Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Google Cloud Data Storage Education

Universities Adapt To Google's New Storage Fees, Or Migrate Away Entirely 91

united_notions writes: Back in February, Slashdot reported that Google would be phasing out free unlimited storage within Google Apps for Education. Google had a related blog post dressing it up in the exciting language of "empowering institutions" and so forth. Well, now universities all over are waking up to the consequences.

Universities in Korea are scrambling to reduce storage use, or migrating to competitors like Naver, while also collectively petitioning Google on the matter. California State University, Chico has a plan to shoe-horn its storage (and restrict its users) to limbo under Google's new limits. UC San Diego is coughing up for fees but apparently under a "favorable" deal, and still with some limits. The University of Cambridge will impose a 20GB per user limit in December 2022. And so on.

If you're at a university, what is your IT crowd telling you? Have they said anything? If not, you may want to ask.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Universities Adapt To Google's New Storage Fees, Or Migrate Away Entirely

Comments Filter:
  • Cloudiness (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @02:22AM (#62935969)

    Cheapskates the world over are slowly discovering that entrusting their storage and processing to a cloud provider invariably leads to vendor lock-in.
    Because free has a cost. In this case, free storage means your data is now hostage and the cloud provider now demands a ransom.

    Hint: don't be a cheapskate and do your own IT. You'll thank me in a few years.

    • Re:Cloudiness (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @02:41AM (#62936003)

      entrusting their storage and processing to a cloud provider invariably leads to vendor lock-in.

      No, it doesn't. If you use the cloud as generic storage and don't rely on any proprietary APIs, then there is no lock-in.

      free storage means your data is now hostage

      No, it doesn't. The data is still accessible for free until December. Anyone who doesn't like the new policy is free to go and take their data with them.

      If I give you something for free and then decline to give you more stuff for free, that doesn't make me a thief.

      • Re:Cloudiness (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @02:56AM (#62936031)

        The lock-in isn't in the API. The lock-in is letting people upload gigabytes upon gigabytes of stuff for free, then telling them "In x months, you gotta pay to access your data" and there's too much data.

        Yeah, you can exfiltrate your data and re-upload it someplace else (or host it yourself) if there isn't too much. But if there's a lot, it's totally impractical, leaving the only easy option to pay up and stick to more of the same.

        • Re:Cloudiness (Score:5, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @09:57AM (#62937081) Homepage Journal

          It's not that either. Other cloud services will let you transfer the data directly from Google Cloud without downloading it yourself, at very high speed. Google gave them plenty of advance notice that this was coming.

          The problem is the Google suite of apps. The provide email, an office suite, cloud storage drive, collaboration tools like a whiteboard, and easy transfer of data between users. While there are alternatives like Microsoft's Office cloud stuff, changing the whole university over to new apps with new licences, retraining everyone, figuring out how to replicate the established workflows... It creates immense inertia.

          I imagine what many of these places will do is to move bulk file storage like old archived projects to other clouds, but keep Google for the apps and some workspace.

          • Re:Cloudiness (Score:4, Insightful)

            by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @11:48AM (#62937487)

            What you say is true, but (at least at our university) there's also a challenge in that some researchers apparently were putting many, many terabytes of data into that "unlimited free storage" (I can't find the email that went out about this, but I was honestly shocked by the amount of data involved). Wherever they want to move that is going to cost them significant money - money they probably don't have.

        • How much storage do you think they have to exfiltrate that they can't get it out in three months?

      • Re:Cloudiness (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ArghBlarg ( 79067 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:03AM (#62936049) Homepage

        No, it makes you a drug dealer. "The first hit is free, try it out, no strings attached, honest!".

        The fact one even has to consider how to 'take their data with them' (export APIs) means there is a lock-in for non-technical users.

        My phone's microSD card doesn't require a vendor-specific API. When it gets near to full, I either decide to pop it out and stick it in a drawer and label it for later use, replacing with a new one, or back it up to a local drive and wipe it to use again (which TBH has its own set of problems for non-tech users...)

        Exporting and *actually using* Google drive data is well beyond the skills of most non-technical users, sadly. Blame Google, or the users; it doesn't matter. Data storage management is not easy but cloud/smartphone providers have intentionally made it even harder.

        • My phone's microSD card doesn't require a vendor-specific API.

          That's probably the worst possible smug example you can provide, especially when talking about "lock-in for non-technical users". Android (the only phone OS we can speak of supporting microSDs at all) has been at war with the external storage for more than five years, shuffling things around and making it harder and harder to use microSDs. Not only full OS upgrades but even various API levels are introducing disastrous changes (so basically your

          • I agree with everything you say itsme1234.... but just because ArghBlarg picked a bad example of "no vendor specific API," What we do have is another example of "google making it hard to move your own files" or "google making things suck that had worked just fine for decades."

        • by Anonymous Coward

          (which TBH has its own set of problems for non-tech users...)

          If even the most basic of data-handling, even including a physical thing to handle, is already too problematic for "non-tech users", then either "we the techies" have hopelessly failed, or the whole doing-the-digital thing is just beyond non-techies.

          And then you note that "cloud" is Just Too Hard for those, even though it's touted as "none of that hard on-premises data handling required!".

          But then, maybe data-handling really is that hard. Back in the day large organisations would have dedicated data-handl

        • by unami ( 1042872 )
          Really, I've never met a drug-dealer that gave out free hits to get customers hooked. Maybe that works with highly addictive substances like crack or heroin, but I doubt it that people who sell that kind of stuff have the foresight or financial leeway to have a marketing strategy. That allegory should probably rather revolve around app subscriptions, streaming services or storage providers.
        • > No, it makes you a drug dealer. "The first hit is free, try it out, no strings attached, honest!".

          Could you direct to where I find those amazing drug dealers?

          > The fact one even has to consider how to 'take their data with them' (export APIs) means there is a lock-in for non-technical users.

          A non technical user just drag and drops the folder from the google drive into a local folder and lets it copy while they do other things.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Unfortunately a lot of these services do use proprietary APIs. WebDAV is rare. Often you find they use the Amazon API because they are just re-selling Amazon cloud.

        Fortunately rclone supports most of those proprietary protocols. I rely on that and Duplicati to prevent me getting tied in to one cloud provider, and to make sure I have local backups of all cloud data.

      • Re:Cloudiness (Score:4, Interesting)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @04:35AM (#62936229)

        No, it doesn't. If you use the cloud as generic storage and don't rely on any proprietary APIs, then there is no lock-in.

        Indeed. There's no lock-in because there's also no-integration. The power of the cloud isn't that your have files somewhere, it is that it is integrated in your groupware.

        I'm a fan of free cloud tool. I run my own on my own server as well. But I don't pretend it would even remotely be suitable for my employer (Azure based) or my wife's school (GSuite based).

        Open API doesn't mean shit if that API remains largely unused.

      • It typically depends on how much other 'cloud' you are using.

        Aside from any API-related quirks, the vendor get to specify what the ingress and egress charges are and what(if anything) interaction with a given blob of storage via one of their other services costs.

        Somewhat unsurprisingly, it's pretty common for ingress to cost less than egress; and access via the same vendor's other services to cost little or nothing(aside from whatever the other service itself costs) while access from on-prem or a 3rd
      • Re:Cloudiness (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @07:01AM (#62936471)

        No, it doesn't. If you use the cloud as generic storage and don't rely on any proprietary APIs, then there is no lock-in.

        Egress charges. Cloud providers love free ingress, but charging for egress, to make it financially difficult to change your mind and pull your datat out.

        No, it doesn't. The data is still accessible for free until December. Anyone who doesn't like the new policy is free to go and take their data with them.

        True in this case, though the fact remains a cloud provider may... alter the deal. Unless you have a contract promising free egress with adequate notice, you are at risk. In this case, the universities may still be in a pinch. Universities tend to be rather bureaucratic beasts and having only a single quarter to get funding and go through a procurement process to preserve their data may not be feasible.

        If I give you something for free and then decline to give you more stuff for free, that doesn't make me a thief.

        They didn't say Google was a thief, they simply stated that there is a risk associated with cloud hosting, *particularly* in a deal without legal guarantees of access within your budget on a reasonable budget. It is perfectly within Google's rights to do this, but doing so bolsters the case for 'own your data'. Even if you opt to not own the compute or use the cloud storage, you should have an on-premise strategy for having copy of your data.

        • by kqs ( 1038910 )

          They didn't say Google was a thief, they simply stated that there is a risk associated with cloud hosting, *particularly* in a deal without legal guarantees of access within your budget on a reasonable budget. It is perfectly within Google's rights to do this, but doing so bolsters the case for 'own your data'. Even if you opt to not own the compute or use the cloud storage, you should have an on-premise strategy for having copy of your data.

          Sure, but there is a risk in anything you do, including "owning your data". Do you have enough redundancy that you can survive two drive failures (because the most common time for a failure is when rebuilding RAID)? Can your data survive a building fire? Do you have off-site backups, are they tested, and how long would they take to recover? Would you detect it if your data were corrupted?

          The cloud is not always the best solution, but reflexive "never use the cloud" is always the worst solution. And I s

          • by Junta ( 36770 )

            While "I didn't use the cloud" is certainly no reason to be assured that you have the things covered, the converse is the strategy a lot go with "I have the cloud, therefore I'm safe". The same things about having and testing your backups applies to cloud usage too. The same person that would get bitten by trusting RAID or skipping off-site can be bitten by using cloud too.

            For reference, in my specific case, an event would have to take out three sites, 25 miles from each other. Routinely rotated in to ens

    • Doing their own IT is not good advice for most organizations. Universities with large endowments may be able to afford the kind of IT staff needed to run the kind of secure public sites with lots of functionality that are wanted these days, but for most organizations, paying for a professional provider (doesn't have to be Google, obviously) is a better option.

      • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:07AM (#62936057)

        That's utter bullshit. The smaller the company, the lighter the IT needs and the easier it is to implement good practices.

        A one-person company with one computer running office tools, keeping current with updates and antivirus, and the guy doing regular off-site backups is good enough (just talking productivity tools here, not web presence)

        A mid-sized, 50-person company can hire an IT guy to manage a small LAN, manage servers, printers, backups, update roll-outs etc...

        A larger, 1000-person company has an IT team, maybe they're rocking Citrix and they need to manage a fleet of terminals, they manage the site's physical installations, they manage the ERP, have a helpdesk...

        A very large company... Obviously they have the means to do everything at scale correctly.

        The point being, NOBODY needs the cloud because everybody can manage their own IT at their own scale if they take the time and effort, and the extra money it costs to hire competent people and never be dependent on the internet going down or the cloud provider pulling a fast one on you or deprecating features you need without asking you first.

        Best proof? Before there was a cloud, that's what people did, and to my knowledge, the IT world isn't much safer today than it was before.

        • Most smaller companies don't have the money to be able to do IT right. Even medium size companies put stuff in and don't implement best practise security measures.

          While in smaller companies it's easier to implement good practices as there's less to break, they very rarely get put in, whether that's apathy, ignorance or both is up for debate. They are however a much smaller target for hacktivists and ransomware attacks.

          Before the cloud people ran on-prem servers, all sat in an office and security was the off

          • You don't need the cloud for remote access.
            You don't need the cloud for email.
            You don't need the could for mobile devices.

            Believe it or not, there used to be a working internet before the cloud.

            • Yes, and then you've got to manage that security risk of being exposed to the internet.

              Cloud is convenience. One of the purposes of using SaaS is that your outsourcing the updating of the software to the vendor.

              From a security perspective, nothing that you've said here seems to have any basis in reality for any company that I've known for the past 25 years.

          • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @07:08AM (#62936491)

            Even medium size companies put stuff in and don't implement best practise security measures.

            But the cloud doesn't help them, they still implement bad practices, just on cloud services.

            Before the cloud people ran on-prem servers, all sat in an office and security was the office firewall. Hard outside, soft on the inside.

            Soft on the inside is a fast path to disaster, but based on my experience with some teams dealing with cloud instances, the difference is now it's just soft everywhere.

            So unless you're advocating for sending everyone back to the office, with no remote access, no cloud email, no mobile devices or anything?

            Those existed prior to cloud.

            The strongest case for cloud is having a largely web-based customer interaction where the redundancy and geographic distribution of the providers resources are hard to match for small/medium businesses.

            • > But the cloud doesn't help them, they still implement bad practices, just on cloud services.

              Yes, but making sure that the web app that they're using, that has a dependency on log4j (Or whatever the next thing is that's got a bug in it is) is appropriately updated is no longer the customer's responsibility. So many organisations don't even get basic patching right.

              > Soft on the inside is a fast path to disaster, but based on my experience with some teams dealing with cloud instances, the difference i

          • Most smaller companies don't have the money to be able to do IT right.

            This is just my opinion, but - I'd say the real problem is most smaller sized companies (and perhaps medium-sized as well) don't have the ability to correctly evaluate and hire the right IT people necessary to "do IT right". But it's also true they don't want to pay the salaries necessary to acquire those people.

        • by Monoman ( 8745 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @05:20AM (#62936311) Homepage

          IMO cheapskates should not roll their own IT. They will always cut corners rather than implement good practices. Just about any reputable "cloud" vendor is going to do a better job than cheapskates.

          FWIW - the IT world was much safer before the internet.

          • FWIW - the IT world was much safer before the internet.

            FWIW, there was a short period between the apparition of the internet and the apparition of the first cloud provider - roughly 20 years.

            For some strange reason, the cloud wasn't needed during that time and things more or less worked. Amazing eh?

            • by Monoman ( 8745 )

              Maybe not 'cloud' but web hosting and then SaaS email got started pretty quickly. Cloud as we know it today is much newer.

              Colo --> Hosting ---> Cloud

              • Cloud as we know it today is much newer.

                It is, although it's worth mentioning that "private cloud" computing is as old as corporations being able to own multiple computers. From early days there have been systems to send jobs to whichever machines were idle at the time. The first one I used is DQS, which has been around since the eighties or earlier. The current version runs on pretty much every Unix, and OpenVMS too.

            • by russty ( 7398610 )

              Does "Hotmail.com" tell you anything? With something resembling the modern internet arriving around 1990 and the first cloud mail provider launching in 1996 it wasn't even close to 20 years.

          • > FWIW - the IT world was much safer before the internet.

            I'd even say that the internet was much safer 20 years ago, ransomware and other viruses have become a lot more prevalent and complex than what they were.

        • Smaller organizations usually don't have the staff or equipment to do a proper redundant IT infrastructure. Things like generators, UPS batteries, redundant servers and storage arrays, and overnight monitoring can get expensive quickly.

        • I agree that relying on the "cloud" is or was a disaster waiting to happen.

          Best proof? Before there was a cloud, that's what people did, and to my knowledge, the IT world isn't much safer today than it was before.

          This isn't a question of being safer. Cloud services, particularly storage, allowed the IT market to expand as fast as it did. The comparison to drug addiction is somewhat apt. Before a person gets addicted, it's easy to quit (return to local, self-managed storage), but now that the addiction has s

    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @04:22AM (#62936185)

      A cloud is like a marriage. Getting in is easy and fairly cheap and you think it will solve your problems, but eventually you notice that getting out again is really difficult, very expensive and chances are good that half your stuff will be missing.

      • So you're saying that a married person should be regularly evaluating and testing their backup plans? I'm game, but I don't think my wife will go for that.

        • Sure, but I have to suffer her updating the environment without asking, it's like being married to Windows 10.

    • Or other peoples storage. In other countries whose currrency fell against the USD, a lot, leased storage makes no sense. However shingled or SMR drives are cheap, unreliable, less durable anyway. Business would have to regrow that learning curve. It goes to show, like drug pushers, who give out free samples to prospective clients, have created the term 'Couch storer's' that are good and addicted. Other suckers don't see bandwidth charges.
    • by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Yeah, I'm not sure if I'd want to trust my classwork data to a storage provider with such a checkered history of suddenly pulling the plug on projects with little warning.

      After looking at the list of dead projects on https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com] I can't imagine paying them for any IT service that I needed to continue to exist six months from now.

  • Cryptocurrency users have been warned for a long time about "not your keys, not your crypto", the same applies to data. Always use real servers, real back up tapes and real offsite storage instead of relying on "clouds". This whole cloud computing fad is going to end up hurting a lot of people. Google just shut down stadia, just wait until they shut down something more people rely on.
    • by Kwirl ( 877607 )
      cloud computing is NOT a fad and will not be going anywhere. do you think those companies that don't have the budget to manage their own racks have any more of a budget to manage their security and compliance needs, as well as updates, maintenance and day-to-day operations. any small to medium business without the ability to maintain the day to day that comes with having your own steel is going to be attracted to the cloud. it isn't perfect. but i'd rather deal with a client that has their infrastructur
    • I heard a guy yesterday talking about how he had trade secrets (worth at least billions) stored on a Google Drive.

      He was very pleased with his brilliant move to ensure he couldn't lose the data. Smart guy, has a treasure trove of research that in a normal economy would have made somebody else a ton of money, but he has zero sense of infosec and full trust in Google and his 1FA password.

      I didn't have the heart to tell him.

  • by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:17AM (#62936067)

    Ta Da!

    • by xlsior ( 524145 )
      The issue isn't so much the storage itself, it's /safely/ making it accessible to you (and selectively to others in your organization/department/school) in a safe, controlled way 'from anywhere'.

      Just slapping a bunch of data on a bargain-basement WD "cloud" drive and hooking it up to your router and calling it good is beyond stupid. Doing it *right* and keeping it secure over time is complex, and a lot more expensive.
      • Yeah, I know.

        Maybe people should get away from the "access from anywhere" concept.

      • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        The thing is every University I have worked at (I have worked at several) has had a data centre. In fact, they have all had at least *two* data centres. My day job is running an HPC facility for a university in the UK.

        Storage is these days ridiculously cheap, and I am not talking about a WD cloud drive. I am talking about PB scale replicated GPFS backed up to tape. If you have nothing today I would say $1 million would get you at least a couple of PB, and you could double that for an extra $500k. A chunk of

        • "It's ridiculously cheap! Only about a million dollars!"

          Do you guys ever listen to yourselves? There's another guy above who thinks a company with 50 employees can surely hire a full-time IT pro that'll run six-figures before you even buy the on-prem stuff for him to manage. The real world doesn't work like that.

    • I would rather they buy some decent NAS and then allocate the capacity.

      I got 3x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in my Synology NAS, with 1 drive redundancy (so about 15TB available). Was about 1000 bucks couple of years ago.

      And I still have another 2 bays available for future expansion. Will add bigger drives to the pool when I have used at least 10TB of storage. At that point the GB per dollar for HDD will probably at 10TB or larger drives I guess.

      How much would it cos for a school to start with 100TB or so an

      • A Synology NAS with a few drives in RAID is definitely not enterprise great. It might be great for personal data, but that has multiple bottlenecks and single points of failure.

        If you want to go to the PB level, you are talking about something that has multiple disk controllers, tiers of disk caching (ZILs, L2ARC caching), tiers of drives and autotiering, from SSDs to the slow, high capacity enterprise drives, on the fly compression and deduplication, backend encryption on everything, then making sure the

        • Synology also sells enterprise level NAS/SAN.

          It's not just for SOHO / homes.

          Some enterprise level gear from Synology :
          https://www.synology.com/en-uk... [synology.com]

          Anyway I was just using Synology as an example - there are many other NAS/SAN providers who are also pretty decently priced.

          And yes I am considering playing around with TrueNAS when time permits. But for now, Synology is one of the easier ways to set up an NAS for homes.

          If I was suggesting home level gear, will not have suggested a one time expense of 100k-20

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Not really. First you need a lot of hard drives, in a NAS with redundancy. Two NASes. Those cloud services come with an SLA.

      You also need VPN servers and a chunky pipe to handle all the off-campus file transfers.

      Finally you need an off-site backup system.

  • by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:46AM (#62936105)
    How much space do they need? 20GB seems like an awful lot outside of specialist subjects where you might be working with large media or model files of some kind.
    • That's less than a single video project for one class. Any university should be able to provision a terabyte per student. I got $150 worth of storage as an undergrad. The machine room backed it up to tape every night too.

      • I said outside of subjects like that. Like a maths, english, or whatever mostly written work student. Also a terabyte for a video project? What are they filming? An epic in 8k?
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          A terabyte for a video project isn't excessive at all. Professional cameras don't record direct to MPEG 4, they use higher quality formats with less or no compression, and raw sensor data so that the video frames can be exposed in post just like raw format photos from a still camera.

          It's important for students to learn those technologies as those are what are used in the industry.

          They will also have a lot more raw footage than ends up in the final product. Multiple takes, video running before, between and a

          • I'm pretty sure they don't do their editing with cloud storage though. Maybe as a backup for long term but that's even less applicable in a student environment.
        • by godrik ( 1287354 )

          I don't think this applies only to students. And I had been told by my IT people to use my google drive to backup particularly important and large files.

          But even for students:

          Email is probably part of that quota.
          Some students take hand written lecture notes and then do high def scans. That's easily 5MB per lecture. And when I was a student, we were exchanging notes with a few students in case we missed something.
          Some students have disability and audio record every lecture. That's probably 10MB an hour, so

    • by godrik ( 1287354 )

      20GB is really not THAT much depending what you use this for. It seems the limit applies not only to student but to staff and faculty as well. And there 20GB is not much.

      If you have a class where you produce 3 video essays of say, 10 minutes. You'll easily blow your 20GB in raw footage and temporary renders.

      It is also likely that that 20GB limit includes your gmail account. And god know how much junk you get in there.

  • Party over (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:55AM (#62936129)

    All the hard drives are full, no more free cloud data. Which really, why would anyone think that they could have free unlimited storage till the heat death of the universe? I feel like we've wasted a lot of energy on "cloud" at this point that we've could have spent on building up private storage. There's absolutely a use-case for cloud storage and I won't detract from that, but I think Universities could have spent all that money they spent on clouds and just put in a good NAS solution on their own terms. But you know what, that's just my two cents.

    • I feel like we've wasted a lot of energy on "cloud" at this point that we've could have spent on building up private storage.

      The overwhelming majority of "cloud" vs private storages enable a world of flexibility that either:
      a) wasn't possible - consumer's home data.
      b) wasn't fundable - small businesses without the internet pipe to enable to the data to move around.
      or
      c) wasn't competently run - e.g. universities and medium business IT departments, outsourced to the lowest bidder who couldn't spell the word redumbdency.

      That and with educational integration directly into educationally provided tools it's a no-brainer to get everythi

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There was a university in Japan that accidentally deleted a large amount of research data a few years ago. From memory it was something like they unplugged and wiped the wrong NAS.

      While in theory they could have had a really well engineered system with backups and skilled operators who don't make those kinds of mistakes, in practice those things cost a lot of money and it's difficult for academic institutions to get the staff. Easier to just pay someone else to do it, with an SLA in place. Often it's cheap

      • by zlives ( 2009072 )

        i am not sure what you are talking about, universities have unpaid/lowly paid workers on tap and if the university doesn't have the capability of understanding how backups work, they should not provide degrees in IT.

    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Exactly.... At the end of the day, I view these decision to put data in the cloud as similar to a decision to rent instead of buying a house. In the short term, it might make good financial sense and make things a little easier for you. But renting for the rest of your life? You're almost guaranteed to have hassles when a lease isn't renewed and you're forced to move everything someplace else. The terms and conditions of the lease can change year to year, too -- and prices are sure to keep going up.

      When

  • Wasabi is getting some nice contracts. They might be the smartest network storage vendor out there.

  • as the title says, University of Cambridge uses Microsoft and is failing EU laws because of it they have a perfectly good inhouse system but migrated because webmail needs to be fancy...

    basically they compromised their in house team and long term vision because someone wanted a quick win and to move on...

    they can not add DANE to microsoft even though the exchange team have been promising it for some time...

  • My IT crowd is telling me to try turning it off and back on again.

  • Someone will have to pay in the end.
  • by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @09:55AM (#62937067)

    By all means take advantage of the "benevolence" of mega-corps after you've thoroughly done the research, kicked the tires, and determined that you're willing to pay whatever it is that they're taking from you in lieu of actual money. But for fuck's sake have a backup plan - no pun intended - to replace the critical product or service on short notice for the inevitable time when they start asking for money in addition to the data, privacy, first-born children, etc. that you've been giving them all along.

    And don't whine, or go to them hat in hand on bended knee, when they alter the deal. You knew what you were doing - don't even try to pretend you didn't - when you took the bait in the first place. You knew on some level that they were taking full advantage of you. If you didn't arrange to take full - and I mean full - advantage of them from the outset, then you're a fool. Stop bitching, stop begging, learn the lesson, and do better next time.

    I'm a "fuck Google" kinda guy; I use their shit to a limited extent knowing what I'm giving up, but if I held the button that ended them I'd keep pressing it until my thumb failed and then switch hands just to make sure the job got done. Even at that, I have no patience with your tears.

  • I'm writing this in bitterness. Just today I was refunded about $25 to my credit card, making clear to me OVH decided long ago to cut off their service to grandfathers like me, without warning. This caught me off-guard and now everything I backed up to their cloud is gone. Thank goodness it was only backups.

    I was grandfathered into a 10tb cloud backup account for €50/annually, and it worked with my QNAP NAS. OVH.com removed my access to my cloud data without ANY warning, period!

    My first clue was around

    • Here's a solution: Buy a 10TB+ drive + the cheapest mini PC w/ Windows preinstalled (doesn't have to be fast - it just has to run some modern flavor of Windows). Dump your backup data from all of your systems + NAS onto the drive and get a personal Backblaze account and install the Windows Backblaze backup client on the Windows box ($70/year for supposedly unlimited cloud storage). Everyone is supposed to have a multi-tiered backup strategy anyway such that the loss of any particular backup isn't a major

    • I learned a similar lesson. What I wound up doing is for my main NAS offerings, I just built my own. Get a NAS case that you can stuff a bunch of bays into, add a recent gen i3 CPU, make sure the motherboard supports ECC RAM, and toss in 4-8 gigs of ECC RAM. From there, have a SSD that has your OS and NAS platform of choice (TrueNAS is good, but nothing wrong with Ubuntu), and for the drives, just use ZFS, perhaps with 1-2 SSDs as a ZIL/SLOG for a performance bump. From there, you can use rclone or Borg

  • We sell easily scalable AWS S3 on prem. https://cloudian.com/

  • Many schools dumped all their stable infra and went to Google cause of the free storage. It's no longer free and hard to go back to the depreacted very large and powerful systems that handled everything before. So it's more than a bit painful for everyone to adapt however we have 1 year to migrate things around and dump google in favor of other solutions.

  • When M365 gives 1,000 GB?

As of next Thursday, UNIX will be flushed in favor of TOPS-10. Please update your programs.

Working...