Users sound off as new 100TB-to-share Google Workspace for Education storage limits near
- Reference: 1644512921
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/02/10/google_workspace_storage_policy/
- Source link:
[1]Google Workspace for Education , formerly G Suite for Education, is Google's offering for schools and universities. As part of the [2]rebrand last year , the free tier was renamed Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, alongside paid-for Standard and Education Plus editions.
Most institutional IT people have absolutely no idea what the actual data needs of scientists are like...
At the same time, the Chocolate Factory notified users of a new storage policy it was introducing.
"Google has traditionally offered unlimited storage to qualifying schools and universities for free. However, as we've grown to serve more schools and universities each year, storage consumption has also rapidly accelerated," the firm said.
In response, the new storage model provides schools and universities with a baseline of 100TB of pooled cloud storage, but that is shared across all the users at the site. According to Google, this is "more than enough storage for over 100 million docs, 8 million presentations or 400,000 hours of video."
[3]
This policy is set to come into effect in July 2022 for all Google Workspace for Education editions that are being used by existing customers, and also applies to any new customers signing up this year. Google said it expects that more than 99 per cent of institutions would fall within the pooled storage provided by the new policy.
[4]
[5]
However, Google does not offer users the option to just purchase extra storage, instead requiring customers to move to a paid-for tier if they wish to go beyond the 100TB limit.
"Can I only purchase additional storage? No. You can get additional storage through Education Plus or Teaching and Learning Upgrade," Google's FAQ states. Alternatively, users are encouraged to purchase more storage options via Google Cloud Storage.
[6]
Although these changes were announced well in advance last February, some users are venting their anger at the move, as the deadline draws closer. Bryan Jones, a retinal neuroscientist at the University of Utah, [7]tweeted : "Looks like the unlimited storage that Google promised my university a couple years ago is being discontinued, and the entire institution is being limited to 100TB… I can fill that 5 times over with our data."
Jones went on to state that his establishment had fortunately maintained its own servers "as a proper investment of taxpayer dollars," and if he had instead relied upon Google to keep to its promise, "I would have effectively had a couple of months to figure out how to migrate .5 PB of data to a new solution on top of the grant deadline I need to make."
[8]Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee
[9]Google denies Gmail users an early start to the weekend after problems accessing service
[10]Google Cloud will let you know how your workloads are damaging the environment
[11]Google killed desktop Drive and replaced it with two apps. Now it's killing those, and Drive for desktop is returning
Others noted the changes as well, with Mike Barker of the University of Arizona [12]commenting : "Yes, this happening to all the infinite University Google Drive agreements! They announced it last summer and we (UA) have just reinvested in a major local storage update for our HPC to address the loss of storage. I have been migrating TBs of data off Google for months now. SLOW."
However, some respondents to the original posting were less sympathetic, and blamed schools and universities for not investing in their own IT infrastructure, especially in providing storage space required for the growing size of data sets these days, and assuming that Google would offer unlimited free storage forever.
Wallace Marshall, a professor at University of California San Francisco [13]noted that "the problem is that most institutional IT people have absolutely no idea what the actual data needs of scientists are like."
[14]
The issue also started a debate on [15]Hacker News , with some commenters suggesting Google had followed a bait-and-switch tactic to lure users in with the promise of free storage, and then introduced charges at a later date. Others expressed the view that this is simply a cost controlling measure on behalf of Google, to pre-empt costs from eating up profits as the cloud giant continues to expand.
This is one of those moves that is likely to divide opinion, since people should know not to expect to get something for free forever, although that being the case, should Google have promised free unlimited storage to users without expecting them to take it up?
As some commenters pointed out, 100TB is not much more than a handful of drives these days – Toshiba [16]announced only this week that it plans to ship a 20TB drive this year, and a 30TB model by 2024.
We asked Google for an explanation, and it simply pointed us to its [17]original blog post outlining the change in storage policy. ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://edu.google.com/products/workspace-for-education/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/14/google_workspace_free_google_account/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YgWZGqa6z5nNd0GwjZ9obwAAAAI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YgWZGqa6z5nNd0GwjZ9obwAAAAI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YgWZGqa6z5nNd0GwjZ9obwAAAAI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YgWZGqa6z5nNd0GwjZ9obwAAAAI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://twitter.com/BWJones/status/1490802506628145153
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/20/google_sours_on_g_suite/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/12/gmail_down/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/12/google_next_roundup/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/13/google_drive_desktop_app_resurrection/
[12] https://twitter.com/BarkerLab/status/1491067604139601922?s=20&t=vqPe3NAznce1y4qVXUNt-A
[13] https://twitter.com/WallaceUcsf/status/1490831081796354049
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YgWZGqa6z5nNd0GwjZ9obwAAAAI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30264617
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/09/30tb_toshiba_disk_drive/
[17] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/google-workspace-for-education/
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
In the case of Google, don't rely on it even if it is a paid-for service. They can still pull the rug from you at any time.
I have one of those Google phones :o)
and my pictures get pulled to their servers, and I cannot find a way to drag ALL of them off, and load them to my own home storage. I do NOT wish to do them one at a feckin time ffs. Maybe hoping some here will know what buttons to push ?
any or anyones buttons tbh :o)
but back to the issue in hand, and I agree, no one was ever going to offer unlimited for ever ......
and why TF are universities trying to do it as a one off plan ?
do it the proper way, hybrid, put it all on local resources, have local admin, so you can go shout shouty stuff at them when things don't work as you thought it should .......
and then drop the essential* stuff, onto cloud in a backup / recovery option
*essential by definition may vary dependant on which side of the tech business you are form
and my pictures get pulled to their servers, and I cannot find a way to drag ALL of them off, and load them to my own home storage. I do NOT wish to do them one at a feckin time ffs. Maybe hoping some here will know what buttons to push ?
I think Google Takeout does it. You could write a script to wget/curl all the URLs in a json file that it generates for you.
Use rclone.
Nobody should have entered in "free, infinite storage" agreement with Google and not know this would come to an end at some point.
The fact that there are entire universities that rely on that for their data storage and are at a loss as to what to do with their petabytes of data all of a sudden is however absolutely insane. Then on top of it to have this huge blindspot where this deadline announced a year in advance is causing a stir *now*. Think of all the potentially insanely critical research data that is just entrusted to Google, with no idea of what their backup plans / recovery procedures are.
I would suggest that the insanely critical research petabytes better belongs on a local RAID system (possibly with cloudy backup in case of fire). Keeping it in the cloud will slow your access to it.
A lot of research data will never be read again
They keep it around so their work can be reproduced or built upon, but most of it is worthless. The problem is, you can't tell what is worthless so you have to keep it all.
Only the active part you are actually working with needs to be on a RAID, the rest can be on tape with a copy sent to Iron Mountain or similar.
Re: A lot of research data will never be read again
Argh! I want to downvote you for saying data are worthless. But I can't because you speak the truth!
"Think of all the potentially insanely critical research data that is just entrusted to Google, with no idea of what their backup plans / recovery procedures are."
I was thinking of what Google will be going with all that space used that is above the new 100TB limit if the researchers haven't moved it by the deadline. Will they allow read-only access for a time so it can be moved, or just cut them off at the knees?
I don't particularly like Google, but in this case I'm finding it hard to blame them. Hundreds and hundreds of terabytes for free? Nice to have, by all means use it, but have an alternative already researched and ready to roll. Even if (if!) the Google guys who set this up had all the best intentions in mind, people change, policies change. You can't rely on what's effectively corporate charity and trust it to last forever.
I might maybe blame Google for a bait'n'switch, grabbing people with a free-but-unsustainable offer and then suddenly asking for money, except they've given one year advance notice - that's plenty, plenty of time for users to find, trial and acquire other solutions, and it's not like Google has a monopoly on cloud storage.
For Google this was never about corporate charity, this was a well thought plan to get students used to their toolset - hopefully driving more future use case towards them instead of Microsoft 365. Seems it just ended up costing them more than anticipated.
What the difference between drug dealers and google ?
Fuck all, would appear to be the answer/ Neither gives a shit about the law, and both business models rely on getting users hooked.
Hmmm
Interesting. I wonder if Google is feeling some sort of internal pinch. They're also killing the free Google Apps For Domains/Workspaces in July. Plus the Google photos thing. Makes one wonder if everything in Willy Wonka World isn't all rainbow raindrops and chocolate rivers of late.
Re: Hmmm
Maybe they are paying huge chunks of cash to their parent, Alphabet and are seeing their coffers beginning to drain? Google like, for example Starbucks UK, might be paying enormous sums to "licence" the Google name, trademarks and other IP from Alphabet and so make little to no profit, therefore pay no taxes. Alphabet may have just upped the licencing fees so Google needs more cash flow.
MS Is Loving This
Looks like MS sales peeps will be salivating on migrating these scorned users.
From their O365 Education site:
Unlimited personal cloud storage for qualifying plans for subscriptions of five or more users, otherwise 1 TB/user. Microsoft will initially provide 1 TB/user of OneDrive for Business storage which admins can increase to 5 TB/user. Request additional storage by contacting Microsoft support. Storage up to 25 TB/user is provisioned in OneDrive for Business. Beyond 25 TB, storage is provisioned as 25 TB SharePoint team sites to individual users.
src: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/academic/compare-office-365-education-plans?activetab=tab:primaryr2#coreui-contentrichblock-74nfo1y
Tangentially related, MS is twisting the knife on Google's decision to axe the G Suite legacy accounts.
https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/microsoft-365/262606/microsoft-offers-g-suite-legacy-customers-a-deal
I only really use mine for YouTube.
I'm copying my channel subscriptions across to a gmail account, but it is recommending me a load of videos I've already watched now.
"assuming that Google would offer unlimited free storage forever"
If you give people a bigger dustbin, it will still always be full.
If you give them an infinite-sized dustbin, they will never empty it.
Just like a drug dealer...
...the first hit is free. Then you start to pay.
Got a letter from my Alma matter about how Screwgoogle is forcing them to change everything they have had in place for years. Not really "forcing", I guess. Just making them pay for what Google previously gave away under an orgy of philanthropic goodness.
Yeah, exactly like a drug dealer.
We have seen a similar thing happen last year with the unlimited photo storage on Google Photos being withdrawn and replaced with just 20GB.
Don't rely on Google or any other free service as your only option as they can pull the rug out from you at anytime and your then forced to either spend time and money to move to somewhere else or cough up whatever amount of money they are demanding to keep the status quo.
Google will be pulling more of these sort of things in the future as their ad revenue drops so the are looking for other ways to make money from their userbase.