this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 263 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

[–] cogman@lemmy.world 151 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Subverb@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because he let someone else use it to see a dying family member iirc, which was a breach of contract

[–] Aleric@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 1 year ago

It's a fun rabbit hole

[–] Kbobabob@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] cogman@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm saying that Google should not be allowed to sell a product with an advertised feature to gain advantage over competitors only to later change their mind and remove that feature when they deem it too costly.

A multibillion dollar advertising company should have to support the products they sell.

If you bought a car and one of the features sold was "free repairs for the life of the vehicle" you'd be rightly upset if a year later the dealer emailed you to say "actually, this was too expensive to support so we are cancelling the free repairs, but you can still pay us to repair your vehicle or we'll sell you a new one, aren't we generous!"

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OP is using a strawman, but it's a reasonable one. In an ideal world, if a company offers unlimited data, then changes its mind, the least they could do is, I don't know, ship the users' data in SD cards for free.

[–] Eezyville@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] twilightwolf90@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

While I agree SD cards are unfeasible, Google Cloud Services offers a Transfer Appliance. MSFT Azure Databox is a mere $350 for a round trip 100Tb NAS freight box. I think that something could have been arranged.

[–] Doug7070@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] trafficnab@lemmy.ca 52 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] trafficnab@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago

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

[–] ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He did pay for the service though. They just decided to stop charging him for it.

[–] andthenthreemore@startrek.website 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] papertowels@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Dempf@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] time_lord@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

233TB. Damn, I thought that was GB until I reread it.