Dropbox Ends Unlimited Cloud Storage Following Google Change 46
Dropbox, a provider of online data storage, is ending its unlimited option, saying a small handful of customers were using massive amounts of resources that had the potential to degrade the cloud service for the rest of its clients. From a report: The company's highest-tier "all the space you need" storage plan will be capped at about 5 terabytes per user for new customers, the company said in a blog post.
While the plan was designed for businesses, some clients were instead using it for cryptocurrency mining, pooling storage with strangers, or re-selling the cloud service, Dropbox said. These uses "frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers," the company said. [...] The change follows Alphabet's Google removing "as much storage as you need" product branding for its highest-tier Workspace plan in May, according to copies of its website hosted on the Wayback Machine.
While the plan was designed for businesses, some clients were instead using it for cryptocurrency mining, pooling storage with strangers, or re-selling the cloud service, Dropbox said. These uses "frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers," the company said. [...] The change follows Alphabet's Google removing "as much storage as you need" product branding for its highest-tier Workspace plan in May, according to copies of its website hosted on the Wayback Machine.
Backblaze announced a price increase yesterday. (Score:3, Insightful)
When they all move in lockstep your options are clear - don't trust the fucking cloud. You don't own shit and they can increase your rent or kick you out on a whim.
Re:Backblaze announced a price increase yesterday. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone stupid enough to believe that anything with associated costs could be provided in unlimited quantities would be the ones needing a bit more education. For those that paid for clearly delineated quantities at an acceptable price can continue to leverage the cloud as appropriate to their requirements.
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Ahhhh, the old "we lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume" argument. But I kind of get it, Google's product is you and your data, so the more, the better. It just doesn't strike me as a business plan that I wish to be a part of.
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It's pretty dumb to think Google can in any way monetise the data of someone who just uses it to store hundreds of TB of pirated movies. That sort of use is a pure money sink for them.
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Anyone stupid enough to believe that anything with associated costs could be provided in unlimited quantities would be the ones needing a bit more education.
Yeah, but the problem is that the charged cost runs so far out ahead of the associated actual cost that anything short of unlimited is often infeasible, and when unlimited plans cease to exist there are classes of users for whom none of the offered plans (at any price) are large enough. Basically, anybody who does a lot of 4K video recording is screwed.
The largest Dropbox plan ($24 per month) provides less than half of what I would need if I wanted to migrate my backups to the cloud. Optimistically, assum
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Actually, they might just be saying that they only want to sell certain types of products. As an example, I have been driving manual shift cars for decades and I strongly prefer them, but they are nearly impossible to purchase anymore in the U.S. Unfortunately, the businesses that could build them do not believe that there is a sufficient number of buyers to justify the expenditure to design, manufacture and support that product type -- given how much revenue it would result in. Just perhaps, cloud storage
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>When companies drop the unlimited plans, they're basically saying that if you're big enough to need lots of storage, they don't want your business. And that's fine, but f**k them.
No, they are saying that it's not profitable for them to do so, that's all. I assume that if they charged actual costs to the "whales" it would be cost prohibitive for those people to buy the plan, as your quick calc seems to make clear.
So, what can they do besides just not offer it? Offer it on a sliding scale up to whatever
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When they all move in lockstep your options are clear - don't trust the fucking cloud. You don't own shit and they can increase your rent or kick you out on a whim.
Prices are going up everywhere...at least in the USA. There is an economic concept going on here, but I am wasting my time explaining that on /.
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https://www.statista.com/chart... [statista.com]
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There is an economic concept going on here
Yes, it's called bait and switch. It has nothing to do with the current economic conditions. I mean there will always be some form of "current economic conditions" that an executive can use and complain about and blame it all on. But it's been going on forever, especially in IT because it's so easy. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was Microsoft's method. The classic bait and switch is what Netflix did and now what Google, Dropbox, and others are doing.
With Netflix it was:
1) Share passwords, we encourage it
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There is an economic concept going on here
Yeah, the rich want a 9th fucking house for no good reason.
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Yeah, because the 3rd small price increase in 16 years is something to grab pitchforks and torches over. A $1 increase then 4 years later another $1 increase and 2 years later another $2 increase with more features, options and services available means promises were broken?
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For under $500 one can have 4TB of RAID-10 or Z2 nvme on a thunerbolt/USB-C box hanging off your home device or nas.
I get storing a few documents online to grab from anywhere, but man! TBs for personal use?
If I wanted video on the road I'd just load up the tiny 2TB portable I got for $119. Hotel internet is terrible anyway.
Are these hoarders or am I missing an obvious use case?
Re: Backblaze announced a price increase yesterday (Score:2)
Are these hoarders or am I missing an obvious use case?
Nonprofessional photographers who shoot in RAW format. Exposures add up quickly on DSLR or mirrorless.
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"hanging off your home device or nas"
"am I missing an obvious use case?"
It all depends on how many homes you have.
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Color me surprised... (Score:2)
I am amazed that unlimited storage lasted this long. There have been a lot of companies that offered unlimited storage, but when people start storing a ton of TB, there is no way to make money doing that. It was nice when Google offered unlimited storage for colleges for a while, but I don't think with inflation and the economy sinking that there is any feasible way to do unlimited storage.
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>>I don't think with inflation and the economy sinking that there is any feasible way to do unlimited storage.
It's got nothing to do with the economy/inflation (price of storage continues to drop every year regardless of general inflation). Any "unlimited" promise, whether it's cloud storage or all-you-can-eat buffet, is inherently unfeasible, particularly if people try to game the system.
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Any "unlimited" promise, whether it's cloud storage or all-you-can-eat buffet, is inherently unfeasible, particularly if people try to game the system.
"If" people try to game the system? There will always be people who operate under the principle of "anyone who doesn't game the system is a sucker".
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I'm sure that these companies want a handful of users to game the system. They'll run into problems before anyone else and will help beta test what is likely an unfinished product. Once everything is worked out or if the "handful" of users becomes too significant, the unlimited offer goes away.
Of course, there's sort of a Pyramid scheme element for unlimited use. Higher usage is made up for by continual new subscribers that haven't had time to store much yet. Once they hit market saturation, they are bl
hard card or softcap with overages? (Score:2)
hard card or softcap with overages?
Like Homer Simpson at the buffet (Score:3)
Re:Like Homer Simpson at the buffet (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the BS marketing that's the problem, they want to sell grand words like UNLIMITED to make it sound like they're different, but they don't really mean unlimited, so they shouldn't market it unlimited, for this exact reason. "We want to charge you for our unlimited plan, it's not cheap but MAN, it's UNLIMITED" with a small note saying (But please don't use it, we aren't really going to give you unlimited we just want to charge you on the premise that we are)
PLEX (Score:5, Interesting)
There are zounds of PLEX users who were storing hundreds of TBs of pirated movies and TV shows on Google Drive, then started to move their data to the next thing, Dropbox.
Expect HDD prices to rise soon.
HDD price rises (Score:2)
Probably not. The business is on thin ice already; rotational drives will price themselves out of existence that way.
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Even with SSDs being what they are, HDDs have a price advantage for capacity. CMR is relatively inexpensive for lower tiers, and SMR is something that can be used by Hadoop, MinIO, or other programs which calculate RAID not just on the drive level, but on the host level as well.
Drives are also gaining in capacity still. Seagate should be getting out the 30TB HAMR drives sometime this year. Even with sacrificing two drives (you don't want to go lower than RAID 6, or RAID-Z2), you still can store quite a g
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Even with SSDs being what they are, HDDs have a price advantage for capacity.
Not to mention reliability, with the whole SanDisk Extreme Pro debacle.
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Agreed. However, this is why you use a multi tier system. For example, a Synology NAS would have HDDs, but have two SSDs for caching. Or, your ZFS based file server has a mirrored ZIL/SLOG on SSD, and the L2ARC cache would also be on SSD. This gives you the ability to have SSD performance as a landing zone for data, while most stuff is on HDD. Of course, this isn't ideal for things like VM farms, but for a lot of data like video archiving/storage, this can be good enough.
Tape also has its place. Ideal
Offline (Score:2)
I just have a server running software raid on Linux. It comes on, rsyncs the contents of the primary array, and then turns off. Offline.
I have to manage LTO drives in real life in libraries, they frankly suck in terms of capacity and data transfer rate. If it weren't for demand for *transportable* storage, they wouldn't exist.
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It depends on the LTO revision. LTO-9 isn't bad, but don't expect much backwards compatibility because Quantum broke away from the old "read/write one generation back, read only two generations back". However, I can see older tape revisions not having enough meaningful capacity to be relevant. Even with LTO-9, a lot of workloads mean there will be a ton of tapes used.
Overall, other than a SPoF with a single controller, it is hard to beat a Linux machine with ZFS for a decent NAS. Toss MinIO on it, and y
Recourse? (Score:1)
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I believe the going rate for unlimited was $24 per user with a 3-user minimum. They are spending some real money but getting way more back for it. At the $864 cost of 1 year, you could buy a Synology and set up two 12TB drives in RAID1. If you just use a spare PC, you could get to 36TB with RAID5. With the new capped plans, they'd still be getting 15TB so they are probably storing far more than that. I'd bet these users are probably in the range of 100TB or more.
Requisite Flip Wilson (Score:2)
From The era of "Flip Wilson"
A kid sets up a lemonade stand with a sign that says, “All you can drink for a dime.”
Before too long, a man happens by, sees the sign, and thinks it’s a good deal. He gives the kid a dime and the kid hands him a cup.
The man tosses it back and says, “Hey, that was pretty good. I’ll have another.”
The kid says, “That’ll be another dime.”
“Now wait a minute,” says the man, “your sign says ‘all I can drink for a dime.’”
“But you just had a cup, didn’t you?” asked the kid.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s all you can drink for a dime.”
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The devil made me do it!
Another one forced to more truthful marketing.... (Score:2)
Really, there should be nobody out there selling any of their resources or services as "unlimited".
If nothing else, DropBox identified the core problem as part of their rationale for changing things; too easy for one person to sign up and then sub-contract the service out to others. So they wind up hosting files for 20 people while only one person pays for it.
Uhm, These are "businesses" (Score:2)
Crypto-mining (presumably a Storage-based crypto?) and Re-selling a service Are definitely genuine businesses. What do you think a business even is?
While the plan was designed for businesses, some clients were instead using it for cryptocurrency mining, pooling.., or re-selling..These uses "frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers
It seems like someone just forgot that for SOME businesses can be in the business of using as much storage as possible, And you ce
dropbox - i remember those guys (Score:2)
they used to do file storage and sync, but could never get the business model worked out.
Tale as old as time. (Score:2)
These uses "frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers," the company said.
Bullshit. If you sell an "unlimited" product then a percentage of the users are going to take you at your word and use it as such. If you as the vendor didn't anticipate this, then that's on you.
Also what does that mean "genuine business customers"? Are "fake business customers" a thing?? Just because you didn't pred