9 ms·

Ah, the old "give them a bunch of storage and then ask for more money to keep storing it" meme.

by thebspatrol 9y ago

selckin 9y ago
Not entirely fair, there are whole communities around storing 100s of TB on amazon
- vitalysh 9y ago
  I'm not even mad. /r/datahoarders brought this on themselves. Who in their right mind expects to upload 100s of TBs of data, encrypted and pay 59.99?
  - ghughes 9y ago
    People who understand the literal meaning of the word "unlimited"?
    - vitalysh 9y ago
      Yes, Amazon is to blame here as well. They shouldn't have offered unlimited service. At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy.
      - cf 9y ago
        I don't get why if they don't mean unlimited just say up to 20TB/mo.
        chc 9y ago
        Possibly because there actually wasn't any limit. Maybe if a handful people were exceeding $LOTS TB, they don't care, but if 60% of users exceed $LOTS TB, the service becomes unsustainable. In this case, the service really is unlimited (there genuinely is no limit that you're not allowed to go over), and if you wanted that effect, advertising a limit would be net negative — a high limit would encourage the "too many users use a lot" case and lead to the same result we get now where the plan has to be canceled for unsustainability, and a low limit would defeat the purpose.
      - unixhero 9y ago
        Because it isn't linux iso's.
        nimchimpsky 9y ago
        were they being serious, I can't tell.
    - oridecon 9y ago
      I hope this (and the many more examples) put a stop to this "unlimited" bs. You can't say people were abusing a service that throws that keyword for marketing reasons.
    - tgjsrkghruksd 9y ago
      @vitalysh > At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy. Because if you are a self-proclaimed data hoarder, do you have the time to sort through and selectively classify your hoard to "encrypt this ISO don't encrypt that tarball" on a file-by-file basis across many terabytes? How much would be saved by deduping anyway? If they're not deliberately making it easy/redundant, even if you got 300TB down to 100TB or such, a single order-of-magnitude reduction doesn't fundamentally change the economics of "unlimited." Blame data hoarders, but don't blame encryption.
      - vitalysh 9y ago
        I store a bit of data at home (only ~20TB). Really easy to sort. There are plenty of apps that do it for you. This extension with those keywords in filename goes to this directory. Others to another dirs. I only have my pictures and personal data in AWS cloud, encrypted. They way I set it up? Point rclone to relevant directories and skip the rest.
        theshrike79 9y ago
        Except Amazon revoked rcloud's key a while back. Any recommendations on the "plenty of apps" that sort your data for easy searching?
        awirth 9y ago
        As someone completely unfamiliar with this space, this prompted me to do some reading into this rclone issue. I'll record it here for anyone else similarly curious. It seems that as of a few months ago, two popular (unofficial) command line clients for ACD (Amazon Cloud drive) were acd-cli[1] and rclone[2], both of which are open source. Importantly the ACD API is OAuth based, and these two programs took different approaches to managing their OAuth app credentials. acd-cli's author provided an app on GCE that managed the app credentials and performed the auth. rclone on the other hand embedded the credentials into their source, and did the oauth dance through a local server. On April 15th someone reported an issue on acd-cli titled "Not my file"[3] in a user alleged that they had received someone else's file from using the tool. The author refered them to amazon support. The issue was updated again on May 13th with another user that had the same problem - this time with better documentation. The user reached out to security@amazon.com to report the issue. Amazon's security team determined that their system was not at fault, but pointed out a race condition in the source for the acd-cli auth server (sharing the auth state in a global variable between requests...) and disabled the acd-cli app access to protect customers.[4] In response to this banning, one user suggested that a workaround to get acd-cli working again would be to use the developer option for local oauth dance, and use rclone's credentials (from the public rclone source).[5] This got rclone's credentials banned as well,[6] presumably when the amazon team noticed that they were publicly available. To top this all off, the ACD team also closed down API registration for new apps around this time (which seems to have already been a strenuous process). I suppose the moral of the story is that OAuth is hard. [1]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli [2]: https://github.com/ncw/rclone https://github.com/ncw/rclone [3]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 [4]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-301816928 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [5]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-301697542 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [6]: https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazon-drive/2314 https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazo...
    - brandon272 9y ago
      That is very selective of them. While their marketing materials said "unlimited", people chose to ignore the ToS which stated that they wouldn't tolerate abuse and that abuse was basically whatever they determined it to be.
  - dawnerd 9y ago
    Looks like it's really the plex people to blame. They were hosting tons of TBs of pirated movies/tv shows.
    - thanksgiving 9y ago
      And why is that a problem? Copyright is theft.
      - derefr 9y ago
        Corporations see "complicity in an illegal act" as a negative utility far larger than the ultimate lifetime value of any single customer. So, when you do something illegal (even if for dumb reasons) and use a corporate service to do so, you've got to expect that said corporation will immediately try to distance themselves from complicity in that act by terminating your account with them. This is one of those "inherent in the structure of the free market" things.
        thanksgiving 9y ago
        Why? Isn't this like a private storage? Unless people are sharing the files, why should Amazon care what's in the files?
        richmarr 9y ago
        So, first of all I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The whole point of an unlimited tier is to attract large numbers of outsiders who don't want the cognitive burden of figuring out $/GB/month and estimating how many GB photos they'll need to store. What we're talking about here is that they got some customers like that, but they also got a small number of customers taking them for a ride, call them 'power users' the kind of customers who (as we see elsewhere in these comments) won't stick around if the price changes. There's nothing wrong with these power users storing huge amounts of data at subsidised price, just like there's nothing wrong with Amazon changing the pricing. They just decided to stop subsidising that behaviour and probably take a slight hit on a conversion rate somewhere. As for your question about 'private' storage, it's a grey area. Privacy isn't absolute, especially in cases where a company is by inaction helping you breaking the law (whether you agree with the law or not). Companies work very hard to distance themselves from responsibility for their customers actions and don't want to jeopardise that by letting it get out of hand
  - Kocrachon 9y ago
    One guy in particular admitted to having 1PB stored. People like him fucked the rest of us over.
    - PKop 9y ago
      Yes.. but them not having an upper limit doomed "the rest of you" from the beginning. Is anyone surprised some would do that? Is Amazon? Should they be? Of course not..
    - awirth 9y ago
      Source on the 1PB guy for the curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...
      - chrisan 9y ago
        Ouch, reading those comments, even by the OP... the writing was on the wall then even
      - FireBeyond 9y ago
        Who is now at 1.5PB, while someone else replies to him who has a 1.4PB flair, and another has a 1.1PB flair...
- pedroaraujo 9y ago
  It is fair from the moment you offer an unlimited plan and even more fair when you make a service of it and charge for it. Customers are customers, not product managers. It is only natural to make use of a service you pay for.
  - selckin 9y ago
    Indeed, and it's in their right to stop offering that when the period you payed for ends. Its understandable from their point of view to offer unlimited and be awesome but not expect this kind of usage that is not sustainable. So they made a mistake and are correcting it. It's hard to see it as a deliberate strategy to pull in users and then charge them more when they are "locked in"
    - _pmf_ 9y ago
      > So they made a mistake and are correcting it. Do they also refund people for their time wasted assuming this was a sustainable service, or does this "correction" only work in one direction?
guiambros 9y ago
Indeed. My annual cost will jump from $60 to $180. That's too much for simple offline backup , so it's time to start looking for options again :( Glacier may a more affordable option, but my experience a few years ago has been terrible. Any suggestions? Google Drive is also pricey ($240); Crashplan is incompatible with NAS, and tarsnap is out of question (>$6,000/year).
- algesten 9y ago
  I'm using Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync) which makes like a private cloud dropbox between my machines/phone. No versioning, but pretty solid.
- styx31 9y ago
  Currently trying Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html. Overall fits my needs.
  - Sukotto 9y ago
    I used Backblaze for several years before closing out my account in 2012. Initial backup took a long time. There was no easy way to prioritize, for example, my photos over system files. I ended up manually prioritizing by disallowing pretty much my entire filesystem, and gradually allowing folders to sync. First, photos, then documents, then music, etc. Eventually it all got synced up and it was trouble-free... until I tried to get my data back out. The short version of the story is that a power surge fried my local system. I bought a new one and had some stress when it appeared the BB client was going to sync my empty filesystem (processing it as a mass delete of my files). I managed to disable the sync in time. Then I discovered there was no way to set the local BB client to pull my files back down. Instead, I had use their web-based file manager to browse all my folders and mark what I wanted to download. BB would then zip-archive that stuff which would then only be available as an http download. There was no Rsync, no torrent, no recovery if the download failed halfway, and no way to keep track of what I had recently downloaded. Also, iirc, they were limited to a couple of GB in size per file. (which didn't matter because at that time, the download would always fail it the file was larger than __MB (I don't remember the exact number. 100MB? 300? Also hazy on the official zipfile size limit) So I had to carefully chunk up my filesystem for download because the only other option BB offered was to buy a pre-filled harddrive from them (that they would ship to me). I felt like Backblaze was going out of their way to make it hard for me in order to sell me that harddrive of my data. I felt angry about that and stubbornly downloaded my data one miserable zipfile at a time until I had everything. Once I was reasonably sure I had everything I cared about, I closed my account and haven't looked back. [Edit to add] This was at least 5 years ago. No doubt their service has improved since then.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
I call it the Dropbox Mantra.
AtlasLion 9y ago
I was just reading on reddit how some users were uploading petabytes of data to it. I am an ACD user, but I can't blame them for stopping that.
- brandon272 9y ago
  I was always amused when I warned people on /r/datahoarder against abusing the service because Amazon would inevitably put an end to it. I was always told that I had no idea what I was talking about and was given many rationalizations about why Amazon wouldn't care about users storing dozens or hundreds of TB of files on the service.

Ah, the old "give them a bunch of storage and then ask for more money to keep storing it" meme.

selckin 9y ago

Not entirely fair, there are whole communities around storing 100s of TB on amazon

vitalysh 9y ago
I'm not even mad. /r/datahoarders brought this on themselves. Who in their right mind expects to upload 100s of TBs of data, encrypted and pay 59.99?
- ghughes 9y ago
  People who understand the literal meaning of the word "unlimited"?
  - vitalysh 9y ago
    Yes, Amazon is to blame here as well. They shouldn't have offered unlimited service. At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy.
    - cf 9y ago
      I don't get why if they don't mean unlimited just say up to 20TB/mo.
      - chc 9y ago
        Possibly because there actually wasn't any limit. Maybe if a handful people were exceeding $LOTS TB, they don't care, but if 60% of users exceed $LOTS TB, the service becomes unsustainable. In this case, the service really is unlimited (there genuinely is no limit that you're not allowed to go over), and if you wanted that effect, advertising a limit would be net negative — a high limit would encourage the "too many users use a lot" case and lead to the same result we get now where the plan has to be canceled for unsustainability, and a low limit would defeat the purpose.
    - unixhero 9y ago
      Because it isn't linux iso's.
      - nimchimpsky 9y ago
        were they being serious, I can't tell.
  - oridecon 9y ago
    I hope this (and the many more examples) put a stop to this "unlimited" bs. You can't say people were abusing a service that throws that keyword for marketing reasons.
  - tgjsrkghruksd 9y ago
    @vitalysh > At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy. Because if you are a self-proclaimed data hoarder, do you have the time to sort through and selectively classify your hoard to "encrypt this ISO don't encrypt that tarball" on a file-by-file basis across many terabytes? How much would be saved by deduping anyway? If they're not deliberately making it easy/redundant, even if you got 300TB down to 100TB or such, a single order-of-magnitude reduction doesn't fundamentally change the economics of "unlimited." Blame data hoarders, but don't blame encryption.
    - vitalysh 9y ago
      I store a bit of data at home (only ~20TB). Really easy to sort. There are plenty of apps that do it for you. This extension with those keywords in filename goes to this directory. Others to another dirs. I only have my pictures and personal data in AWS cloud, encrypted. They way I set it up? Point rclone to relevant directories and skip the rest.
      - theshrike79 9y ago
        Except Amazon revoked rcloud's key a while back. Any recommendations on the "plenty of apps" that sort your data for easy searching?
        awirth 9y ago
        As someone completely unfamiliar with this space, this prompted me to do some reading into this rclone issue. I'll record it here for anyone else similarly curious. It seems that as of a few months ago, two popular (unofficial) command line clients for ACD (Amazon Cloud drive) were acd-cli[1] and rclone[2], both of which are open source. Importantly the ACD API is OAuth based, and these two programs took different approaches to managing their OAuth app credentials. acd-cli's author provided an app on GCE that managed the app credentials and performed the auth. rclone on the other hand embedded the credentials into their source, and did the oauth dance through a local server. On April 15th someone reported an issue on acd-cli titled "Not my file"[3] in a user alleged that they had received someone else's file from using the tool. The author refered them to amazon support. The issue was updated again on May 13th with another user that had the same problem - this time with better documentation. The user reached out to security@amazon.com to report the issue. Amazon's security team determined that their system was not at fault, but pointed out a race condition in the source for the acd-cli auth server (sharing the auth state in a global variable between requests...) and disabled the acd-cli app access to protect customers.[4] In response to this banning, one user suggested that a workaround to get acd-cli working again would be to use the developer option for local oauth dance, and use rclone's credentials (from the public rclone source).[5] This got rclone's credentials banned as well,[6] presumably when the amazon team noticed that they were publicly available. To top this all off, the ACD team also closed down API registration for new apps around this time (which seems to have already been a strenuous process). I suppose the moral of the story is that OAuth is hard. [1]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli [2]: https://github.com/ncw/rclone https://github.com/ncw/rclone [3]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 [4]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-301816928 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [5]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-301697542 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [6]: https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazon-drive/2314 https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazo...
  - brandon272 9y ago
    That is very selective of them. While their marketing materials said "unlimited", people chose to ignore the ToS which stated that they wouldn't tolerate abuse and that abuse was basically whatever they determined it to be.
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Looks like it's really the plex people to blame. They were hosting tons of TBs of pirated movies/tv shows.
  - thanksgiving 9y ago
    And why is that a problem? Copyright is theft.
    - derefr 9y ago
      Corporations see "complicity in an illegal act" as a negative utility far larger than the ultimate lifetime value of any single customer. So, when you do something illegal (even if for dumb reasons) and use a corporate service to do so, you've got to expect that said corporation will immediately try to distance themselves from complicity in that act by terminating your account with them. This is one of those "inherent in the structure of the free market" things.
      - thanksgiving 9y ago
        Why? Isn't this like a private storage? Unless people are sharing the files, why should Amazon care what's in the files?
        richmarr 9y ago
        So, first of all I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The whole point of an unlimited tier is to attract large numbers of outsiders who don't want the cognitive burden of figuring out $/GB/month and estimating how many GB photos they'll need to store. What we're talking about here is that they got some customers like that, but they also got a small number of customers taking them for a ride, call them 'power users' the kind of customers who (as we see elsewhere in these comments) won't stick around if the price changes. There's nothing wrong with these power users storing huge amounts of data at subsidised price, just like there's nothing wrong with Amazon changing the pricing. They just decided to stop subsidising that behaviour and probably take a slight hit on a conversion rate somewhere. As for your question about 'private' storage, it's a grey area. Privacy isn't absolute, especially in cases where a company is by inaction helping you breaking the law (whether you agree with the law or not). Companies work very hard to distance themselves from responsibility for their customers actions and don't want to jeopardise that by letting it get out of hand
- Kocrachon 9y ago
  One guy in particular admitted to having 1PB stored. People like him fucked the rest of us over.
  - PKop 9y ago
    Yes.. but them not having an upper limit doomed "the rest of you" from the beginning. Is anyone surprised some would do that? Is Amazon? Should they be? Of course not..
  - awirth 9y ago
    Source on the 1PB guy for the curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...
    - chrisan 9y ago
      Ouch, reading those comments, even by the OP... the writing was on the wall then even
    - FireBeyond 9y ago
      Who is now at 1.5PB, while someone else replies to him who has a 1.4PB flair, and another has a 1.1PB flair...
pedroaraujo 9y ago
It is fair from the moment you offer an unlimited plan and even more fair when you make a service of it and charge for it. Customers are customers, not product managers. It is only natural to make use of a service you pay for.
- selckin 9y ago
  Indeed, and it's in their right to stop offering that when the period you payed for ends. Its understandable from their point of view to offer unlimited and be awesome but not expect this kind of usage that is not sustainable. So they made a mistake and are correcting it. It's hard to see it as a deliberate strategy to pull in users and then charge them more when they are "locked in"
  - _pmf_ 9y ago
    > So they made a mistake and are correcting it. Do they also refund people for their time wasted assuming this was a sustainable service, or does this "correction" only work in one direction?

guiambros 9y ago

Indeed. My annual cost will jump from $60 to $180. That's too much for simple offline backup , so it's time to start looking for options again :( Glacier may a more affordable option, but my experience a few years ago has been terrible. Any suggestions? Google Drive is also pricey ($240); Crashplan is incompatible with NAS, and tarsnap is out of question (>$6,000/year).

algesten 9y ago
I'm using Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync) which makes like a private cloud dropbox between my machines/phone. No versioning, but pretty solid.
styx31 9y ago
Currently trying Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html. Overall fits my needs.
- Sukotto 9y ago
  I used Backblaze for several years before closing out my account in 2012. Initial backup took a long time. There was no easy way to prioritize, for example, my photos over system files. I ended up manually prioritizing by disallowing pretty much my entire filesystem, and gradually allowing folders to sync. First, photos, then documents, then music, etc. Eventually it all got synced up and it was trouble-free... until I tried to get my data back out. The short version of the story is that a power surge fried my local system. I bought a new one and had some stress when it appeared the BB client was going to sync my empty filesystem (processing it as a mass delete of my files). I managed to disable the sync in time. Then I discovered there was no way to set the local BB client to pull my files back down. Instead, I had use their web-based file manager to browse all my folders and mark what I wanted to download. BB would then zip-archive that stuff which would then only be available as an http download. There was no Rsync, no torrent, no recovery if the download failed halfway, and no way to keep track of what I had recently downloaded. Also, iirc, they were limited to a couple of GB in size per file. (which didn't matter because at that time, the download would always fail it the file was larger than __MB (I don't remember the exact number. 100MB? 300? Also hazy on the official zipfile size limit) So I had to carefully chunk up my filesystem for download because the only other option BB offered was to buy a pre-filled harddrive from them (that they would ship to me). I felt like Backblaze was going out of their way to make it hard for me in order to sell me that harddrive of my data. I felt angry about that and stubbornly downloaded my data one miserable zipfile at a time until I had everything. Once I was reasonably sure I had everything I cared about, I closed my account and haven't looked back. [Edit to add] This was at least 5 years ago. No doubt their service has improved since then.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

I call it the Dropbox Mantra.

AtlasLion 9y ago

I was just reading on reddit how some users were uploading petabytes of data to it. I am an ACD user, but I can't blame them for stopping that.

brandon272 9y ago
I was always amused when I warned people on /r/datahoarder against abusing the service because Amazon would inevitably put an end to it. I was always told that I had no idea what I was talking about and was given many rationalizations about why Amazon wouldn't care about users storing dozens or hundreds of TB of files on the service.