Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "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"

You just expanded it. It's still basically the same.

> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.

230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore.

Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.

Unlimited means unlimited. Too often what gets lost in the phrase "edge case" is that there's a human being on the other end. They should do the decent thing and work with him and anyone else storing more data than can be practically downloaded to come up with a workaround or extension. Imagine if your bank closed your account and forfeited your money because they couldn't dole it out to you fast enough.

Unlimited did mean unlimited though. There was probably some sort of limit but this guy never in fact hit it. But Google stopped offering unlimited storage (probably because of people like this who would store 100s of TB). They notified him of this months before discontinuing the service and he apparently made no effort to find a different storage solution, maybe because it would be really expensive to store that much data in the cloud anywhere else. Did he think they would just continue to store the data indefinitely? That doesn't strike me as a reasonable assumption to make.

He was told that after the grace period ends, his account would become "read-only". Interpreting "read-only" as "I will still have read access to the data" is not unreasonable. I'm guessing that neither of us would have trusted it, but HN readers are not representative of the population as a whole. Google should have provided explicit notice of their intention to delete the data a reasonable amount of time in advance, accounting for the amount of data involved. I don't think that a week is reasonable in any case, but it is especially unreasonable when hundreds of TB of data need to be moved.

Sure, I agree that they should have been more explicit when they discontinued the service and said that they would delete data over the new limit at some point. But I don't think you have to be an HN reader to understand that if you stop paying for a service eventually the service provider will stop providing it. Like did this guy really think that the data would just stay in "read-only" mode forever?

They don't stop charging you because your account is over limit.

Unlimited does. And it should.

But if its your "lifes work" i would assume the value there is more than just the cost of storage. That the person storing it would have thought about ownership and egress options a bit further out.

Like i use workspace for all sorts of stuff. But its google, they can and may just axe your account for any reason. So i have backups of all things at all times and worst case, i just move my email/drive whatever to another service along with the domain, which I own (and he appears to as well)

Im not excusing google at all. But at some point you have to take some accountability. Not having a backup plan and just trusting google or ANY company to faithfully keep your lifes work for you seems slightly....naive.

If you read the article you will learn that he did have a backup, but it is currently in the FBI’s hands. He wasn’t relying solely on google.

Thats not really what the article says.

>We’ve written a few times about independent journalist Tim Burke. Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News.

It just says his electronic devices were seized. Not that backups were included here, though it is implied.

Event still the FBI raid occured in July [1]. Backups are N-1. So he was down to nill back in July and didnt seem to act from there.

Also based on the dates in the screenshots provided, he went into grace period on the Google Drive data ALSO in July..

So I say again....its his lifes work. Its invaluable to him but its just data to anyone else. Its incumbent on him to make sure this doesnt occur some how, some way. Even on backblaze that would be 20k/year. I would be having that on multiple disks at multiple sites that I control. But that is just me.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/27/journalist-tells-fbi-to-...

While they had unlimited they didn’t have a problem. But at a certain point someone is going to do the maths and realise the 1% who fully take advantage and go massive in an unlimited offer cost more than you make from the others.

The GP comment didn't "just expand it". There is a huge difference in the English language between "Life's Work Deleted" and "Life's Work Will Be Deleted." Past tense and future tense are very different things.

So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.

Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

>So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.

No, the morale of my story is not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people.

> Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

That isn't an edge case thought, was it?

> not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people

But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse.

> That isn't an edge case thought, was it?

If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.

> But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse.

I might be, but I am not going to be flaming the shit out of Google about it. I've been the edge case many times in scenarios just like this and I knew I was taking full advantage and eventually it would have to stop. And there was plenty of notice about the rule change.

> If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.

Lots of people were in roughly the same boat during COVID. There would have been thousands of people taking pictures of their child to send to doctors every day. People need non-urgent medical attention every day, that is not an edge case. Taking pics to send to your doctor during covid was not an edge case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com