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
from the how-do-you-trust-a-company-that-can-delete-your-life's-work? dept
Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, 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. Going all the way back to 2009, I had suggested that the company needed not just better customer support, but something like a user advocate.
This issue shows up time and time again. The company screws people over and generally there’s no one to talk to. Too bad. Talk to the white monolith. We’ve faced it ourselves here at Techdirt.
And, of course, in situations where someone’s full Google account is taken down, and where there’s little to no recourse, it can really fuck people over. Last year, we wrote about a NY Times story by Kashmir Hill concerning a parent who not only lost his entire Google account, but also was flagged for passing around child sexual abuse material (CSAM), after a medical professional had asked the father to take photos of his son regarding swelling. Despite flagging him as a potential criminal, he couldn’t even talk to anyone at Google to explain what happened.
Hill just recently published another such story, regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, that’s a problem, and the video was taken down quickly, but Google shut down the woman’s entire Google account and said it would be deleted.
But it’s not just issues regarding CSAM that are creating these kinds of issues.
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. As we noted, this seemed like a pretty big 1st Amendment issue. Burke is also facing bogus CFAA charges because he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content.
But, with all of his devices seized, Burke at least still had Google Cloud to keep all of the massive troves of (mostly video) data he’s collected over the last few years of reporting. Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while. However, in the last year or so, they simply phased out that plan, which really sucked for those who had a ton of data.
As you can see from the above email, they told those who had formerly used a ton of storage on their unlimited plan, that their account would go into “read-only” mode and they wouldn’t be allowed to upload any more data. Tim Burke and his 237.22 TB of video files were among those put into read only mode, which he assumed meant that, at least, that content would be kept safe (hopefully until he could get the feds to return all of his computer equipment).
Instead, over the weekend, Google reached out to say that since he’s using too much storage, they’re going to delete his entire account in seven days (later this week).
That email sure isn’t subtle:
Your Google Workspace Enterprise Standard for your account burke-communications.com has been scheduled for suspension and will soon be canceled, and your data will be lost.
As Tim notes, this is his life’s work. And even if he had access to ~250 TBs of free storage, it’s not even clear he’d be able to transfer that much data in just seven days.
But, of course, Google has it’s big monolith problem. There’s no one to speak to. You’re just dealing with the machine.
That seems… bad?
And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. And finding (and paying for) multiple backup services that can handle 250 TBs of data is likely pretty cost prohibitive.
One hopes that some human at Google might finally realize how bad this is and give Tim the time he needs to find another home for the data (or just give him back the plan he originally paid for, or at least let him store the existing data there as suggested in the earlier email).
Filed Under: cloud backup, customer service, data backup, tim burke, unlimited, white monolith
Companies: google
Comments on “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”
Not even an offer for, “Give us a hundred bucks for a month to rescue your data,” or anything.
Never mind Google never said this was going to happen prior to the 7 Days (ht Christopher and Zachary Crowe) impending doom notice. Ridiculous.
Re:
We’re potentially under 3 days remaining now, depending on timezones and whether they intend to delete at the beginning or end of the day. If no better idea has come up, it might be time to give the password to Archive Team and pray for the best.
Re: Re: If your data is critical do this
first if ur data is critical never have only one copy BUT
if google exploit you then exploit google
your account have 650gb daily limit
you need to create services accounts
you have 6TB of data to download?
create 10 service acc, give them permission to read content to x drive then download everything with rclone(godsend application), it is expensive if u have a bad bandwidth but if your data is lifesaving pick a dedicated server with some 4/8tb hdd (could be 50 to 80€/m) and then download the data so at least u will have a 30d time to find some hdd to store them locally.
the whole process could seem tricky and it’s but there are some guides on the internet who explain better than my words
Re: Re: Re:
That no longer works, they fixed that work around a few weeks before they ended the unlimited storage.
Re: Re: Re:
What makes you think a second copy wasn’t in the devices that were seized from his home?
Re: Re: Re: Why comment if you didn't read the article?
The FBI seized ALL his physical backups, Google was an additional backup.
Your comment adds nothing to the discussion.
Re: Re: Re:2
Sooooo the natural response to having the primary copies taken (with no prediction as to when or how they would be returned) and the backup relegated to read only was to sit on his hands for 5 months? If the data is that important, buy yourself a laptop, a USB to SATA dock and a dozen desktop HDDs. Or set up an AWS account and a Cloudberry license. Or pay for premium file storage from Box, Dropbox, Apple, Microsoft, or any other commercial cloud provider. Banking on continuity of service from Google is not exactly a smart idea – and that anyone who hasn’t gotten that memo has zero sympathy from me at this point.
Re: Re: Re:3
While the FBI is watching you like a hawk.
Good job, dumbass.
Hindsight’s always 20/20, and there’s still the…
Oh, right, FBI.
Re: Re: Re:
Reading comprehension is not your strong suit. His physical hardware was seized by the FBI. You’d know that if you read the article.
Re: Re: Don't hope in ArchiveTeam
Even if it were possible, ArchiveTeam is not going to dump 240 TB of private files onto archive.org at the cost of some 500 k$.
And if you meant people like certain r/DataHoarder regulars, such crackdowns on unlimited Google Drive storage were instituted in part to stop them from using Google as an infinite storage archive. Probably this fiasco started from someone at Google thinking “oh of course I’ll be able to quickly set up a script to identify the nefarious users who dump hundreds of TB of so-called encrypted Linux ISO in order to operate their seedboxes on the cheap, who could possible have a legitimate usage for so much data”. But of course they aren’t.
Re: Re: Re: Geocities, Angelfire, Tucows, …
Back in the day there were quite a number of “free website hosting” options. They couldn’t stop us from farming accounts to use as “hive” storage. Enough redundancy (like RAID) that some of the accounts getting cleaned up didn’t really matter.
It’s hard to stop creative people from finding creative ways to abuse systems.
It really is.
The optics on this, though, really do appear to be a faceless corporation doing evil.
Re: Re: Re:
I wrote “pray” rather than “hope” for a reason, but who else could possibly take data out of Google at (now) 15 Gbit/s? (It’s since been pointed out that there might still be an option to just pay Google for the storage, which would be the “easy” way if true.)
Archive Team are not affiliated with archive.org, and it’s archive.org who’d be paying the costs. Which they might, if it’s deemed to be in the public interest and might eventually be publishable. And for what it’s worth, they’re doing a fund drive right now (and if their search page hadn’t been broken since like February, and a few other complaints, I might be considering a donation).
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Re: Re:
they have given you over a year not seven days. you have tons of emails from them. And if its your lifes work then pay them to keep it on.
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Re: Download the data
It is not cost prohibitive to rehost this data for a month or so on another provider if it’s that important. Cheap? No, but definitely doable. And if you can’t prioritize out of that much data ….. Seriously?
Google has never had an unlimited data plan. He has been exceeding his quota for a long time and no one called him on it until now. This is his fault.
Re: Re:
In two and a half days? Can you maybe be more specific as to how one might get 240 TB of data from Google to the new service, in that time frame? If my calculations are correct, the rate would have to be just under 10 Gbit/s sustained.
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Re: Re: Re:
He can setup an account on google cloud, open a browser window, sign in, and then export his data from google takeout, and if its in the same data center he should get speeds over a 10 gigabit connection, which would take probably about 3 days to copy.
Re: Re: Re:2
Wait, so Google still offers this service to those who pay? Okay, the e-mail does briefly mention that the subscriber failed to “get more storage”, but only in the past tense—it doesn’t say that’s still an option. And Mike doesn’t seem to have considered it as an option.
How much money are we talking about? Since there are only screenshots of the messages, I can’t follow the links.
Re: Re: Re:3
Benjamin meant “Google Cloud Platform”, which is their service for companies to host their servers and data. It’s like Amazon Web Services.
As of 2021, TikTok stored 470 petabytes on Google Cloud. The storage really is unlimited… as long as you pay the per-GB bill.
Re: Re:
Not true. Google used to have an unlimited data plan for enterprises and for universities.
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Re: Re: Re:
I’m a little shocked that someone in the tech industry is using only cloud storage with no back up anywhere else. You should have your own NAS and be responsible for your data. No back up is your own fault.
Re: Re: Re:2
As is clearly stated in the article, all of his physical equipment was seized under a warrant by the FBI. Can’t get any of that back until the government releases it. Which, bare minimum, means not until after the legal situation is revolved, and maximum, would be never. Numerous articles are published across the internet about people having to fight for years to get their property back. Even a few where the government accidentally destroys the evidence rather than giving it back.
Re: Re: Re:2
HIs fucking NAS was seized and you should really read the fucking article.
Re: Re: Re:2
So, who exactly was in the tech industry?
Three guesses, first two don’t count.
Re: Re: Re:2
I’m a little shocked that someone on this site didn’t read the article. His physical hardware was seized.
Re: Re: Re:
Indeed, we used to have that. Paid for it for years, was a bit surprised when we were suddenly “approaching our pooled storage limit” which is now only 2TB. Luckily we hadn’t exceeded it.
Not that google will care but we have moved all of our cloud compute etc elsewhere now.
Re: Re:
Google pixel 1; problem solved.
Re:
cloud dot google com/storage/pricing
$1.20 / mo per TB for Google archive storage
Re:
$100? 1/4 of a PB costs about $7.5k/month. It’s $1.8 million for 5 years for a PB, so I’m talking bulk volumes enterprise costs, not consumer level prices which are higher.
A quote from Colleen Doran about contracts. In her case it’s an artist’s contracts with their publishers, but it applies everywhere. Even if you’re paying, get the terms in writing. Assume any ambiguity will be interpreted in the other guy’s favor and if that matters make them spell it out explicitly so there is no more ambiguity. Make sure there’s explicit (and explicitly specified) penalties for failing to follow the terms of the contract for both sides. Make sure the case where they want to cease offering the service is covered. If you can’t live with the terms they’re willing to agree to, you have to assume everything you have on their service will disappear at any moment with no warning and your only consolation will be that you don’t have to pay them any more.
Remember, the penalties won’t enforce themselves either. They won’t stop the service from violating the contract, and they’ll only get you compensation if you’re willing and able to sue over them and fight until you win.
Re:
How, precisely, does a consumer negotiate their contract terms with Google?
I’ve been saying the same, for about as long. Consequently Gmail has remained the only Google service I’ve ever actively used (outside of search), and even that I’ve only kept this long because I’m too lazy to sort through and migrate 18 years of emails.
Seeing as they can’t even do search halfway competently any more, and instead spend their days trying to perform a vendor lock-in on the entire web, I see no point whatsoever in supporting anything they do in future. There’s never anything in it for me as an end user. They’ve long, long since burned their last remaining bridges of goodwill, and I honestly can’t remember hearing or reading a single positive thing about them for years and years. You’d think that’s a tad hyperbolic, but nope, not even slightly, which I find sort of wild in and of itself.
Re:
As someone who recently switch away from Gmail: just do it. Most services (I picked proton) can import from Gmail, and I just set up a Gmail forwarder, so I still got my Gmail emails in proton, and slowly transitioned more and more accounts over.
Re: Re:
It’s in progress, sort-of-kind-of.
I’ve had forwarding to my “new” personal account (Zoho, largely ’cause they handle my business accounts) for a few years now, so in actuality it’s more like 15-16 years of emails. Only reason I haven’t imported the whole lot and called it a day is I mean to pre-purge the gmail of anything I don’t want or need migrated. Then it’s just a matter of moving my last few external accounts over to Zoho.
Re:
I’ve been using Kagi as my search engine for the last few months (whenever they added their cheap subscription tier) and I can’t see myself moving back. It’s far superior and worth the cost.
The ad-supported internet must die. It’s time to move to open-source, donation supported services or privacy-oriented premium services.
Why do individuals keep anything of importance on google or any cloud servive? Just buy the TB dives and keep your stuff at home. Putting important data in someone else’s hands is just begging for disaster in more ways than one.
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The FBI took the physical drives.
Re: Re:
copy drives and hide them. Safety deposit box? I can think of lots of ways to hide copies of drives.
Re: Re: Re:
We’re talking about at least 12 drives here, and their backups. 12 might fit in an oversized safety deposit box, but not a standard one, and the cops might seize those; they wouldn’t be hard to find. The backups, of course, should be kept separately if possible. Regular access to both drive sets is required.
I don’t think that’s particularly easy to manage. If you’ve got a friend or family member who won’t mind you coming into their house (or storage unit) every week or two to refresh backups, I guess that’s an option (for one drive set). Asking them to run a 15-drive NAS and deal with tens or hundreds of terabytes of monthly network traffic is probably out of the question. A non-independent journalist could’ve stored stuff at work, but this person was independent. What are you thinking of? Dead drops buried around town? (Unreliability would be an obvious problem, necessitating at least one extra set of drives.)
In hindsight, I think this person should’ve uploaded everything to archive.org as soon as possible, perhaps contacting them to keep it unpublished for a while. They’ll apparently take drives through the mail. Probably there are some journalism organizations (Freedom of the Press Foundation?) that could’ve done similarly, with lawyers who’d strongly fight for First Amendment rights. Perhaps it would be prudent to dump such data directly on one’s personal lawyer, and ask them to evaluate the legal risks of publishing—asking for legal advice should make them subject to attorney-client privilege. But I can’t really fault a journalist for not thinking of these things in advance (thinking that Google would keep it safe, on the other hand…).
Re: Re: Re:2
With the volume on non changing data in this case, an incremental approach to backup would be better, possible based on high capacity thumb drives. Then a pair of duplicated drives can be taken offsite whenever they are filled. I say two, so that one copy can remain offsite during a restore.
Re: Re: Re: Keystone Cops?
… do you really think the FBI doesn’t know to check your bank for safety deposit boxes?
Re: Re: Re: Hiding evidence from the FBI is a bad idea
bobob – I’m certain the FBI would pile on more charges if you hide stuff that they’ve demanded you turn over to them.
Re: Re: Re:2 Cloud
AWS can be a short term option. There are companies out there that are fiber connected to Google.
Re:
Because the pros heavily outweigh the cons. With HDD prices at about $20/TB this guy would be up for $5400 and have minimum 25 HDDs meaning he’s well beyond a consumer NAS if he want’s them all online simultaneously.
He would have to get the data on to those HDDs which is non-trivial.
He’d have to have some way of tracking what data was where.
He’d need to be accessing thee data which is a nightmare.
If this is ‘must keep’ data he’d want redundancy and lifecycle management.
And yeah, having it local means loss of access due to disaster, law enforcement action, spilled coffee, being on holiday, etc.
Cloud storage is fine. Rug-pulls are not.
Re: Re:
It’s 237.22 TB, and 22 TB drives are readily available at Best Buy. So it’s like 12 drives, maybe 18 if smaller drives will save money (or there’s a lot of filesystem overhead or we disagree on what “TB” means; and when buying that many we have to assume at least one’s dead on arrival). Probably $350 to $650 each, leaning high, because what are the chances Best Buy has them on sale the week this needs to be done?
Then double that to handle backups, but “all online simultaneously” is definitely not desirable for that. Plus a NAS, or several, and offsite hosting and/or storage for at least some of it.
Overall, I agree with your assessment. It’s probably well upward of ten thousand dollars upfront, and a technological-logistical problem that exceeds the capabilities of most journalists.
Some more reputable data-storage companies will accept data from customers, and ship it to them, on hard drives. Non-guarantees of service, though, seem to be a serious problem throughout this industry. A lot of companies require customers to accept agreements saying that the company owes them nothing—can shut down without notice, might lose data, customers can’t sue, and so on and so on. Google’s about the worst choice, but I don’t personally know a great choice.
Re:
As the article notes, all his electronics were seized.
Re: Re:
He’s definitely hiding something. 272 TB of ‘writing’…. Yeah okay sure
Re: Re: Re:
It’s not writing. Tim is a video journalist, and the content is videos he’s collected over the years. For example, he collected tons of public videos about the George Floyd protests a few years ago.
Re: Re: Re:
Video takes up a lot of room. Journalists often rely on video recordings. What exactly would you expect?
Re: Re:
They cannot seize what they cannot find.
Re: Re: Re:
Hiding things from the feds doesn’t tend to end well.
Re: Re: Re:2
Maybe, maybe not. First the feds have to have some idea that you are hiding something.
Re: Re: Re:
That sounds like a great way to get charged for obstruction, honestly.
Google Drive quotas
This could be outdated information but as known in the past Google Drive would limit downloads to about 750 gigabytes per day. Meaning that even if was able to access his Google Drive attempting to download as much data would be a long wait.
Re:
750gb/day is the upload limit.
download limit is at 10tb/day.
My employer was told we owed a 5 figure bill for Google Translate services that we thought had already been paid. We could not get a human from Google to talk with us. It was just fucking impossible. Eventually leveraged an unrelated Google sales relationship elsewhere in the company, and they helped so as to not tank their in-progress sale.
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Fuck corpations.
Fuck all the fuckers who defend them.
You fucking idiot voters are to blame. Stop voting for pro businesses shit heads.
Re:
I’d love to be able to vote for a candidate that isn’t a “pro businesses shit head”, but no such candidates are available.
Re:
If you can find a candidate that is both politically viable and not swimming in corporate money by all means tell people about them, however good luck finding one or more that fit both in the US’ pay-to-play political system.
Not the best timing to put it mildly
One hopes that some human at Google might finally realize how bad this is and give Tim the time he needs to find another home for the data (or just give him back the plan he originally paid for, or at least let him store the existing data there as suggested in the earlier email).
Never mind how bad it is, what Google should really be worried about is how bad this looks, because if they think the ‘Google is in bed with the government’ crowd is bad now just imagine how much worse it looks for them to delete a bunch of files shortly after the FBI seized the offline copies.
Even if the timing is coincidental(and I’m willing to grant them that much barring some evidence to the contrary) the optics are really bad and the spin for anyone that wants to use this against them practically writes itself.
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Their platform/systems/cloud/servers/company/etc. Don’t like it? Find another provider.
Re: 'Leave [Insert Billion-dollar company here] alone!'
It always amuses me to see people throwing themselves in front of criticism of major companies like that, all the more as it’s always using the same long-debunked argument.
Which is to say, enjoy your funny vote, you certainly earned it.
Re: Re:
Debunked? Has any court ever held that someone providing a free service over the internet has any responsibility to the (non-)customers? I’m not sure whether to read the comment you replied to as a defense or a condemnation of the situation, honestly. It could be a joke—referencing the lack of good providers or the impossibility of the timeline—but I don’t see much of an “argument” to “debunk”.
Excluding subtext, the explicit text is saying only that Google has the right to suck. Which is far as I can tell is true, and is a right they’ve never hesitated to take advantage of.
Re: Re: Re:
Dubunked in the sense that just because a company can do something it does not necessarily mean they should, and it certainly doesn’t make them immune to criticism when/if they do.
A company could fire all their managers and replace them with literal chimpanzees as a hypothetical, but that doesn’t mean they have a right not to be called out for their idiocy or praised for their brilliance(depends on the company/managers in question) if they did.
Likewise here, no-one’s saying that Google can’t decided to pull a stunt like this with their own property, they’re merely calling them out for doing so.
Re: Re: Re:2
What you’re calling “debunked” is more “irrelevant” or “non-responsive”, assuming the poster meant their comment as a serious response to a concern (like Google’s actions being illegal) that nobody raised. But, then, aren’t you kind of doing the same thing by referencing a hypothetical “right not to be called out for their idiocy” when nobody else had postulated any such thing?
Re: Re: Re:3
But, then, aren’t you kind of doing the same thing by referencing a hypothetical “right not to be called out for their idiocy” when nobody else had postulated any such thing?
Pray tell, other than attempting to defend the company by pointing out that they have the right to do what they are doing, something no-one is arguing against, why else would you think they’d post that comment?
Re: Re: Re:4
I did answer that. They could’ve been referencing corporate “freedom” in a snarky way, to mock the very idea that corporations should be able to run roughshod over their customers. And referencing the idea of competition ironically, because what “cloud” provider doesn’t claim the right to screw their users with little notice?
You’re probably right that it wasn’t meant that way, but with Poe’s law, who knows?
Re: Re: Re:5
Okay, asswipe.
How do you also propose getting enough storage space…
while trying to convince the FBI you’re not doing anything more criminal than the shit you’ve been falsely charged with.
Re: Re: Re:5
Eh, it might have been a poe but given it’s popped up on a number of articles over time where the entirety of the comment is basically ‘Oh yeah, well the company can do that so who are you to object?’ I lean more towards classifying that sort of comment as trolling, objecting to an argument no-one is making as though it scores them points or something.
Re: Re: Re:6
They’re hard to catch, but don’t give up. I hear ten Big Poes will get you a pretty good prize.
Re: Re: Re:
This wasn’t a free service. As noted in the article you clearly did not read, Tim paid a very large bill for the plan that included unlimited data.
Re: Re: Re:2
Okay, good point. The article’s a bit rambly in that part—referencing all kinds of other people—and I must have overlooked the sentence, which cannot be found by searching for “pay” or a dollar sign.
But what does that change? It says “paid” in the past tense, which suggests maybe nobody’s been paying for a while. And is there any precedent to suggest a court might come down on Google for these actions?
Re: Re: Re:
Google recently lost a case for a free service that it was required to bring back, Google Music. So, yes, companies that provide a, what you call “free service”, is not actually free. We are exchanging our personal data and information for a service. While it might not be money paid for, a transfer of goods is being made. This is a purchase and Google has certain responsibilities to fulfill according to this recent ruling over Google Music.
Re:
Whoosh!
Remember when Google was good?
Yeah, me neither.
Problem 0, the initial problem for Google was how to make money at all. That morphed into how to make a profit. Well, ads were the solution. They just did a really shitty job of it. Little did I know, but they routinely had 10% of anybody’s ads go nowhere. In the goal of doing no evil they still collected the money – cause that wasn’t evil. At least, not for Google’s accountants.
Every single thing they’ve done outside of search, has been canceled, or just failed. If it hasn’t, then we haven’t waited long enough.
Re:
Gmail?
Re: Re:
Don’t count on that to “go the distance”. It has ever-growing costs and ever-shrinking revenue. I think it’ll disappear before Search or Android, personally. They’ve already gone through several “enshittification” phases for people who were using it on custom domains (although they did back off a bit from their most recent attempt).
Re: Re: Re:
Gmail is more that an email account to Google, it is also the account for other services, like YouTube and the App store.
Re: Re: Re:2
What you’re talking about seems to have been called a “Google Account” for upward of a decade. It would be supremely dumb for Google to discontinue free mail to people with Google Accounts, but when’s that ever stopped them?
Re: Re: Gmail??
The only successful in house product from google has been search. Everything else they acquired. Including Gmail.
As their lockin tool I don’t see it going away anytime soon but :shrug:
Move it all to Box.
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As much as it is a dick move by Google, to say that it isn’t long enough to find a way of either moving or downloading to local storage is nonsense. If it genuinely is his “life’s work” and is so important, he would easily find a way. He might complain about the up front cost of purchasing local storage, but that’s life.
Re:
So.
Being watched by the FBI means nothing to you? Especially after the fact that HIS OFFLINE COPIES WERE SEIZED BY SAID ORGANIZATION?
Re:
Like what? It’s 2 or 3 days remaining, and downloading 240 TB in that time period would seem take us outside the realm of “easy” all by itself: that’s a 10 Gbit/s transfer rate. And it takes a day or two to fully write a modern hard disk, so you’re gonna have to be writing all 10-15 disks in parallel—having somehow have configured some software to download and write different data to each.
Re: Re:
This is all much ado about nothing. It’s not like his physical copies of the data were destroyed. And even if he’s found guilty of what seems like criminal behavior, he’s likely to be able to recover the seized property if he mends fences with the gov’t and informs the court of his sincere desire.
Re: Re: Re:
Somehow I don’t think “get it back from the FBI” is the “easy” way Marty was referencing. And from what I’ve read about other cases, that’s not easy at all.
Re: Re: Re:2
Also, if you get your devices back from the FBI, would you them them to be as seized, or to be returned with extra unwanted spyware installed.
Re: Re: Re:3
It doesn’t really matter for data drives. Nobody’s going to run anything off them.
Re: Re: Re:4
With modern drives being a computer with storage attached, don’t be so sure.
Re: Re: Re:5
Okay, so the drive itself runs malware… to what end? Yeah, it could maybe exploit a bug in the operating system’s filesystem driver that way, but it couldn’t do much about a direct drive-to-drive copy. And if someone did that and later noticed the original behaving different than its copy, the FBI will have “burned” a very useful exploit, because the original will be going straight to some security researchers.
Re:
You do realize that if he did buy local storage and somehow figure out how to download all of his data (which would be a pretty difficult thing to do), the FBI would probably seize that too? It’s not as though the FBI has cared about doing things lawfully. Hell, they might even seize it in mid-download just for shits and giggles.
Google's Misbehavior Sucks
Lord Acton was right: power corrupts and absolute power turns you/your corporation into a big asshole.
F****** Google
does the subject Title explain how I feel about them? I hate Google. I really really really hate Google. They have taken so much of my money and simply just don’t give a shit, I was even terrorized for a year by a guy I dated one time, who works for Google and hacked me because I told him no, and refused to help me even though he freelanced for them. Can I state once more how much I really really really hate Google?
Not just a problem with Google...
This is not just a problem with Google or with that particular plan going away, just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it is forever. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, X, fill in the blank…, none of it should be considered archival because an archival digital media of any kind of appropriate data density doesn’t exist. Not even close. Microsoft has got something in R&D, but it may never reach commercial availability even for exclusive use by Microsoft. So anyone with hundreds of terabytes or more of data online anywhere, you are at great risk, FBI raids aside. You better have a system to curate the most important stuff to exist on physical media in multiple locations that are periodically refreshed using contemporary technology, otherwise you will eventually be screwed. Doesn’t matter what face the faceless tech giants put on themselves, you have always been on your own, you just didn’t know it.
Re: Data archival is hard.
I maintain an archive of data exceeding 50TB—that’s a shocking amount of data when it isn’t all 4K video. Encyclopedias dating back to 1917, Popular Mechanics dating back to 1902 or so. A variety of computer publications—every issue. The first animated film (Prince Achmed, from the Aladdin series, in German) and even medieval manuscripts. A complete historical archive of Apple developer and marketing material. 27,423 songs in 3,475 albums totalling 77 days played 24/7. 435 movies. 5,000 or so television episodes, including 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s “lost media”.
And yet I still lost my photo library of tens of thousands of photos as a professional photographer.
Data archival is hard.
Re: Re:
Which raises the question, is there are company doing this right? I mean, whose promises one can actually rely on, unlike most who disclaim everything?
Amazon, for example, suggests using Glacier for “Hospital systems [that] need to retain petabytes of patient records […] for decades to meet regulatory requirements”. But their agreement promises only 12 months’ notice of product discontinuation and 30 days for them closing an account (“for any reason”). Then proceeds to disclaim all “LIABILITY… UNDER ANY CAUSE OF ACTION OR THEORY OF LIABILITY”, and also cap damages to the amount that was paid in the last 12 months. They do promise that subscribers will have access to their data for 30 days after termination without cause; but, still, that’s 60 days to retrieve “petabytes” that were meant to last “decades”.
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poor users
Hmmm.
all eggs…same basket…something…don’t…whatever
They were seized?
Did you not read? The FBI seized his shit. And of course, that’s what you do when you are under investigation/duress, is go out and buy a new NAS or five, secret them around the world, and self-host your backups.
Old Lessions
A fool and is data are soon parted.
Never trust anyone with your data. EVER.
Six months interval
So in May, he receives a warning that his account is using too much storage and will go read-only in July. In May also, the FBI raids his home and grabs all his equipment. That was over six months ago. And the whole time “he assumed meant that, at least, that content would be kept safe”.
I mean, isn’t it a bit optimistic that Google would let him keep all his storage forever, when they already let him know that he’s over the limit and that they’re blocking him from adding more?
I get that he lost his backups in the FBI raid, but that also happened in May. Since then, he knew that he didn’t have any backup in case the FBI didn’t give him back his hardware. It’s his life’s work, and for six months, he’s been just hoping that Google lets him keep it forever…?
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Swearing in the article?
Are you really swearing while writing this article? Agreed the situation isn’t great but your professionalism is even worse. Do better please.
Re: nanny nag, unprofessional reader
Fuck off
Re: Stubbing your toes can be covered with 'dangit!, getting it cut off...
If after reading this article the most offensive thing you found in it was the swearing you should probably re-calibrate your priorities.
Childhood videos gone
I made the mistake of posting my daughter’s childhood videos on YouTube between the ages of 0-3, and then posting a video which had some music and got copyright banned with no access to her videos. She’s now 14.
I am trying to get my YouTube account unbanned for 11 years now and apparently there is NOBODY to help me there. I have talked to at least 20 different people at Google, all dump the problem on someone else and nobody knows what’s going on.
This is so sad for me, and completely aligned with the “big faceless monolith” comment. No empathy there for customers, that much I can tell you for sure.
An inexpensive alternative.
While many hosting services are absolutely ludicrously priced (e.g. my own data would cost me half a million USD per month on Amazon S3), Backblaze, a provider I’ve used for flat-fee unlimited offsite backups for years offers a competitor: B2. S3 comes to ~$26/TB/month, B2 comes to $6. “Free” tiers for interactions that cost can eliminate some of those costs outright.
The link I associated with my name when posting is a referral link that benefits us both, if anyone would be curious to try it out. 🙂
Re:
That page just demands that I “Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue”, but I see via archive.org:
And also:
As a bonus, they can change those terms at any time, and any subsequent use of the service (even to take your files elsewhere) will be considered agreement.
It hardly seems appropriate for data ones cares about. That’s substantially worse than Amazon’s bad agreement that I quoted above.
For anybody in a similar situation: Lawyer up immediately!
Most of these faceless companies are way more sensitive to requests comming in trough their legal department.
Arbitration is usually easy, quick and relatively inexpensive. You may even be able to go trough it all without a lawyer, but having a lawyer to guide you through is usually fundamental.
Re:
The agreement’s proabably pretty clear that they don’t owe you even 5 minutes of notice before deleting everything. Lawyering up is worth a try, but only as a last-ditch effort to stall it.
Better would be for an independent journalist to “lawyer up” ahead of time, and ensure the lawyer has a copy of any data that might anger the authorities. Under attorney-client privilege as much as possible, because courts (being run by attorneys) still take that pretty seriously.
Perhaps it is time that people learn that using Google is entering into an abusive relationship.
Google will give you the present of a new feature, and you really like it… then Google takes it away.
Things will be fine and then something minor will set Google off & Googles response is to slap you around.
You will ask and ask and ask Google what you did that was so wrong, but they will give you the silent treatment.
Then they will just let you keep begging & pleading for a response, and silently sit there enjoying your suffering.
I guess they took lessons from Nintendo on how to abuse users. Google avoids having to think by using zero tolerance & making sure that there is no one to hear any tearful begging that might come in & perhaps do the human thing we expect to see.
Google knows we’ve committed to the relationship & now feels free to abuse us at will… its not like people will go anywhere else. We’ll make our search shittier to get more advertising cash & you’ll take it. We’ll put the first useful result on the 3rd page, and you’ll take it.
Once upon a time users mattered more than shareholders screaming for a few more cents each cycle, now we’re just yet another product to be marketed & generate revenue.
I got same notice from google, but this is misleading. 1st notice from google is 30 days before they deleted the account, not 7 days
Re:
Your also misleading its actally 1 year and i got it and its truth. Stop lying next timr.
Temporary fix…
Easiest way to add temporary large storage to a single user account orphaned by the data limit changes is to create a bunch of dummy ‘data storage’ users, rather than pay googles extortionate fees for a ‘data pack’.
The per-user data allocation for pooled data rates are pretty reasonable.
If they’re having problems accessing the account, working with a Google partner (we’re one) gives you a lot more options too
Re: "extortionate"
You’re looking at over $5,300/mo. to store that much data in Amazon S3 for example.
This guy was paying like $10 a month per user for that plan, which definitely isn’t “a lot of money” compared to what storing ~240 TB of data would normally cost him
SyncBack to Backblaze B2
I did not read all the comments, sorry if this is a repost, but I got trapped with Google Photos recently.
I found that Syncback (maybe Pro?) was the only thing that could connect to the Google Photos API and download my photos. Loses albums, meta information, ratings, valuable shiznit, but still, I at least have the photos.
So, I think in Syncback you can set the source as Google Drive, and the destination of a Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.
Might have enough days to complete that as a “let’s get it out of here” option, and then figure out what to do with the ~250 Terabytes of data you have (so much btw, crazy, kinda jealous).
Depending on price, keeping that data in Backblaze may be a long term solution.
Good luck!
This hasn’t just happened. It’s been flagged for 12 months. There were multiple emails warnings. I went through exactly the same process.
Re:
Judging by what’s written, and the posted screenshots, none of the warnings before the 7-day warning mentioned any possibility of deletion. Why do you think Timothy and Mike are wrong?
Raw deal
What a raw deal. At least they should keep the info for the 60 days they initially said; I mean, really, is it going to kill them to hold this data for an extra 53 days (after having held on to it over multiple years)?
Just sue them!
I am still wondering why no one has sued Google over this yet.
that sucks. my brother in law likes to record long videos during concerts when he asked me how to back then up cheaply I first advised him to upload them publicly on YouTube then realized it was bad idea because even though you can go under the radar for years they might suddenly decide to delete your account but I never thought it could happen to your personal data. I usually recommend cloud with two factor authentication as the safest way to backup data. I think I’m gonna start syncing my Google cloud on a physical disk
Re:
I wouldn’t recommend cloud storage at all for anything you don’t want to lose. 240+TB is an extraordinary example, but for most people I think a home NAS setup would be well worth it.
He can try to storage it on wasabi s3, it’s about 1700 USD/month for that large amount of data.
I think it’s the cheapest place I know for storage data.
Plex and other video server programs have installer scripts geared to load movies into Google cloud free and now business storage. often having many terabytes of movies, TV, etc.
They announced this crackdown just after the pandemic as thousands of people signed up and grabbed terabytes for free.
This is just a bystander here.
Trust no one
Look up bitcasa who did the exact same thing with no repercussions about ten years ago.
I no longer trust cloud storage for any kind of permanence. They are backups
Hard way to learn a lesson.
Are we supposed to feel bad that in 2023 people still don’t know how to safe guard their own data? Why would you entrust a faceless company with all of your data? Storage is cheap…$00.01/GB. ALWAYS keep at least 2 physical copies and then one in the cloud.
Re:
Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.
Google needs to be shut down
Google needs to be shut down they’ve fucked up everyone’s lives, they get to do whatever they please with no reproductions, just like our wonderful dick’tators here in Canada and North America as a whole 😵💫
Re:
Judging by history, they’ll do that to themselves eventually.
Google No Tech Support
The issue is the difficulty of dealing with Google. They change the rules and give you the middle finger. I purchased lot of music on Google Music. When it became YouTube Music they made the music you purchased virtually unusable on the web and on a Google device unless you pay for YouTube Premium. What a bag of dicks. I’ve purchased over a million in Google Ads, and they have shut down my account for violations of terms, where I had made no changes for months. They took me down for a month one time over this phantom issue. WTF do the US employees even do? They sure do not talk to me.
Little reminder that 260+ TB of files is far exceeding normal usage and could pretty fairly be considered abuse. Still sucks, but storing that much data for one person ain’t cheap even for a mega corporation.
Re:
My webhost once ripped me a new one over something like 50gb that was just sitting there.
With as much as I rely on Google for my information, entertainment and income, it makes want to vomit, slurp that up and vomit that again, how much money I have to pay them daily to survive and how much they don’t give a shit if do so. I would drop them in a second for ANY viable competition…. ANY. I hate this company and what it has become. I hope to see it die in my lifetime. I really do. Have they targeted me directly in any way? No. It is their level of not giving a shit if ai exist that is the problem. They are now so big, they think they don’t need customers to exist. They cannot see their feet.
I hate Google with a passion
With as much as I rely on Google for my information, entertainment and income, it makes want to vomit, slurp that up and vomit that again, how much money I have to pay them daily to survive and how much they don’t give a shit if do so. I would drop them in a second for ANY viable competition…. ANY. I hate this company and what it has become. I hope to see it die in my lifetime. I really do. Have they targeted me directly in any way? No. It is their level of not giving a shit if ai exist that is the problem. They are now so big, they think they don’t need customers to exist. They cannot see their feet.
How about he stops getting people like you to bitch for him, stops doing illegal things to get his equipment seized, and pays up for the storage he needs. All sounds simple enough to me!
More to the story
There clearly is more to the story. For starters I would want to see his agreement for his personal payment plan. Secondly, I wound need to see his inbox to see if they sent an email notifying him earlier. Thirdly, I would need to see why his account was being suspended. He was informed in May he exceeded his limit despite his claim of being unlimited. He had 2 months to clear up the limit issue and get clarification on why the limit was imposed and possibly upgrade his account or more the data as even in read mode he exceeded his data. 3 months after being on read was when they would delete his information, meaning in the 5 months he chose to do nothing about his data despite the discrepancy being brought to his attention. The FBI raiding his stuff is a whole different problem and any attempt to recover the data might have resulted in it being confiscated. I actually would have used that to your advantage and given the FBI access to the Google account and asked for the data back when they finished or have them contact Google and request the data remains until after you can get your physical storage back.Even if this guy did nothing wrong, I assume the data might track to someone that did.
Discussing on googles part
What I really worry about is Google, Facebook, And others going and deleting peoples whole histories, especially after they passed away. Basically we have a whole chunk of peoples lives and history that are going to be wasted and erased, and we will not have a history of a lot of things that we’d like to keep the history of. I think the world needs a massive advancement in storage technology, so that somehow we can keep peoples histories forever.
For example, just think how much we value being able to look at old photos from 100 years ago, or diaries or any writings of what people did. It’s the same for today. For many people it has value. Of course people should have a way to delete their stuff if that’s what they want to do, but for many it’s a whole life that is online, and tech companies will erase that person’s whole legacy, and value it created, for that person, and for all who cared about them.
We should do better as a society on this subject.
FBI and Google partnership
What no one seems to notice is that Google and the FBI are acting together to restrict access to his data. I wonder what’s in there…
Google is a shitty and evil company that should never be trusted.
Chat or call Google
If you have an Android and have Google One, one of the benefits is chatting or calling customer service. Try that. They helped me before when it came to storage when I joined Google Fi. Google Fi to over my 2tb of space and bundled it. Coincidentally I just paid it in full for the year. They worked with me. Good luck
You can talk to a person at Google and it doesn't cost that much
If you sign up for Google One (like $20/yr for a family), you get a handful of benefits including the ability to access actual support.
I had an issue with one of their fixed in place rules and was able to resolve it in under 10 minutes.
Google
Thanks for this. Great red flag to remove myself as soon and as much as possible from the Googleverse
Unlimited?
So sorry to hear about the journalist’s predicament.
I had an “unlimited” account with a backup firm in NORWAY. I had about 12Tb on their site. Out of the blue I received an email that my account was suspended for sharing copyright material. I had indeed run a test of their “sharing” URL capabilities with one of my alternate emails. I ultimately left them and now run my own personal cloud machine in my detatched garage.
250TB? I’m sorry, but I have scrapes of all of reddit (excluding last 2 years) and it’s less 70TB raw.
1/4 of a PB? The cost of a PB for 5 years is about $1.8 million.
I can’t imagine what he has. 1 hour of 8k video is 2.25 GB, so he would need 111 million hours of video, or 12683 YEARS(!!!) of 8k video to fill 250 PB.
Re:
Why are you talking about 250 PB? That’s way more than the 250 TB under discussion.
Bait and switch.
I knew from day one when Google wanted to give away the cow for free that this was not going to end well. Sure, like everyone else, I took advantage of as much as was offered and as they have been continually removing and canceling services. I have also lost much in the Google promises while they’re pulling the rug from under you. At the same time I was taking advantage of those services, I made provisions to make sure that my data was not going to some anonymous “cloud”. I do feel sorry for a lot of these people who have entrusted this anonymous entity called Google with their lives work. While I’m not in the same category of this amount of data that can be lost, I do have several terabytes of data that I have on my own server. The downside to your own server is that if your house is set on fire, you’re going to lose that data. However, that’s not much different than somebody pulling the plug on one of their data servers. While that only means you lose a portion of your data, it’s still a loss.
In the early days of Google setting up their Gmail services and integrating new and interesting suites, I happen to have needed to have interaction with them and managed to get Google to respond….. But that was eons ago.
Sane people adopted LTO and got out.
What baffles me is the fact that more people are not complaining about the crisis Google kicked off not only did it kill all unlimited cloud collaborative platforms from the rapid influx of people trying to migrate, It forced people in those positions to buy physical servers and deploy them in co-location facilities at 10-100x times the cost.
I have to migrate only 28TB of data which was just enough of an excuse to adopt LTO5/LTO6, which was a 3 weeks of collecting software and putting together a full-scope guide for the VHS-Decode wiki of which 9TB of FM RF capture data was stored on Google workspace, for public use and tinkering and still is until the last day possible.
What I can’t believe is people started trusting hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of essential data, I know people from multiple business sectors and the educational sector that instantly had to use a 10 gigabit line and just pull it to a servers ware they could go and collect physical drives from if they couldn’t that’s it they were screwed.
Google not only tried to kill the piracy market backbone of high-speed cheap sharing but they also killed small businesses educational groups, and countless amounts of research data has now evaporated, alongside collaboration projects.
250 terabytes really is nothing if you have cashflow it’s small enough to get a loan and get LTO7-8 or buy bulk 8TB drives and a few 22TB drives and make a simple Unraid array.
But if you consider the data your life’s work why is it not on archival optical or vacuum packed lto tapes to begin with backups wise, common sense just doesn’t exist anymore outside of the archivist and datahorder communitys apparently.
Re:
So…
if read the article?
Being watched by the FBI is a shitty way to live.
Google has turned to trash in the last few years. I hope they have some sort of big PR disaster that will make them get their shit together.
Why not pay for the drives?
Why couldn’t he find some way, if possibke, to get ahold of someone at Google and pay for the dri es that has his data, etc? Lol
270tb
Am I the only one asking how ‘writing’ takes 272 TB. Obviously the guy isn’t telling the whole truth.
Re:
This post has like 10 links, so it’s easy to miss, but you have to follow the “seized all of his electronic devices” to see the back-story:
With not-very-compressed video files, it’s easy to get to 272 TB. For example, the RED camera records at about 100-600 megabytes per second, or up to 2 TB per hour. Probably Fox News is using less-costly cameras and settings, but that could still be “mere” thousands of hours. And a journalist might be reluctant to re-compress, because that would remove metadata that could be useful for proving authenticity.
As people here have said, it’s hard to manage such huge volumes of data. Fox’s failure to do so, securely, was where this story started.
Do you have any proof of that? I never saw the term “unlimited” or similar as a promise attached to any of their storage plans.
Lawyer Up
See if you can get an injunction through a local court.
Also 10TB nas devices are cheap now a days. Go buy 30 and start downloading.
No matter what, this is why one must always back up locally – say hard drives connected to your computer? Local (at home) LAN, and very last-case-scenario; burning to Blu-Ray discs… I have almost the same amount of data, scattered on many different hard drives and discs. And all clearly marked as “main”, “backup 1”, “backup 2”, etc… I think uld never trust my data on any cloud or “online service”.
Re:
And how do you protect your data from the man coming along and seizing all your electronics?
Can I charge for the storage space in my brain for this article?
Physical solution
It would cost between 2-3K to store it on hard drives or micro SD cards less if you can compress the data.
Specifically how much was he paying?
Google working for the FBI...
Plot twist, FBI Saw some things on the equipment they took from the journalist and called Google to delete it.
So a guy abusing the unlimited storage ignored all of the warnings about the ending of that unlimited storage and waited until the last minute to complain to the press instead of securing his data?
Who cares.
Re:
You’ve had all you devices, phones included, taken by the FBI, now how long will it take you to get back into your online accounts, noting that simple recovery methods often requires the phone you no longer have, or the back up email account whose password you no longer have. How much of the warning did he miss, because he was not able to use Gmail?
The fuck is over 200TB huge? I’ve got friends who have pirated servers full of 10k+ hours of movies and music, as well as PC games and such. Only used up like 30-50TB? Needed a NAS to store it all, and he lost it because lmao imagine using a shitty RAID setup.
Who knows.
Cammunicationologist
Yes
Mr google
Me want my paper Dem Fi photocopy before Jamaica school open January 7 =2024
Cause me a go use them Inna the morning while the pick eye them deh inna school at 8 am till 2pm so nuh bother delete my something them till me get my christmus no us first…
AWS Glacier storage is fairly inexpensive and you don’t pay for transfer in. Nothing in life is free, especially not “free storage”
Cloud Storage
I have been trying to get cloud storage. But I fill out the form and nothing no comments nothing. Am I even eligible for cloud Storage.
Nothing new
Nothing new from these shitbag faceless corporations. All they want is all your data in return for some shitty user experience. I lost a google acouunt due to a compromised device, all login info changed within 20 seconds. No help from google. Use a generic google account now tied to nothing. I had a physical security key and everything.
Microsoft is no better, changing their T&Cs to subscrition services all the time, locking paying users out of functionality, and commercially their support is a joke.
My plea deal called for me to get all my stuff back and Tor dropped off earth. I did eventually get all my files back.
The fact his hardware was taken isn't exactly relevant
The FBI took his hardware as potential evidence in the charges being proposed. Unless he was issued with a restraining order preventing him from using computers (in which case, how is he communicating with Google at all?) getting a bunch of drives and pulling as much data as possible from Google’s servers is still the best solution.
I would have done this as soon as the original hardware was taken (or better, get a third-party like a lawyer to). TBH, I’m kinda surprised Google was supoenaed for access to the data or that it wasn’t also locked and held as potential evidence.
Or as has been suggested, buy Google’s storage and move the files insystem, even if only temporarily until either the legal situation has been resolved, or he could get his data off Google.
The short version: never have just one backup (assuming here that he was using Google as his backup) and always have an exit plan.