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Google Data Storage

Google Is Killing Unlimited Drive Storage For Non-Enterprise Users (petapixel.com) 50

If you're one of the Google Drive users who is taking advantage of unlimited storage for $12 per month on G Suite, beware. Workspace is replacing G Suite and offers more features for those who do, but you might not want to switch: unlimited storage on Workspace will cost you at least $20 a month. Jaron Schneider reports via PetaPixel: Currently G Suite business subscribers (which do not need to be actual businesses, but any individuals looking for greater storage capacity) can access unlimited storage on Drive for just $12 a month. For photographers with considerable backlogs of photos, this was a relatively inexpensive cloud storage backup solution. Google states in its plans that groups using this particular plan with four or fewer members are supposed to be only eligible for 1 TB of storage each, but in testing by Android Police and others have shown that Google has never enforced that limit.

Unfortunately, this appears to be changing with the transition to Workplace. According to the company's list of plans, which you can view here, there is a limit of 2 TB for individual Business Standard users and 5 TB per person on its new Business Plus plan. To get more, you will have to go to the Enterprise level which Google says requires you to work directly with a Google sales representative (this appears to actually be the case), but Google does promise they can offer as much storage "as you need" in this category. That doesn't explicitly say unlimited, but should realistically operate as such for now. Pricing in that Enterprise level will cost you $20 per month ($30 per month on Enterprise Plus), nearly double the previous price for the same amount of storage. For now, G Suite customers will be able to stick with their current plans if they do not switch to Workplace, but Google is intending to transition all users over to the new system eventually.

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Google Is Killing Unlimited Drive Storage For Non-Enterprise Users

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  • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @09:41PM (#60604978)

    Back in the 70's, I was taught that drug dealers would give out free samples to get you hooked. Then they would start charging you for their "service".

    This seems to be the same business model.

    • by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @09:55PM (#60605000)

      This seems to be the same business model.

      Yes, this is the cloud computing model that many of warned would end up boiling its users alive. This is just the beginning, as it's going to get much, much worse. There's a very good reason we moved away from centralized computing and storage to decentralized computing and storage in the 80's and 90's; but the young seem to have never studied computing history, and are therefore doomed to repeat it.

      • Yes, this is the cloud computing model that many of warned would end up boiling its users alive. This is just the beginning, as it's going to get much, much worse. There's a very good reason we moved away from centralized computing and storage to decentralized computing and storage in the 80's and 90's; but the young seem to have never studied computing history, and are therefore doomed to repeat it.

        Not that I use the "cloud" for storage of anything I don't mind losing. But as someone who graduated high school in 2000, can you go into detail so I can learn? Also, yeah, they didn't do a good job in teach computing history in college.

        • I would recommend that you start by reading up on time sharing systems of the 1970's, computer gatekeepers of the period, and the politics of control as they relate to shared computing resources.

          Cloud computing is exactly the same, and will have exactly the same outcomes.

          • Not finding a lot on gatekeepers and the politics of control. A lot on the technical aspects of time-sharing computers. Do you happen to have a good lead I can follow?
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Yes, this is the cloud computing model that many of warned would end up boiling its users alive. This is just the beginning, as it's going to get much, much worse. There's a very good reason we moved away from centralized computing and storage to decentralized computing and storage in the 80's and 90's; but the young seem to have never studied computing history, and are therefore doomed to repeat it.

        No, we experienced distributed storage and it sucked big time. Everyone and their dog tried millions of solut

    • You're hardly a 'Kid' then,,, We are in love with these free samples though.
    • > Back in the 70's, I was taught that drug dealers would give out free samples to get you hooked.

      They told us that in the 80's too, but we never found those mythical free samples.

  • I thought 640 K should be enough for every body.
    • I thought 640 K should be enough for every body.

      Because of all those Nigerian Princes selling secret royal penis enlargement witch doctor potions over the internet, our penises have grown a lot bigger, and thus, porn takes up more space appropriately.

    • by jmccue ( 834797 )
      I wish 640k it was enough. With these memory and disk hogging applications we have, I miss the days of applications only doing one thing.
  • 16 TB 7200 rpm 3.5 inch drives are on sale for under $400....

  • by will_die ( 586523 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @11:02PM (#60605170) Homepage
    With microsoft I get 1TB for under $70 a year or $49 if you work for an organization with home use program.
    Then along with the 1TB I get full use of MS office
    • If I Remember Correctly, with an Office subscription for $99/year, one has licenses for five 1 TB One drive accounts. One person could have the five accounts or spread them over up to five individuals. Not a bad price regardless of how one sets up the subscriptions
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      With Jottacloud I get unlimited storage for â75/year. It really is unlimited too, I know people with 20TB+ on there although I'm not quote that far in yet myself.

      Works great with Duplicati too so is ideal for off-site, encrypted cloud backup as well as general file storage.

      • Apparently Jottacloud doesn't have unlimited any more. 50â for 10TB is insanely expensive.
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          https://www.jottacloud.com/en/... [jottacloud.com]

          It's the "Jottacloud Personal" option on the right. 7.50/month or I think they do a discounted yearly subscription. Unlimited storage but upload speed is "reduced" over 5TB. From what I've seen and heard whatever reduction is in place is minimal, certainly much faster than my crappy internet connection can manage.

          • Thanks, missed that somehow.
          • Minimal?! It goes from "full speed" (that would be let's say 11 hours and 5 minutes for the first 5TBs on gigabit) to 0.1Mbit/s (that's 12.68 years for 5TBs!!!). Note that you don't need to have a huge pipe yourself, you can upload from anywhere. Now if you're saying your notion of unlimited is 5 or 10 or 20TBs that's another thing.

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              It doesn't go to 0.1Mb, it's more than enough to saturate 100Mb upload links.

              • It's literally what they say in the official documentation: https://docs.jottacloud.com/en... [jottacloud.com]

                Don't tell me you tested and it doesn't go to 0.1 Mb/s, for that you'd have to upload 30+ years before that at 0.25Mb/s!

                • That's my concern. I have roughly 12 TB to back up, but first it is going to take a long time to get it all in there and second what if they say "we're closing down in a month"? You will never get all your data back in time.
                  • Well, they can say "we don't have your data anymore because of X" at any time. One copy is zero copies :-)

                    However they don't throttle on outgoing.

                    But other than that they aren't Google/Microsoft/Amazon so probably you won't be getting gigabit speeds even in a good day and if there's some issue (think transforming the unlimited in 1TB, that's the usual) probably 90% of their customers will have to get their data in a rush (or rather probably 99% of the data uploaded over years will have to get out). For sure

                    • If they close down, then EVERYONE will be trying to download at once. Can't see that ever working even without throttling.
  • It isn't news even for Slashdot, I've been saying that since the last article here too: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]

    Also the Enterprise Users are limited to 1TB if under 5 user/domain and to 5TB per user "with more storage available at Google's discretion upon reasonable request to Google": https://workspace.google.com/t... [google.com]

  • I struggle to imagine a person that would use unlimited cloud storage for individual purposes. No doubt there are such people, like frequent video streamers with insane bandwidth, but not many. What does unlimited mean anyway? We can safely say not unlimited in this context. In my experience unlimited is usually as much as possible without inconveniencing the provider. If this is being cancelled, it may mean that anything more resource intensive than "limited" plans starts to inconvenience Google, in othe
    • I struggle to imagine a person that would use unlimited cloud storage for individual purposes. No doubt there are such people, like frequent video streamers with insane bandwidth, but not many.

      It's not so much unlimited as 1TB can quickly be used up. I have over 3TB of photos; and have converted almost all of my DVDs to video files so I can stream them to my Tvs, resulting in nearly 6TB of cloud storage as a backup. ARQ does a nice job of encrypting and updating the backup as I add more files.

      • You arent worried about storing (illegally) ripped videos with someone else who can give the authorities access to your account?
        • You arent worried about storing (illegally) ripped videos with someone else who can give the authorities access to your account?

          Nah, they are encrypted before they are uploaded; plus many are actually the digital copy that comes with the original.. Quite frankly, DMCA aside, since I'm not torrenting them the chances anyone would notice and care are slim to none. Interestingly, in the RealNetworks case the court implied ripping of DVDs one owned may be fair use, the sale and manufacture of ripping software wasn't. I'm guessing the MPAA has little interest in testing the limits of fair use and wants to focus on illegal sharing and sa

      • by pnutjam ( 523990 )
        I use a time4vps storage server, 1TB. I can also run my calibre library and pihole on the same server. I backup to a 2nd internal drive in my server, then shuffle the important stuff to the cloud. I don't do any "ripped" videos in the cloud. Seems unnecessary. When I started with Time4vps, they were on par with costs for b2, I think they are a bit more now. I pay around $18 a quarter.
    • You'll always have that one guy who will try to download 20 Exabytes of dummy files to the "unlimited" cloud storage providers, just to see where their breaking point is. I'm curious how far they got this time before Google changed their minds on this policy.

    • I struggle to imagine a person that would use unlimited cloud storage for individual purposes. No doubt there are such people, like frequent video streamers with insane bandwidth, but not many. What does unlimited mean anyway? We can safely say not unlimited in this context. In my experience unlimited is usually as much as possible without inconveniencing the provider. If this is being cancelled, it may mean that anything more resource intensive than "limited" plans starts to inconvenience Google, in other words, the rate of bandwidth and content growth is outpacing cloud space growth. Where are the days Google proudly displayed its cloud space capacity growth counter and there was actual competition among cloud providers, so much that they tried to entice customers with ever increasing free cloud space offers...

      Plex hoarders. They collect 100+ TB libraries of every single movie and TV show in multiple formats. Considering that they can't watch even most of this within multiple lifetimes, its mostly for dick measuring.

  • by nagora ( 177841 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @04:05AM (#60605662)

    And they can switch it off any time that it's not making them money.

    Is your business plan exactly the same as your cloud providers? Will it be tomorrow?

    Cloud storage is for backups, at best.

    • And they can switch it off any time that it's not making them money.

      Is your business plan exactly the same as your cloud providers? Will it be tomorrow?

      Cloud storage is for backups, at best.

      Exactly. I have encrypted cloud backups using ARQ, but they are my 3rd tier after local HD backup and HD backup stored in safe deposit box. Relying on any one means you have a single point of failure; with cloud based backups that failure point is beyond your control.

    • by ledow ( 319597 )

      One cloud is one thing. One single point of failure.

      Another cloud could be another point of failure, giving you some kind of redundancy.

      But then your Internet/ISP/router is going to cut them both off from access, unless you have a truly dual redundancy on your connection (e.g. even a 4G stick?).

      Cloud is fine. As one thing. Maybe two if you have two entirely separate cloud services with no common path. But otherwise it's just one thing.

      Like on-site is just one thing.

  • So Google was always charging for 1 TB of space per user, and is now charging the same (?) for 2 TB per user and fixing a flaw in their system that allowed you to use more services than you were paying for. How is Google the bad guy in this?

  • Thanks for sharing this info! In my opinion, it is better not to take any chances, that's why I back up all the necessary emails. I use https://emailindetail.com/arch... [emailindetail.com] for this purpose. This tool is easy-to-use and super fast. And it offers several ways to process attachments. I'm very pleased with it, but I'll bear the suggested ways in mind.

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