> I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos.
If you keep taking pictures of the same things over and over, you get a really high compression ratio.
Not to mention that you have the option to throw out the old data.
> A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon
Google has always charged for storage in Google Photos - it's part of your "Google Drive" storage quota. They do give you 10GB free though, which can be substantial for a lot of folks.
>Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it
Maybe, though I'm not sure it's without breaking a sweat. Also, someone is most definitely footing some rather large bills.
According to this blog post[0] the amount of data uploaded each day is over 4 petabytes. For Drive, Photos and Docs only, i.e. it doesn't even include YouTube.
> Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where next?
Uhm... how about the 200 GB plan? Or the 400 GB plan. Or 1 TB for $49.99/month? Or you could contact sales about Google Cloud Storage: https://cloud.google.com/pricing/cloud-storage Or you could just buy S3 storage.
Actually, there are literally dozens (to maybe even hundreds) of alternatives for hosting static content for less money for more bandwidth.
Hasn't Google+ done this for quite some time now? I think at 2048 x 2048 you can store unlimited photos. Odd that it wasn't one of the comparisons in the article anyway.
“Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”
Horowitz was stunned. “Not need files anymore?”
“Think about it,” said Pichai. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”
Color me stunned too. I just took a vacation to Italy and my camera sure has heck didn't push 40GB of photos up into the cloud on some random wifi connection that didn't exist where I was at that very moment, so that I could then saturate the nonexistent bandwidth pulling them all back down again for viewing and editing (or panorama stitching).
This is actually the #1 use case for me that prevents me from traveling a few pounds lighter with just a tablet. I need lots of storage for photos.
I'm half playing with the idea of just getting a big dropbox account for traveling and just push all my photos up at the end of the day. A 50-60GB GDrive would have been great had Google offered it.
> One of the things not mentioned in the article is the support from Google photos. Storage space is now unlimited, and files are uploaded full res
I hadn't heard about this until now; is this for all Android users, or just Pixel users? If the latter, do you lose the unlimited space once you move off a Pixel?
> Why would this be considered? What if he didn't want to migrate 200+ TB of data and just decided to stay where he's at, continuing to pay Google a lot of money?
Because whatever he was paying Google wasn't enough, so they removed the "unlimited storage for $12/month or officially $60/month" offering.
There was another option - pay for enough Business Plus seats to reach the pooled storage requirement. At 240tb that means he needs 48 seats, and at $18/month that's $864/month. Not bad for cloud storage geo-replicated on at least 2 continents at any time.
> The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers.
Is that true? I'd be shocked if it costs Google more than $2/month to have the average 100GB user's files sitting in storage. Maybe if I was constantly uploading and downloading, but most people push things up there and then they just sit.
With photos, I guess this could end up being around 1GB. Maybe this will push you off the free plan to the $1/mo plan, but I don't see it being that big of a needle-mover for services revenue.
> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"
You just expanded it. It's still basically the same.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.
230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore.
Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.
If you keep taking pictures of the same things over and over, you get a really high compression ratio. Not to mention that you have the option to throw out the old data.
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