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> The ugly fact is the Unlimited Amazon Drive has been abused by media pirates and data-hoarders to store up to 20TB

Somebody on reddit bragged about reaching more than 1PB [0]

> Of course, I agree that you shouldn't call something "Unlimited" if it isn't.

I am maybe nitpicking, but it really was unlimited. Nobody is being billed for exceeding a given threshold or stopped from using it. The service is being discontinued and people will not be able to renew it. They never said "forever" :-).

It's like I got a special deal from my gym for unlimited access. If next year they won't offer it anymore I cannot say "it was not unlimited".

> As far as I can tell, Prime Photos will remain unlimited. I wonder how long it'll be before media hoarders hide their content in Google/Prime Photos with a convenient CLI tool?

In another thread on reddit somebody was already talking about that, so I guess it won't be long.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...

> It's like I got a special deal from my gym for unlimited access. If next year they won't offer it anymore I cannot say "it was not unlimited".

I don't think this analogy works. If you used a lot of space, or really any space over the amount that they change to as the upper limit, that data is now at risk. Some places will make it read only until you move it off (up to a certain amount). Most will simply delete it after a certain amount of time if you don't move it.

Your gym can't really take back an amount of your previous, unlimited usage of the gym. If you have legit uses where you're way over the limit this can pose a real issue. I ran into this when storing photos and videos on Microsoft's OneDrive after they lowered the crazy high amount they were given...I eventually decided to pay the higher fees to cover my data so I wouldn't lose it until I had more time to move it all off.

I no longer use OneDrive.

> It's like I got a special deal from my gym for unlimited access. If next year they won't offer it anymore I cannot say "it was not unlimited".

That is a very anti-consumer way of looking at it. Storage, especially for businesses, is not like a gym membership. These bait and switch tactics are harmful for the consumer as well as the industry itself.

You place a certain trust with data storage companies. Alot of media companies can easily have 30 terabytes of data to backup or share. They kill the unlimited plan with essentially a price hike. Now I am wondering "when is the next price hike coming"?

Amazon has already cut their CLI interface and their web interface is terrible. I would rather just keep it on a NAS with NextCloud.

You place a certain trust with data storage companies.

I think the point is that now we know not to.

Noah has been ranting about this long before Amazon and Onedrive did this.

I don't think you can call it bait and switch. That would imply that they offered you unlimited but only gave you a limited amount. They did allow unlimited storage, they have now decided to remove this product and offer something else in it's place. The consumer can choose to stay or leave. It's difficult to leave, but it's the same kind of deal when your apartment's lease is not renewed. I can't really see this as anti-consumer

I assumed bait and switch now encompassed this marketing tactic. If you know the exact term this tactic is called please let me know.

> The consumer can choose to stay or leave. . It's difficult to leave, but it's the same kind of deal when your apartment's lease is not renewed. I can't really see this as anti-consumer

Your argument is simply: consumers deal with something like this for an unrelated industry so it is not anti-consumer. That is not a good argument.

edit: also, renting is a very poor example. There are laws that govern how much rent can be raised that vary based on jurisdiction. If renting wasn't anti-consumer why would such laws exist? No such laws against gouging against for data storage which undermines your argument.

> That is a very anti-consumer way of looking at it. Storage, especially for businesses, is not like a gym membership. > These bait and switch tactics are harmful for the consumer as well as the industry itself.

The point of the comparison was to stress the fact that unlimited amount of space doesn't necessarily mean for an unlimited amount of time.

> Storage, especially for businesses, is not like a gym membership.

I though that the unlimited plan was only for personal use. If it was open to businesses I understand why it became so quickly a money sink for Amazon.

all-you-can eat buffets work because each person has to pay seperately and the amount any person can eat in one setting has hard physical limits that are fairly low.

Unlimited in the computing world usually has practical limits many orders of magnitude above normal usage, making outliers much, much more expensive. But you can't substantially increase the price because you can't afford to lose your normal customers and be left with only outliers.

I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the argument that "we meant a lot but UNLIMITED was a much better marketing term, so we said that."

You are missing the point. Amazon's service was truly unlimited

> Amazon's service was truly unlimited

It is not and never was. Check TOS

> 5.2 Suspension and Termination. Your rights under the Agreement will automatically terminate without notice if you fail to comply with its terms. We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend, or terminate your use of the Services at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of the Services or harms our interests or those of another user of the Services. If your Service Plan is restricted, suspended, or terminated, you may be unable to access Your Files and you will not receive any refund of fees or any other compensation.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

But did they ever kick anyone off? They didn't kick off people using hundreds of terabytes or more. And abuse language is there on every ToS. I'd say it truly was unlimited while they were selling it.

> But did they ever kick anyone off?

Sure they did. Saw plenty of people complaining about it on r/DataHoarders months before this big cut-off happened.

>it's not a one-sided issue

It's totally a one sided issue. Abuse and fraud are not specific to Amazon, they are attempted at every business and industry under the sun.

It's just not credible to believe they initially thought the offer was long term sustainable without any limitations, protective terminations for abuse, etc. This is no more complex than what it appears. A deliberate, and effective, marketing campaign that would eventually have to come to an end.

Maybe they could at least use some kind of old school caveat like "while supplies last", or "until the rate of user acquisition is strategically outweighed by the subsidies required to absorb our losses".

I think without abuse, for most users it was sustainable. If I had to guess, the average HDD size being sold on a budget PC today is closer to 250GB (I've been seeing plenty with 32GB EMMC drives).

That's 4 PCs worth of content without going over the limit, and post non-technical users are probably using even less than that.

They could probably account for outliers using way more, but as long as most users were "average" users backing up word docs and family pictures they'd be fine.

The problem is "data horders" latched on much harder than average users. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those "average" users aren't affected by this change at all. I can't imagine my non-technical parents (for example) generating 1TB of data to back up very easily at all.

But they aren't "abusing" the system if the system offers "unlimited" bandwidth/storage/whatever. Companies are being very dishonest because none of them actually mean "unlimited" when they say "unlimited". They should have just said 1TB from the beginning. But they were trying to fool people into signing up because they used -- disingenuously -- the word "unlimited". So screw the companies. They shouldn't say things they don't mean.

My point is more, to the average consumer it really was "unlimited". When you can backup 4 lifetimes worth of your PC with a service, for "practical" purposes it is unlimited

Well what I'm saying is that companies should then offer 1TB of storage, not "unlimited" and then yank the rug out from underneath people that are actually using the "unlimited" storage they were advertised. The storage is not unlimited if any consumer can get to a point where they're using too much storage. The companies then call these people "abusive", but I personally don't think it makes it any less scummy of these companies if we can find some value of "unlimited" (like "practically unlimited") that sort of fits the story of them pulling out of their promise. It's the companies that are being abusive, not the consumer.

I guess we just don't agree on that.

To me unlimited is impossible right off the bat if you want to take it literally (there must be some finite limit to how much free storage Amazon has). Both sides in the agreement have some definition of unlimited that is less that unlimited, and to me hosting TBs of pirated content and porn is going past what a reasonable definition of unlimited and turning into abuse. If only the minority of users with legitimate TBs of data of their own creation to back up had used it I doubt AWS would have had trouble profiting without storage limits. But with people abusing it (or using it as piracy storage or mass internet backups if you want to claim that's not abuse) I don't see why they shouldn't have put an end to the plan.

I have seen ACD accounts storing more than 1000 TB of data (mostly collected by scraping porn sites) for a mere $60 a year.

If you offer unlimited, expect people to take advantage.

Some data hoarders can be acommodated since the service only cares about average usage per user.

Also data deduplication works even for data hoarders if they are hoarding media commonly shared on the internet.

Given the above points, I think there is no basis to call it "abuse".

They are encrypting it to avoid detection of this TOS violation.

Are there any other alternatives to Amazon that still offer unlimited storage?