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.

Google is an untrustworthy business partner. Why should anyone invest in their projects.

Just some advice to anyone who finds themselves in this specific situation, since I found myself in almost the exact same situation:

If you really, really want to keep the data, and you can afford to spend the money (big if), move it to AWS. I had to move almost 4.5PB of data around Christmas of last year out of Google Drive. I spun up 60 EC2 instances, set up rclone on each one, and created a Google account for each instance. Google caps downloads per account to 10TB per day, but the EC2 instances I used were rate limited to 60MBps, so I didn't bump the cap. I gave each EC2 instance a segment of the data, separating on file size. After transferring to AWS, verifying the data synced properly, and building a database to find files, I dropped it all to Glacier Deep Archive. I averaged just over 3.62GB/s for 14 days straight to move everything. Using a similar method, this poor guy's data could be moved in a few hours, but it costs, a couple thousand dollars at least.

Bad practice is bad practice, but you can get away with it for a while, just not forever. If you're in this situation, because you made it, or because you're cleaning up someone else's mess, you're going to have to spend money to fix it. If you're not in this situation, be kind, but thank god you don't have to deal with it.

tl;dr: Google fucked him proper. But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his "life's work", risk free.

I store my shit on Google Drive. But it's only 2TB of offsite backups, not my primary.

Time and again I've learned the past 25-years, no one gives a shit about their data until they lose it all. People gotta get kicked in the fork so hard they go deaf before they'll pay attention.

Wait, journalist, 233 terabyte? Just what in the fuck did his life's work consist of?

Lot of didn't-read-the-article-itis in here. FBI seized his physical storage, cloud was the only option for the journalist and it did not make financial sense to pay for multiple cloud backups. Google is entirely the bad guy here.

a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over. At the time, I dubbed it Google’s “big, faceless, white monolith” problem, because that’s how it appears to many customers.

Hey, sounds like pretty much every corporation in 2023!

I hate so fucking much how little customer service companies are allowed to have.

Guess he could make reporting on tech giants pulling this shit his new lifework.

Jesus. Even downloading at 1 Gbps, it would take a few weeks to download all that data. I don't think Google's Transfer Appliance works for retrieving data.

from "don't be evil" to stunts like this in basically no time flat. #capitalism!

Goddamn hope this story gets somebody at google's attention. Off topic, even though it was mentioned in the article, what ended up happening to the dad's account, was it reinstated? I can't find an update

I'm speechless

Googs IS the LastPass of everything!

Storing that much data on Wasabi would cost about $1,700/mo.

If it’s that important, rent a VPS, connect Rclone to Google Drive and Wasabi, and transfer.

Even 5 Gb/s would get it done in under 5 days and VPSes are usually faster than that.

I hope someone has already made this suggestion to him.

Edit: Forgot about the daily download limit.. ugh. What a pain in the ass.