they at least encrypted their files?
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.
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.
