Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ev…
Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google’s storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a “60 day grace period” ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.
He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn’t really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they’re going to delete his account in a week, which isn’t enough time to retrieve his data… because he didn’t do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn’t do anything during the grace period, and hasn’t done anything since the grace period ended.
I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he’s not paying that cost anymore.
They discontinued the unlimited storage plan, so he can’t still be paying for the unlimited storage. I’m not a big fan of Google’s “I’m not seeing a return yet, better kill this product” approach, but it has been their MO for a long time. I think by now everyone doing business with them knows who they are.
It is their customary response when a person quits the service, the plan is no longer offered etc that the data remains in read only mode for an unspecified period of time during which they do not any longer take payments for the service. This happened previously to people who exceeded the limit for Gmail free storage too. 15GB of storage free with a Gmail account but if you exceed that (say had Google One and exceeded that and then canceled your Google One subscription) your files wouldn’t automatically be deleted.
Actually, I just read one of my emails from Google about their change from drive storage to Google one storage. It claims if I exceed my storage limit for up to two years my entire account will be deleted, not just my files. Effective June 1, 2021. I have a consumer account, but I’m assuming there is an equitable set of policies for gsuite/business users.
Yeah it’s definitely shitty if they really only give 7 days notice that your account is going from read-only to suspended and deleted, but after basically not paying your cloud storage bill for like 6 months this is a pretty predictable outcome
They keep charging you the original rate presumably, which now only gives you X TB of storage, not unlimited, and as he did not move to increase the amount of storage his plan has (by paying more), he was essentially underpaying his bill the entire time
I’m not sure what sort of pricing he would have with Enterprise (it’s “call for quote”), but the cheapest published way to get the 250TB or so of cloud storage he needs would be to pay $900/mo for a Business Plus plan with 50 users
Exactly. People love to “cry foul” when Google does stuff like this but it’s completely unrealistic to think you can store 278 TB on Google’s server in perpetuity just because you’re giving them like $20-30/month (probably less, I had signed up for the Google for Business to get the unlimited storage as well, IIRC it was like $5-$10/month). It was known a while ago that people were abusing the hell out of this loophole to make huge cloud media servers.
He’s an idiot for saving “his life’s work” in one place that he doesn’t control. If he really cares about it that much he should have had cold-storage backups of it all. Once you get beyond like 10-20 TB it’s time to look into a home server or one put one in a CoLo. Granted, storing hundreds of TBs isn’t cheap (I had 187 TB in my server across like 20 drives), but it gives you peace of mind to know that you control access to it.
I have all my “important” stuff in Google drive even though I run my own media server with like 100 TBs but that’s because I tend to break stuff unintentionally or don’t want to have to worry about deleting it accidentally. All my important stuff amounts to 33 GB. That’s a drop in the ocean for Google. Most of that is also stored either on my server, the server I built for my parents, or pictures stored on Facebook.
To be fair to the guy, over the summer the FBI literally raided his home, took every single electronic device, and are (still?) refusing to give any of it back, so I’m willing to give him a pass if his home network infrastructure isn’t currently up to snuff
So, he paid for a period. Then the product was discontinued and they stopped charging him. So from then on, no he wasn’t paying. Google didn’t have to change it to read only, they could have just given notice and deleted it then.
Should they have made it clearer that the read only mode was a limited time thing and the data would be deleted at the end of that? Very probably.
Where are you getting that they stopped charging him? The email in the article says his subscription will be stopped, which I interpret to mean he was paying
Correct, I had the same GSuite setup (for the purpose of keeping backups) and they kept billing me even after they set my drive to read only. They only stopped when I decided to cancel the account myself. IIRC the minimum was around $10/mo. Technically you were supposed to have 5 employees in your GSuite “company” at $10/mo per license, but they didn’t really check, so I just had myself as the sole employee.
Google didn’t tell him that they were going to delete the data until a week before. I think that’s the issue. It’s like when you tell someone a family member moved on, you need to use the word “die” or it’s open to interpretation. Google needed to straight up say that they were going to delete the data after 6 months, but they didn’t.
Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google’s storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a “60 day grace period” ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.
He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn’t really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they’re going to delete his account in a week, which isn’t enough time to retrieve his data… because he didn’t do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn’t do anything during the grace period, and hasn’t done anything since the grace period ended.
I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he’s not paying that cost anymore.
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They discontinued the unlimited storage plan, so he can’t still be paying for the unlimited storage. I’m not a big fan of Google’s “I’m not seeing a return yet, better kill this product” approach, but it has been their MO for a long time. I think by now everyone doing business with them knows who they are.
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It is their customary response when a person quits the service, the plan is no longer offered etc that the data remains in read only mode for an unspecified period of time during which they do not any longer take payments for the service. This happened previously to people who exceeded the limit for Gmail free storage too. 15GB of storage free with a Gmail account but if you exceed that (say had Google One and exceeded that and then canceled your Google One subscription) your files wouldn’t automatically be deleted.
Actually, I just read one of my emails from Google about their change from drive storage to Google one storage. It claims if I exceed my storage limit for up to two years my entire account will be deleted, not just my files. Effective June 1, 2021. I have a consumer account, but I’m assuming there is an equitable set of policies for gsuite/business users.
https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9312312?hl=en#:~:text=If you’re over your,Forms%2C and Jamboard files).
Yeah it’s definitely shitty if they really only give 7 days notice that your account is going from read-only to suspended and deleted, but after basically not paying your cloud storage bill for like 6 months this is a pretty predictable outcome
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They keep charging you the original rate presumably, which now only gives you X TB of storage, not unlimited, and as he did not move to increase the amount of storage his plan has (by paying more), he was essentially underpaying his bill the entire time
I’m not sure what sort of pricing he would have with Enterprise (it’s “call for quote”), but the cheapest published way to get the 250TB or so of cloud storage he needs would be to pay $900/mo for a Business Plus plan with 50 users
Exactly. People love to “cry foul” when Google does stuff like this but it’s completely unrealistic to think you can store 278 TB on Google’s server in perpetuity just because you’re giving them like $20-30/month (probably less, I had signed up for the Google for Business to get the unlimited storage as well, IIRC it was like $5-$10/month). It was known a while ago that people were abusing the hell out of this loophole to make huge cloud media servers.
He’s an idiot for saving “his life’s work” in one place that he doesn’t control. If he really cares about it that much he should have had cold-storage backups of it all. Once you get beyond like 10-20 TB it’s time to look into a home server or one put one in a CoLo. Granted, storing hundreds of TBs isn’t cheap (I had 187 TB in my server across like 20 drives), but it gives you peace of mind to know that you control access to it.
I have all my “important” stuff in Google drive even though I run my own media server with like 100 TBs but that’s because I tend to break stuff unintentionally or don’t want to have to worry about deleting it accidentally. All my important stuff amounts to 33 GB. That’s a drop in the ocean for Google. Most of that is also stored either on my server, the server I built for my parents, or pictures stored on Facebook.
To be fair to the guy, over the summer the FBI literally raided his home, took every single electronic device, and are (still?) refusing to give any of it back, so I’m willing to give him a pass if his home network infrastructure isn’t currently up to snuff
He did pay for the service though. They just decided to stop charging him for it.
So, he paid for a period. Then the product was discontinued and they stopped charging him. So from then on, no he wasn’t paying. Google didn’t have to change it to read only, they could have just given notice and deleted it then.
Should they have made it clearer that the read only mode was a limited time thing and the data would be deleted at the end of that? Very probably.
Where are you getting that they stopped charging him? The email in the article says his subscription will be stopped, which I interpret to mean he was paying
Correct, I had the same GSuite setup (for the purpose of keeping backups) and they kept billing me even after they set my drive to read only. They only stopped when I decided to cancel the account myself. IIRC the minimum was around $10/mo. Technically you were supposed to have 5 employees in your GSuite “company” at $10/mo per license, but they didn’t really check, so I just had myself as the sole employee.
Google didn’t tell him that they were going to delete the data until a week before. I think that’s the issue. It’s like when you tell someone a family member moved on, you need to use the word “die” or it’s open to interpretation. Google needed to straight up say that they were going to delete the data after 6 months, but they didn’t.
233TB. Damn, I thought that was GB until I reread it.