If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it. Maybe three years ago, there was a post by someone using Amazon’s unlimited free storage to store camgirl streams and had amassed a petabyte or so. Cloud storage companies all eventually learn this lesson, but depending on the size of the company they can prop up the free storage options for a while.
"If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it."
This is an obvious result but I think what really precipitates this move is the creation, and maturation, of tools like 'rclone'[1] that dramatically simplify inter-cloud data transfer and treating disparate cloud platforms as "dumb storage".
It's one thing to have some weird utility that nobody knows about and only runs on linux and stores your data as blobs in gmail[2] ... it's another to have a mature tool with a decent userbase and development community that you can point to actual storage ...
A reminder - there's only one cloud storage platform that has 'rclone' built into the platform.[3]
My favorite example of "unlimited storage" was Twitch's original policy of permanently storing all past broadcast VODs. Completely for free!
When they changed that policy, they insisted it wasn't to save space, but I can't believe that. The mind boggles at the number of drives required (ballpark 1GB per hour, with a few million active streamers), especially with the popularity of Twitch exploding at the time.
I remember hearing that YouTube would store bit-for-bit copies of whatever you uploaded, allow you to download it, and wouldn’t check that it was a valid video file.
So we just need to encode our data files into a video format? Sure? There’ll be a lot of overhead due to redundancy to account for compression, but it’s free :)
The implication being they still save it permanently, but now they validate it's a video feed. So all you need to do is encode your data as valid video.
I was on this team at the time. We did it because we had the videos stored on our own JBODs and were running out of space. We could also accidentally and permanently lose some VODs because of the lack of redundancy.
Twitch has the audience. For that reason the talent and streamers won't go elsewhere. Unless you offer them a sweetheart deal - which other streaming services have in the past - but none of those deals have worked out favorably for those streaming services.
Exactly this. A streamer's audience is only "their" audience the way that say the audience for Game of Thrones was "their" audience. It's a very, very long tail.
Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.
And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.
> Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.
Microsoft tried with Mixer, they poached some Twitch stars and shutdown earlier this year. those stars just returned to Twitch.
> And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.
We'll see what happens after the impending antitrust litigation I suppose.
Yeah, and have the uploaders select what they want to save as a more permanent clip.
I believe (I'm not at home in this world at all) the streamers use Twitch for live streaming, then edit (or have employees edit) their sessions into 10-20 minute Youtube videos / series.
Basically, Twitch is losing a LOT of engagement to Youtube because of that.
You can more or less do whatever resolution you want, but the bitrate limits mean that 1080p is as high as you should go for the vast majority of content.
>If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it.
There was a post about it from BackBaze. They know some people abuse it and put several Tbs on there, but they still make money on average as most people have 100s of Mb
"There was a post about it from BackBaze. They know some people abuse it and put several Tbs on there, but they still make money on average as most people have 100s of Mb ..."
... and this is a mistake.
The issue is not whether you will tolerate loss-leaders or not. The issue is that you create an antagonistic relationship between provider and consumer.
It doesn't matter how nice you are (and the backblaze folks seem very, very nice) - this is a structural reality that will produce predictable bad outcomes.
Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but if your organization creates opposing interests - antagonistic relationships between the consumer and the provider - someone is going to lose:
"... paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions."[1]
The relationship is only antagonistic if the provider isn't willing to actually commit to the product they're selling.
If you sell unlimited, you're selling unlimited. It's not an antagonistic relationship. It's only antagonistic when they decide that "Unlimited" needs some asterisks behind it.
The business of selling truly unlimited might not be feasible or viable, but this is more a transparency issue than anything. If you're not willing to actually provide unlimited, don't say that you are. It's that simple.
It's hard for me to feel sympathetic to Google/Amazon for having to store someones 1.8 Petabyte porn collection because that's what they sold them. Clearly they've decided that selling unlimited doesn't make business sense, and that's okay. They're probably right!
But if you offer a product, you should be delivering that product. Anything less is gross.
> If you sell unlimited, you're selling unlimited. It's not an antagonistic relationship. It's only antagonistic when they decide that "Unlimited" needs some asterisks behind it.
If the business sells unlimited because it does not want the general consumer to feel constricted with online storage, then it is a benefit for the general consumer. When abusers of business products test the business' abilities, they ruin the business' chance of offering a great product that the consumer can find convenience with.
All-you-can eat buffet should be treated as such. But when a bunch of big college guys decide to hang out at an all-you-can eat from 8 am to 8 pm studying and eating, it defeats the product. It defeats the offering for others. And it takes away the experience of going to a place never having to worry about ordering more food than you can eat.
This ain't about feeling sorry for the business. This is about feeling sorry for the consumer. It is one abuser that hurts consumer. And that is bad economics for all people.
I'm somewhat more sympathetic to this position in this case as Google was truly providing Unlimited (until now), essentially.
My issue is more that many things are labelled "Unlimited" but they aren't. They aren't even close. Cell Data plans are Unlimited* (Up to 15GB tethered, Up to 25GB at 4G speed, Video limited to 720P)
The thrust of my point is that if you say Unlimited, you should mean it. If that means nobody says it, I'm okay with that. They have a business to run and they should do what they need to to make it work.
But I don't think they should be able to get away with selling it as "Unlimited" when there are several fine print details to define what that means that are as hidden as possible so that you don't know what they are until you've been parted with your money and run up against the limits.
> The relationship is only antagonistic if the provider isn't willing to actually commit to the product they're selling.
I don’t think the capacity exists to continue serving “unlimited” storage long-term. Over time, the amount of free storage people use increases until you can’t sustain the practice. It’s just a matter of time.
The good bed is that paid storage is ridiculously cheap.
I don't think that's rsync's point. The point is that when someone offers you unlimited storage for a flat rate, your incentives aren't aligned, no matter how good the other party's intentions are. I recommend reading the linked article. It's short and succinct.
It depends on what drives value. Backblaze’s value proposition isn’t bits. It’s just a different business model than yours — and I think rsync.net is awesome for different reasons.
Backblaze kind of limits this by requiring their backup client to have seen a given file in the last 30 days. Beyond that the file is eligible to be pruned. So in practice people dumping data into Backblaze can only keep it there for 30 days, or must have an equivalent amount of storage space locally.
Incorrect. For an additional $2/month Backblaze will keep one year of version history.
They also have a "Forever history" offering, which is essentially a plug-and-play integration with B2, priced at $2/month + $.005/GB/month for versions deleted more than 1 year ago.
Sure, you can up the window to a year, or pay the normal rate for B2 on top of your subscription (albeit you don't pay transfer costs).
However, you still need to rotate the data and Backblaze doesn't exactly make that process easy for this use-case. You need to go into the UI and manually select the data you want, wait for it to be packaged up, and then download and restore them to the proper locations. If the files were deleted you also need to mess around with the timeframe in the UI.
This sounds like a poor UI, but for their normal backup/restore users it's fine since you generally want to restore an entire device or you're picking out a particular file you need. This really only breaks down if the size of the device backup exceeds the actual storage capacity of the device, which is probably a rare-ish occurrence. But also, restoring from backup is something that should rarely have to be done anyway.
My point still stands: Backblaze is able to offer "unlimited" storage by making the backup/restore use-case easy, but making the "additional cloud storage" use-case tedious. This generally puts an upper bound on that "unlimited" amount based on how much local storage users actually have.
One thing nobody really says is that backblaze actually requires everything you've backed up to be accessible to the computer at least once a month, so you can't actually delete something you've backed up unless you're willing to lose it in a month, or pay extra for the 1 year retention tier.
Essentially you need to own the physical drive space to store anything on backblaze, so there's not much reason to abuse it.
IIRC their client detects FUSE and friends. People have used iSCSI or ATAoE to bypass this, but that comes with it's own limitations. Most people don't bother.
That only allows them to delete things for less than a year, they would still have to develop some sort of system for redownloading all their data, putting it in a backed up drive, and leaving that drive plugged in for about 2 days for backblaze to actually notice it
Backblaze charge for egress so it makes no sense to abuse it with constant 500GiB/hour of urandom.txt or porn or Blu-ray rips or TV recordings. It’s only useful/usable for backups(as should be!)
Those are different units. You're making an assumption that the user watches every video in their library once per month. I doubt it. My bet is that someone with a big video library will watch significantly less than half the content each month (including repeats).
Or in other words, look at it more like 1c/GB vs. 6c/GB-year.
You know, in real life, if my shop offers free samples of the great homemade cookies my mom makes, and you come and take ALL of them, you're a sociopath.
It's obviously a marketing ploy, but the people who use so much stuff that they have to be cut off explicitly basically don't have any human decency, in this regard.
Quoting the Big Lebowski: "you're right, but you're still a jerk" :-)
Almost every time a "free plan" or an "unlimited plan" is cut off (BTW, in life there is no "unlimited" anything, just use common sense), it's not because some random person uses 10-50-100% more than what the person offering it thought everyone would use.
It's more like 1000%-10000%. And that's definitely being a sociopath/jerk.
Data hoarders are jerks, for example, no way around that. There's almost no rational way to explain it, it's just an addiction.
> Almost every time a "free plan" or an "unlimited plan" is cut off (BTW, in life there is no "unlimited" anything, just use common sense)
Corporations offering "unlimited" plans with limits are lying, plan and simple. They should use a word that doesn't imply they're offering something that they're not.
No, I'm not going to come up with an alternative, that's not my job.
Yes, but why cant companies stop doing business with these jerks just to keep everyone else happy? Or limit their speed of uploading or downloading or whatever limitation to the point it is not useable?
It is the same with Mobile plan's Unlimited Data. 20-30GB are fine. Carrier even put up with 100-200GB per month. Because that is the average Data used for Home Broadband. But when carrier said they stop providing services to said customers because they were using 500 or even 1000+GB per month you really cant feel sympathetic to those people.
Some argue why not just but an arbitrary number instead of unlimited. But consumer wants unlimited so they dont feel they are limited. I know that sounds stupid but it is the default consumer behaviour.
Exactly. There is no unlimited anything, so use common sense and stop offering it. I don't pay for what you think I'll use, I pay for the thing you said you sold me. If you make an offer, it's not my job to second-guess you and evaluate if that offer makes business sense to you.
It's not sociopathic to have no empathy towards a for-profit corporation. Amazon is not a person.
If your shop advertises "Eat all the cookies you want', and then stops me when you think I've eaten enough, then you are, essentially, scamming people.
I dig their channel but if they tried this out for anything more than the views they're crazy.
There's no cheap way to back up a Petabyte of data. If you find a loophole to do it, you can consider yourself one of the reasons it'll shortly be closed.
"Typical" is doing a lot of work there. How do I know what you think is typical? What if it's only 1TB?
And if you say "99.999% of client storage needs", that's probably a bigger number than you think and it's hard for me to figure out what the number is.
If I can really trust their statistics, it's fine. But without knowing the number that's a nagging worry at the back of my mind. Because if we look at the new numbers they think are reasonable, 1TB or 5TB per user, that's not enough to hold normal backups of my data.
Sending in a saleman instead of an enforcing agent isn't much better if the salesman wants me to pay $100 a month.
You used the example of 100TB in another comment. I think 100TB would be a reasonable standin for unlimited when it comes to a single user. But would it be so hard to just say that somewhere? Maybe throttle uploads after that point? Instead you have one guy using 20TB per account and one guy using 2PB per account and they both get screwed by the change.
One needs to do this because - should one say, for example, "100Tb" - this means very little for "regular people". If far easier to say "so much that you don't have to worry about it" " as long as you are decent about it".
And then a small minority of users take to the literal dictionary definition - which one is allowed to, which gave birth to vast amounts on legalese on the wrapping bags of sandwiches - and start to scream "you're not truly >UNLIMITED< you owe me".
And then the provider - which assumed common sense - sees that the common sense is not to be taken for granted, and starts to spell more legalese and then starts enforcing limits which are now laid out but perhaps not enforced from the start, because it assumed that people would know how to read between the lines. But said minority doesn't know how to read through the lines and then starts to search for workarounds around the limits, forcing the provider to drop in even harder limits, which affects EVERYBODY because some people need to go through life with a fine tooth comb that exploits each little thing that they can.
So this is the difference between a high trust society and a low trust society - the level of hard enforcement of rules because people will try to exploit even the smallest thing.
Implicitly redefining words is a dishonest way to solve your marketing challenges. Spinning this into trust is hilarious; I think I'd be wasting my time explaining the hypocrisy in your post.
If you treat your customers as morons maybe you should expect to attract morons?
Zoolz just killed their lifetime plan some days ago. Limited space for lifetime access that, well, ended not living that long (just 1.5 years in my case).
Now I learnt that it doesn't matter if you do a fair use, strictly following the rules: some companies won't keep their word even when they charge what they thought was good.
And, of course, take a look at what the CEO is up next. It might be indistinguishable from a scam.
A lighter version: I remember a lot of MMOs that offered lifetime subscriptions launching back when everyone was still trying to make the next WoW. I wonder how many of those games are even still online.
How is it abuse when you're using the service as advertised? Google didn't call it "a reasonably large amount of storage, sufficient for most people", they called it unlimited.
If you got to a store that has "unlimited" refills for drinks and you go and bring in a set of 40L drums to fill up, thats abusing the service. You know this is a gross overuse of the service which was intended for normal users to fill a drink a few times.
I think its a little less clear for ISPs where large amounts of data usage is normal for average users but in the case of storage, people dumping petabytes of data they don't even care about is clearly misuse. If the drink place stepped in to stop you after 5 drinks that would probably be false advertising.
Yes maybe Google was wrong about calling it unlimited and now they are fixing that by making it not unlimited. That doesn't change the fact that people were actually misusing it
The service is intended for customers to drink as much as you want. That doesn't include filling up storage drums.
An unlimited storage offer is intended to store as much data as you want. The difference is that there is a low natural limit to how much you can drink.
People aren't wrong for storing unlimited amounts of data in the unlimited amount storage space they pay for. They don't have to evaluate if Google's offer makes business sense for it, that's Google's responsibility.
If you want to get technical, it's getting a glass and repeatedly pouring it in the drum for - you know, office party, next year of binge drinking or whatever.
If you offer unlimited and only give 2 drinks / person, you're lying, shame on you. If you drink more than 10 people combined, you're drunk with questionable social compass. When you take more than 100 or even 1000 people, then you are technically correct - the best kind of correct for a sociopath.
Turn the tables; say that as a customer you agree to a company charging you an unlimited fee each month for a service. Do you think they'd charge just $1 because they 'know' you didn't mean all of your salary?
Personally, I've always thought #2 was more important than #1. Unfortunately, #1 is often the one that gets enforced, especially when lawyers get involved, which is why legalese exists because when you know people argue from the standpoint of #1, you have to make sure there aren't any loopholes. But I'm digressing a bit here...
Look, just because a company offers something "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean it can't be abused. To argue otherwise is bad faith, IMO. We can argue over where the line is, but that's just a pointless distraction.
But I think everyone would agree that storing a petabyte of data with a service that offers "unlimited" storage for $12/month is abuse.
Number 2 doesn't really exist. It simply means lying about the service you're offering when you really intend to offer a lesser service. All so you don't have to say "practically unlimited" or "virtually unlimited" in your marketing copy.
It's not abuse any more than using your $500/month insurance plan to cover a $12,000/month chemotherapy treatment is abuse. Advertising unlimited storage for $12 is Google saying "We bet the vast majority of our users don't need twelve dollars' worth of storage but will pay it anyway because they want one less thing to have to think about".
On the other hand, your insurance company would have strictly (and wisely, IMHO) defined how many millions worth of chemo your $500/month plan will buy you, or specifically what kinds of treatments will it pay for, and at what rates.
So, if you run into a "miracle doctor" that will charge you $1,000,000 per dose of their "miracle medicine" that "wipes away cancer, like, forever", the reasons why your claim will be denied are already stated clearly in the small print of your contract.
It's not abuse, they can't get the goodwill advertising value from unlimited and then call foul when people take them up on it, that's absurd. If Google doesn't think it can make money with unlimited storage for 12$ then they shouldn't offer it, not offer it then complain about customers using it too much.
Unhelpful perspective, honestly. Of course there’s a limit on anything “unlimited”, the world is finite. This is a distinction that adults don’t have to make except when they are perhaps talking to small children. And besides, it’s not like Google ever promised anyone “unlimited” anything. The contract says “unlimited, unless we decide to change something”. Getting up in arms about the literal wording while ignoring the fact that only the literal wording of the contract matters is also unhelpful.
Google disconnecting unprofitable users is not the issue. They of course have that right, as stipulated in the terms of service. The point of contention is whether it's fair to call abnormally high use "abuse" when the service is marketed as unlimited.
If we don’t use “abuse” then the word becomes less useful and we have to find a new one to cover this scenario. This is the same usage of “abuse” as appears in the expression “abuse of process”.
On the contrary, if we reserve the word "abuse" for situations where the ToS is actually violated then the word becomes more useful.
Similarly, if we reserve the word "unlimited" for things that are actually, y'know, unlimited, then the word again becomes more useful.
Flagrant disregard for commonly understood definitions of words when it's convenient to one's cause is a concrete example of a tragedy of the commons that makes a language less useful overall.
The word abuse also covers scenarios where someone technically or legally has the capability or entitlement to do something, but a convention exists that they will not. This is the usage when someone is said to have “abused their privileges”, or to have engaged in “abuse of process”.
It sounds like you object to the standard usage of these words, which doesn’t seem like a productive position. Olive Garden isn’t actually going to give you unlimited breadsticks either.
Google advertised unlimited. By definition that means without limits. To then put limits is to make the plan limited. Instead of doing thesemental gymnastics to defend Google might I suggest that the people storing petabytes of data are taking advantage of Google's goodwill but not doing anything inherently wrong. That being said Google calling the people who use petabytes abusive is hypocritical, and wrong. Google wants a certain type of user that overpays for "unlimited" and uses a pittance. Instead Google found that they advertised themselves into a pickle and are trying to blame people using the service as advertised.
Google can either advertise unlimited and live with the costs or advertise what they're actually willing to provide. Users using a service within the advertised constraints is not abuse.
I left a reply to another comment on this topic. To recap that here though, advertising is a non-technical medium generally not bound to literal correctness, especially when the claim is understood by any reasonable person to be an approximation, given that taken literally the claim is obviously impossible.
I'm not talking about literal or pedantic correctness here.
The antonym of unlimited is limited. You're using some impressive mental gymnastics to justify advertising a product with one word while providing the opposite.
If the literal interpretation of whatever hogwash the marketing dept is spewing is obviously impossible then I posit that the companies who do so are deliberately misleading consumers for profit. That seems to me to be an open shut textbook example of false advertising. But then neither my job depends on not understanding this distinction, nor am I overpaid lawyer employed to a company engaging in these patently fraudulent activities.
Bringing up false advertising demonstrates a clear misconception that I think is central to your misunderstanding. A claim of false advertising is predicated on the foundation that a reasonable person could have been mislead. But no reasonable person could be mislead into thinking that Google was offering actually unlimited storage, since it is clear to any reasonable person that such a thing is impossible. “Unlimited” is a perfectly acceptable shorthand for “unlimited as far as nearly all users can tell, interested users are welcome to read the full text of the legal contract agreement for more information”.
Olive Garden, after all, cannot actually provide you with “unlimited breadsticks” either.
No, because again, adults generally don’t have to clarify this sort of thing in their communications. False advertising laws are predicated on the idea that a reasonable person could misunderstand the advertised claim. It would be a burden on society if all communication was required to be as exact as legal or technical communication. If a person wants the legal or technical details they can read the relevant controlling legal documents, which a company must provide before selling a product that has such documents. And which, in this case, made clear that the plan was not “unlimited”.
I'm not a fan of products that pretend to be unlimited (because nothing is infinite, so no one can actually offer you unlimited anything), but it's kinda obvious that there's gonna be a long tail of users who's usage is orders of magnitude higher than average which make the offering unviable.
Exactly. The people paying $12/month and storing petabytes on their servers is just punishment for hyperbolic advertising. If you offer "unlimited videogame streaming" you can't act surprised when some people decide to play World of Warcraft in 8K for 22 hours a day.
I’m sure the terms of use reserves the right to discontinue service to anyone for any reason. You can do that but you’ll likely be cut off and have no recourse.
Fair enough, as far as that goes. But at some point isn't that just false advertising? Where's the punishment for that, or if you don't think there punishment, isn't it at least a pretty poor way to start a business relationship?
I don't think it can be construed as false advertising as long as the contract is carried out (i.e. if you sign up for unlimited for a year, they offer you that until the year ends). Perhaps Google doesn't see it as a good business relationship either if you're in the 99.999th percentile of usage.
If you offer something that you never intended to deliver is that not false advertising? It really doesn't matter how you go about denying the delivery. It doesn't matter that any given termination is legally in the clear. All that matters (IMO) is that you offered something when you knew up front that you were never going to deliver it.
And yes, the above would mean that marketing almost any service as "unlimited" would be false advertising. I do actually think that practice should be actively disallowed by regulators. I really don't think that having slick marketing terms is more important that having offerings that are truthfully and accurately advertised. A functional marketplace absolutely depends on the ability of participants to readily understand the services being offered.
The entitlement is quite staggering, as evidenced by the comment you replied to. This is like Cocal Cola putting a free refill station on the street and a bunch of people rolling up with tanker trucks, then getting upset when it's taken away.
The entitlement here comes from companies that lie about providing 'unlimited' services but whine about being taken advantage of when people actually use these 'unlimited' services.
Advertising a service that a supplier has no intention of providing is called fraud.
Given all the talk about how scalable some of these services are, they end up being pretty easy to break. I'm not on data hoarders, but I personally "broke" my crashplan account a year or two ago. All it took was having 3TB of data, mostly a bunch of family pictures, some home movies, a half dozen cloned git repos with a crapton of small .c files in them and having an account for >5 years. My client got wedged in some kind of server reindex operation (or whatever was happening on the server side in the datacenter) that took longer than the 24 hour window to complete. After they told me to reduce my retention window because I had to many "objects" it mysteriously fixed itself a week or two later after basically being offline for a couple months.
Similarly some software I wrote a couple years ago, that wrote a bunch of small files into a single S3 bucket caused a lot of grief at a 3rd party S3 like service because they never imagined someone would write a couple TB of data into a single bucket (actually it used multiple buckets but each one was a TB or two of <1k files).
> I personally "broke" my crashplan account a year or two ago.
CrashPlan lost some of my data some time in 2012/13, blaming it on how they work with Windows's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
I should have stopped my subscription there and then, but I continued subscribing for another 2 years, probably because I was anxious about needing something else that was in the file retention history.
It wasn't a very good service anyway — slow to upload, often stopping mysteriously, and requiring 1GB of RAM for every 1TB backed up.
I effectively disabled their deduper early on. That solved a large part of the slow uploads, and as a bonus it also reduced the memory footprint. The latter of which is still a problem, but checking my machine at the moment. I see its consuming 10G of address space, but only about 600M are actually resident. I think the 10G number is something I tossed into the config at one point too.
That means I've probably got a bit of duplication @ crashplan, but given the bulk of the data is a .jpg/mpeg dump from my cameras I don't care about the 5-10% of the archive which isn't compressed and likely has some duplication (the .git repos).
OTOH, crashplan isn't my only backup plan, so if they explode tomorrow I don't think it will cause me any grief outside of having to find another offsite/cloud backup solution.
(also as a further note, looking at my config log, it seems I need /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches bumped pretty hard just to keep it running).
it isn't a commons if it's owned by a corporation. there is no tragedy of the commons here, because google bears the consequences of these rules. if people try to exploit it then google will either resolve the issue or go bankrupt. either way the problem solves itself.
>A common resource (or the "commons") is any scarce resource, such as water or pasture, that provides users with tangible benefits but which nobody in particular owns or has exclusive claim to.
>The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.
Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. You aren't entitled to access to googles hard disk space.
By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios.
The important bit for a tragedy of the commons is that the users don’t have any meaningful ownership or motivation to fix the system.
The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. Be it the government or a faceless company that doesn’t charge for it, it doesn’t make any difference from an economic perspective.
> Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource.
No it doesn’t. A commons has the implication that everyone in a particular community has access to something. A tragedy of the commons can easily occur within completely gated communities with the commons owned by a private corporation.
> By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios.
> The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government.
That's not really true; the pre-enclosure commons simply wasn't owned in the sense we'd understand it today, just as Native American land was administered in ways we wouldn't recognise as ownership. Treating land as akin to chattel is a relatively recent development.
It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared. Even in Native American tribes they made rules about how to use different areas.
The critical relationship in the tragedy of the commons is misaligned incentives between the users and the owners. Users have incentive to act greedy and the owner has no incentive to fix it because it doesn’t hurt them if the thing stops being useful for that activity.
> It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared.
Not really. Often there was simply no entity that exercised executive function over the land or its use, which is a large part of why even plainly dysfunctional arrangements persisted.
The idea that there must be an owner to incentivise is modern and ahistorical. As traditionally conceived, the tragedy occurs not because "the owner" has the wrong incentives but because there simply isn't an owner. Pre-modern states didn't have the capacity to administer land in that kind of detail, even if they'd wanted to.
If you have unlimited access to said disk space for a nominal fee, that’s commons.
Similarly, if you rent a hotel room, you have free access to common areas like the pool or lounge. Normally this works wonderfully, until a big party takes over the common space.
I don't understand why datahoarders aren't using distributed storage like IPFS, TahoeLAFS or others instead of relying on centralized services. I know they have storage space themselves, but I bet they're duplicating it a lot, unknowingly (or knowingly) and if they used better storage, it would be for the good of all.
Have you tried pulling a non-popular file out of IPFS? I can't find the link but an archive put up I think, BeOS ISOs - it wasn't possible to get the file back again, just like if a torrent isn't seeded.
> The are raising prices from $12 to $20, not exactly "killing". But Google and "killing" in the same sentence is more attractive, I get it.
If you have to have to work with a sales representative to buy it, and you have to make requests to google to get your quota increased, those are some significant barriers. It's fair to consider that a distinct offering and not just a price change.
Also the notion of requesting more storage in an unlimited buy is a no-go anyway for me. Don't try to sell me unlimited something and then get weird when i use it as labeled. Ugh.
When entities sell/promise unlimited, they expect some good faith behavior from the users.
When your neighbor says, you can borrow my tools anytime he expects some good faith from you. You cannot go to his home everyday and borrow every tool and claim, but you said "anytime"
Your local park also offers unlimited playground time. But if you start practically living there and start hogging the slides 100% of the time, there needs to be new rules.
That's how society works. Can't believe this needs to be explained.
> That's how society works. Can't believe this needs to be explained.
That's not how the market works, though. Would you pay $100/m for borrowing your neighbors tools anytime?
What if you're running a business and you depend on those tools, what hours can you get them? How does maintenance work? What is he obligated to do, anything? If he decided to retract the offer, change the terms, not give you the drill on a Wednesday because he's feeling sick, do you get refunds?
None of your "casual neighbor verbal agreement" example applies here of course because we're not exchanging money. It's not a service, they're not a seller and you're not a buyer.
When you are a buyer, and they are a seller, suddenly people want explicit terms of a contract.
Imaging pumping gas in your neighbor model. "Eh, just pump an honest amount, pay what you think it's worth" - would that fly? Of course not, the gas owner wants a very specific amount for each and every drop of gas.
Do you think Apple or Google has short contracts for when you signup? They must, if they have good faith right? No, they don't. They have pages, and pages, and pages of written legal terms that you as a user are "agreeing" to try and cover their asses should you decide to try and sue.
All these companies with huge lines of legal spaghetti are doing that because good faith doesn't in the majority of cases.
Look at it a different way: I have "unlimited" internet from tmobile. Are you telling me there's no fine print that dictates exactly how limited my "unlimited" is? So Tmobile clearly knows unlimited isn't unlimited - the users are the only ones with "good faith" apparently. But that's how marketing works, isn't it?
It aint about marketing. It is about giving the user an experience they don't have to worry. It is not about giving an abuser a green light they can get away with testing the limits of their patience.
It's funny, as a consumer i view it as a way to obscure the product and not make it clear what is actually being offered.
I don't care about downloading 20TBs, i'm not an abuser. I do however care about knowing the limits of my "unlimited" plan, which are very real and easily reachable.
It's funny how the limits of Unlimited can be reached in just a few days of youtube videos.
These limits don't feel like limitations on scammers and abusers. They are not designed to stop people from downloading 20TBs of data hoarding. They're limits that normal people reach easily.
Imagine a road having "no speed limit", but cops enforce a 200mph speed limit. That seems reasonable to me. They'll pull over people actively trying to break the sound barrier rather than merely trying to get to work going 80mph.
Now imagine that same road, with "no speed limit" - but cops pull you over at 80mph[1]? These aren't people actively trying to kill someone. They're normal, non-abuser people.
Tmobile's data limit isn't even remotely about data hoarders. My 5 year old thumb drive is 10x bigger than my Unlimited data limit.
[1]: This is a somewhat location dependent example, but over here (WA, USA) that's frequently obtained by "normal" people.
This isn't a goodwill issue, Google isn't a charity. This is a product they sell for a profit. They are selling something, unlimited storage, and getting mad when people use it as unlimited storage. If they can't make a profit doing that, which they obviously can't, then they shouldnt advertise it as such. Why am I supposed to take pity on the plight of Googles marketing department?
Because you're ruining it for everyone. You're the guy that goes into the bathroom at a rest stop (in Europe, where you pay to use them), smears feces all over the wall, then proclaims "It's a public bathroom that I paid good money to enter, they didn't say what was and wasn't acceptable behavior in the bathroom".
The fact that they didn't explicitly tell you not to store 8PB of data on a service that costs $12/mo doesn't preclude you using COMMON SENSE. "But nobody told me" stopped being an excuse when you were in preschool.
Just for reference: For someone using the service properly, no loopholes to get around the 750GB/day upload limit, it would take 30 account years to upload 8PB.
Not even a little bit. Google is advertising "public restroom" and you're saying "well they didn't actually say I had to go IN THE TOILET". No, they didn't say that, because they expected you to use basic common sense.
You link me to Google suggesting people setup a 24/7 cam stream rip dumping directly to their drive and I'll go ahead and concede it's the equivalent of "please smear feces on our walls".
Spend 5 minutes on r/datahoarder and you see people writing scripts to bypass built-in upload limits to try to gently impose "social norms" on people. Just don't be that guy...
Google should be able to set proper boundaries by now, either with a number, through data transfer rates or both. They have every technical option to set limits wherever they need them. Don't blame users for a flawed system.
No, that's how marketing works. There's no need to promise infinite anything.
And the comparisons to borrowing things or being given things for free are weird. Google isn't your friend or benefactor, Google is entering into a commercial relationship with you. I can't believe that this needs to be explained. If I say you can come and borrow my tools anytime, the first time you come over to borrow my tools I can tell you to leave my property or I'm going to call law enforcement. I'm not obligated to you in any way.
You don’t have to work with a sales rep to switch to enterprise: it’s not one of those “call for a price” tiers (at least it wasn’t a few months ago when I switched an account to it).
That's correct. But the new, Google-involved behavior is that for 5+ users (which was previously "unlimited"):
" Customers that have 5 or more End Users will receive a total amount of Google Drive storage equal to 5TB times the number of End Users, with more storage available at Google's discretion upon reasonable request to Google. "
That is new behavior, and rubbing some people the wrong way.
I think the more curious thing is how long will they grandfather in the existing Gsuite users to the old, "unlimited" behavior. If they do that for long enough, at least it wouldn't feel like a bait-and-switch.
But how many people put more data onto it than you could fit into a relatively normal NAS? I would think one off-the-shelf NAS is firmly within the scope of an unlimited data storage plan.
Edit: Did I say something dumb? I don't think putting movie rips on this service is inherently an abuse, regardless of whether you ripped it yourself or pirated it. It's the amount that matters.
> But how many people put more data onto it than you could fit into a relatively normal NAS? I would think one off-the-shelf NAS is firmly within the scope of an unlimited data storage plan.
A typical home NAS is probably on the order of 10TB. I have a feeling that would be OK for "unlimited" cloud storage, even if the provider took a loss on those customers. The problem users are certainly storing hundreds or thousands of TB. In the age of inexpensive 1GBit home internet connections, one could theoretically store ~10TB per day.
To be fair those are VERY new and 10TB is probably an accurate estimate of the /average/ NAS user. I have 150TB (I am not average) and the max drive size I have is 8TB right now. Similarly, I'm about to set my dad up with a Synology which I'll be putting 3x8TB for 16TB usable. I even offered to put in 16's but he didn't need the space and didn't want to pay the extra to get it (especially since he can upgrade later if desired)
FWIW, they said nothing about shared drives, so all of the businesses that were/are going to need unlimited storage will be able to use shared drives for sharing files with their team.
I have a unique perspective with having a GSuite for Nonprofits organization, and even though we technically have 30GB of storage per user[0]:
> Unlimited users with 30 GB cloud storage each
We also have shared drives which don't have a (number of bytes-based) storage limit, so I can't say exactly what happens to new Workspace Business tier orgs but I don't imagine shared drives will have a total storage limit.
Ha, sharing it with more than a handful of people would definitely be an abuse.
Though from what I remember they recently drastically cut down the ability to share files, installing caps that most people would never hit, so it's not like they needed to cut the storage amount to fix that problem.
To be clear (and this is mentioned but not highlighted in the article), the previous Business plans were never guaranteed unlimited storage for orgs with fewer than 5 users ($60/month), the 1TB limit those orgs were supposed to have was just never enforced.
I was one of those users, and the thought that the storage limit could start being enforced at any time was always in the back of my mind. Now I'm on the Enterprise plan and can worry a bit less.
But the new Workspace plan is still different for 5+ users:
" Customers that have 5 or more End Users will receive a total amount of Google Drive storage equal to 5TB times the number of End Users, with more storage available at Google's discretion upon reasonable request to Google. "
Existing customers (under G-suite) may be grandfathered for an arbitrarily long time, in which case I would agree you don't need to worry.
Note that I have heard of a number of data hoarders who have jumped onto those new enterprise plans with lots of data stored, and there are no reports of caps or data culls - yet.
No, it's available as a self-serve upgrade from the admin panel. Sales might be able to give discounts, but that's not very likely for an "enterprise" with 1 user :)
I did the same. I heard about the changes, saw the life boat that is the $20 upgrade and figured I would jump on that since it was an available upgrade.
I have 41TB of "Linux ISOs" that I need to keep stored ;)
Burn investor money (or in this case, profits from your near monopoly position in another business) to give away something for free until your competitors are dead (or never enter the market in the first place. Then raise prices. And raise prices. This Model is the new Silicon Valley way. Consumers love it til the party stops
The concept you're describing is predatory pricing, but that doesn't appear to apply at all here. Market competition is alive and well in the cloud storage space.
I find that OneDrive tends to get hung up if it comes across a file that it can't read due to a lock. PyCharm for example will create a lock file, and it will cause OneDrive to halt all syncing until I close PyCharm and the lock file gets removed.
No, but they keep trying to do things with accessibility on my Mac to give them access that Apple doesn't think they should have.
Their price on 2TB for $9.99/month is competitive with Apple but we have 4 Macs, 5 iPads, and 5 iPhones. Much easier to have the Apple devices backing up to iCloud.
I did look at their Plus/Professional/Team offerings https://www.dropbox.com/plans and they do look useful for a lot of business cases.
By the way, they cut the number of devices that could access an account from unlimited to 3 on the free account. Fair enough but I was somebody who earned extra gigabytes in 250MB chunks for every person I referred to them.
That's an OS upgrade thing. They didn't request enough access originally and after upgrades had to ask for more. As annoying as those access restriction requests are, they're probably the best implementation I've seen that is clear enough for the average user to accept and still understand what they're doing.
I find it funny that Dropbox is used as the example of HN nerds saying how they couldn't understand how something was a business because there are so many easy ways to implement it. If it never made money, it wasn't a business.
The original thread was shitting on the idea of an online storage solution. The idea was good, its just every other tech company jumped on the same boat and crushed drop box.
Yes. Stating that the product was useless due to FTP+SVN/USB drives was incorrect. The idea was a huge success. Dropbox just wasn't the one that got the reward.
My comment didn't say that the product was useless, and it certainly didn't shit on the idea of an online storage solution. In that thread, I was saying that I already had an online storage solution, and it was working pretty well for me. When I said the notorious "quite trivially" phrase, I was in fact predicting that it would be easy for every other tech company to jump on the same boat.
Regarding USBs, Dropbox's messaging at the time was "throw out your USB drives", and this was before smartphones or ubiquitous dependable network connections. At the time, if I had to give a presentation in a university classroom, Dropbox wasn't moving the bar much on that particular problem.
It's hilarious now you're backtracking and pretending that you weren't shitting on the idea but that other players would implement the same. Very clear that you were saying since someone could do it themselves why would they need a seperate app for it ,why else did you list it as qualms with the app?
Is your ego really that fragile that you can't admit you made a mistake judging a business?
This is how you get market capa that are 40x annual revenue. It is the potential of extraction.
Nothing new: Oracle has paved the way with Java and databases. Exploit the potential until the last customer leaves. Which makes a corollary: Most of the revenue of a company happens when customers are massively leaving.
Although banks have to be careful since transferring $100k to another bank is significantly faster and easier than transferring 100TB to another cloud storage service.
It's notable how much consumer abuse is on the rise lately, with businesses cutting wages for their employees, increasing prices, and cutting services, to punish us for not buying enough useless crap.
In most cases, consumer abuse, like withdrawing 'unlimited' services, YouTube demanding users sign in, or Autodesk removing Fusion 360's personal use tier, net the abusive company little to no additional revenue. Their purpose is to exercise dominance over end users for not behaving the way the abuser feels entitled to.
I love how there is always an aspiring fiction writer in the comments. Woefully ignorant of the story, has an unrealistic expectation of limitless sevices. It must be cathartic to write victim hood takes like this.
... what a surprise. People seem to think that Google didn't anticipate data hoarders, but in fact, this just seems like a standard hook to get people using a service. (Or a bait and switch, if you're less charitable).
If anyone here is looking for a Drive alternative, I highly recommend the open source, P2P https://syncthing.net/. I use it to synchronise files between Linux, Android, FreeBSD devices including my home NAS.
I don’t think Google cares to have gotten, or cares if they lose the data hoarder market. For everyone else, it’s not a bait and switch because nothing changed, and for the data hoarders it’s not like it’s a bait and switch because there’s no bait. They knew this day would come, as it always has with every other service that’s ever made a similar offer. The TOS already limited usage in a number of ways, but Google didn’t bother to enforce them because the data hoarders hadn’t made enough of a nuisance of themselves to bother.
Can anyone recommend an alternative place to store a couple TBs of data offsite? I don't necessarily need backups, but somewhere to archive large files and get them back when need be. Right now I used google drive, and uncheck the folder when I no longer need it locally.
I've been very happy with Backblaze B2. If I were starting from scratch today, I would probably give Wasabi a try due to their pricing (no egress charges). Whatever way you decide to go, I highly recommend becoming familiar with rclone if you aren't already. It's awesome.
Wasabi's not bad. $5.99 a month per TB, plenty of ways to get your data in and out. I'm nothing to do with them but I back up a TB or so and it works well.
Interesting. I don't particularly stint in my usage; Google reports I use 34 gigs in my old G Suite Business account.
I will definitely pay more if I need to.
I have some level of personal storage backing it, along with paid backups, but I trust Google SRE to store my data long term far more than I do. Having an equivalent infrastructure would be no small project, far more than $20/mo. I've had a few data loss events over the long years.
> I trust Google SRE to store my data long term far more than I do
I don't trust Google (that much) to keep my account active before my death, as their automated tools can shut down my account anytime and leave me with no access to my data.
>"A relatively small number of organizations in a few specific industries actually realize the full benefit of unlimited storage. "
I love statements like the above, coming from a Google spokesperson.
It basically implies "even though you are a customer but because you are small we don't care about your needs, even if it most customers like you don't utilize unlimited storage so it doesn't really cost us anything, but we want to make more money from you anyway".
I would like to know how would the full benefit of unlimited storage look like. When my write rate is somewhat less than Google is adding new storage then I am definitely not taking the full benefit. So how large can be the cap between these?
Frankly I'd love to have some type of Google/Dropbox VFS where I could store unlimited TB's of my movies connected to my kodi player and it would just transparently pull the file down like you can do with Dropbox Enterprise, vs. keeping my NAS backup in Glacier Deep Archive.
The issue is it would cost 100+$/month to keep it in regular S3, and I'm sure Google is losing money on other folks importing TBs of data to their unlimited service unfortunately.
It mounts your Google Drive as a read only FUSE-style filesystem, so that programs can read from your unlimited storage. It was designed to be used with plex, but Kodi works just as well.
I need to backup ~25 TB, and still even with B2 that is $0.005 * 25,000 = $125.00. All near-realtime backup solutions IMO are too expensive at scale for a home user.
The only thing I've found that is a good price is Glacier Deep Archive which is just $1.00/TB, but the only downside is you have to wait ~12-24 hours for a restore.
The main downside to deep archive is the insane amount of money you will have to pay to get data out of it. They are not very transparent about how much it costs, the retrieval fees aren't bad but the egress fees are killer.
Oh for sure, all egress at $0.09 is still frankly a rip-off and the one thing I do see AWS doing to keep people locked in.
If this cheap storage class allowed for real-time reads I'd just store all my data on s3 and mount it via some kind of fuse filesystem and never restore it all for $5000, just stream on demand the movies / mp3s I randomly want to watch and would likely be cheaper in the long run than owning a big nas with hard drives.
Why not just add a second NAS with 25TB and call it a day?
2 x 16TB disks = $600
4 bay NAS = $300
That would give you cost you 15$/month (over the 5 year hdd life) for 32TB of data, or $0.50/TB/month with super fast loading in event of failure, no egress costs and headway to grow to 64TB if you need it.
Honestly I'd like to not have a NAS at all anymore. I moved from a 4k sqft house to an 800 sqft apartment with a ton of hard drives (I've had this reliable 14 disc tower for years so it has a mix of HD's that could be consolidated if I wanted), so having a NAS sitting in my small closet already is a bit annoying. I'd rather not have anything like that around anymore and just be able to stream from s3 would be great, especially if I want to move across the country / world again and don't have to worry about hardware.
The FULL benefit of unlimited storage is probably the whole world having free access to any form of media in one enormous shared archive, like an unlimited library of all things. Or maybe I'm not thinking big enough.
Just a tip, that limit is applied at the API level in a way that allows you to create limitless GCP Service Accounts and bypass that limit by manually granting them access to your Google Drive shares. I was able to upload ~6TB of data in about 2.5 days on a gigabit connection after discovering this.
I use rclone, which has built-in encryption (and is optional; I don't bother with encrypting copies of my Time Machine backup, because it's already encrypted), including even file and directory names.
It takes like 0.1% of users to match the amount of data that the other 99.9% are using. I may be off on that number, but not by a lot.
The amount of data we are using may have changed since the 90's, but the data abuser formula will live until an asteroid hits and ends this in a sweet sweet fireball o' death oh please come soon.
Google Drive has never really offered unlimited storage. Once you get above about 0.75TB upload in one day they throttle down your upload speed or cut you off completely.
It would take years to upload a petabyte, which keeps usage within well defined limits.
For any of these unlimited storage plans, there is a small set of user (<1%) who are massively unprofitable. On some level you can fire those users, but eventually they come back under a new guise. The easiest option is to eliminate these plans other than for larger corporations who tend to use storage more proportionately to their spend.
we really new way to store and access data. Some sites generate 2 GB per hour just for logs, let alone users uploading TBs of videos. 1 TB sounds a lot but it isn't. Imagine 4k security camera recording at 60 fps, 30 day back up videos, for 1 million customers. That's about 120 Gb * 30 * 10 * 1 million = 36000000 TB of data every month. Now do duo backups just in case and you need 72,000,000 TB of space.
Reason n+1 why I've long since begun not trusting anything from google. When it comes to cloud storage, services, anything, I just consider it a non-option if it's by google.
Yev from Backblaze here -> what a fascinating question! You need storage to "generate" the data, and you need storage to "store" the data - so this is a fun thing to ponder!
I requested an export of my data from Google this weekend. They will lose my precious data.
And I recently had a bug with the transition from Google play music to YouTube Music. It seems I lost my premium membership, I'm not sure I'll re-buy these services.
Reading people's take on tech stocks long is laughable. In 1 year I have reduced my google usage in half, email and search only.
And search I've reduced due to SEO gaming. Bing can be better.
You are an anecdote though. I really dislike the Play Music -> Youtube Music transition as well, but I'm not cancelling. $15/month for my family not to watch Youtube ads + music is still OK.
If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it. Maybe three years ago, there was a post by someone using Amazon’s unlimited free storage to store camgirl streams and had amassed a petabyte or so. Cloud storage companies all eventually learn this lesson, but depending on the size of the company they can prop up the free storage options for a while.
https://boingboing.net/2017/08/25/person-tests-amazons-unlim...