Google Drive "abusing"

Reading the forums I see many users using Google Drive to its limits and far beyond.
I sincerely hope we will not come to regret this in the future.

I respect people's choice to use it however they see fit, I am just so worried that its main attractiveness (unlimited space) will disappear due to abuse. As far as I understand from reading here, there's people that use it as a landing zone for torrents, directly (with god knows how many access per second). People that use hundreds of TBs with a single account, people sharing outside their organization to an unspecified number of users (I'm not clear if they even get money for that and I frankly don't wanna know).

This is possible today, as in "you can do it". I am just wondering whether sooner or later it will come back to bite our asses.

Opinions?

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hi,
the rclone forum is very careful not to discuss ways to try to work around google limits with tricks and cheats.

google itself

  • creates the limits
  • enforces the limits

therefore,

  • it is not possible to go far beyond.
  • no need to accuse rclone forum users of abuse
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Abuse was in quotes... I could not find a better word. I explicitly stated that I respect people's choices.

Having said that, have we never seen cloud services reneging on their "unlimited" plans, due to too heavy usage? They created the limits and they enforced them. Nonetheless, unlimited plans got canceled.

Unlimited is already over on Drive with the switch to Workspace and it's terms, it's just a matter of time when they start enforcing it.

If you haven't seen the news recently, they have also removed the unlimited storage for Photos and have also started counting Docs, Sheets etc. towards the storage available. It's impossible to think that they remove the unlimited storage for these and allow you to still have it on Drive for a measly 20$ or 25$ per month.

Oh... no, I am not aware of this. Care to expand on it? Thanks in advance.
(I was aware of the Photos thing, yes, but that's for end users, not business accounts that need 5 users to have unlimited space).

GSuite is evolving to Workspace, so prices and TBs too

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G Suite Business

"G Suite Business" is an edition of Google Workspace comprised of all the Google Workspace Services, except Google Voice. Customers that have 5 or more End Users will receive unlimited Google Drive storage. Customers that have received a Google for Nonprofits discount or have 4 or fewer End Users will receive 1TB of storage in total for Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail combined for each End User.

Nothing changed?

Well, the post subject was kinda different. Regardless of things being as they are, I wonder whether I'm the only one worried about Google getting tired of excessive usage (whatever they will deem as such).

I am worried, for sure. Have been for as long as I've had my drive (close to four years now). Do I take advantage of the (still) unlimited storage? Yes, of course. Have I ever abused it with team drives and service accounts? Nope. Not once.

I for one have always been willing to pay way beyond what G has charged. I haven't made any changes/upgrades to my account, as I'm still waiting to see how this will turn out. If they offered a guaranteed unlimited option for up to $100 a month, I'd jump on that.

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Yeah, same for me. We stopped sharing outside the organization, we have 14 paying users. All to try and be mindful about not to "wake the sleeping bear". This Workplace switch is worrying. Although maybe it "simply" means paying $20 per month instead of $12 to keep unlimited space. It's ironic because in our case it will most likely mean Google will end up making less money than before (I suppose many people will abandon our organization with the new price).

Same here. the use of team drives and service accounts to get around the 750GB limit and so forth always felt shady to be and I avoided it. I had my gsuite with one account on it and if it Hit the 750GB or an API limit I hit it.

To me I thought that suite may be viable long term because google was pretty agressive with their limits and stuff (which is my caching was needed to avoid API bans) and had their 24 hour bans and stuff in place and most of the limits were pretty reasonable.

I'm actually not so convinced they are sacking off Unlimited in the way people are suggesting. I do believe they will be enforcing the 5 user rule (which was always supposed to stand) and they are increasing the costs per user, but from a number of chats I've now had with their support staff they have assured me that unlimited will remain for enterprise users.

It would be a logistical nightmare for them to pull the rug out from many of their business users who like myself store a huge amount of content on their servers (I run a video production company and use Drive for our cloud backup and archival) It would take us months just to get our data back as we currently have several hundred terabytes stored there.

They have assured me they have no intention of pulling unlimited storage for Enterprise users and until I see evidence to the contrary I see no reason I think otherwise.

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Thank you CraftyClown, this is comforting information you're sharing.

They have assured me they have no intention of pulling unlimited storage for Enterprise users and until I see evidence to the contrary I see no reason I think otherwise.

Not to be a pessimist, but I don't put much stock in anything google says regarding this change. That's not to say that unlimited gdrive won't live on for however long...but having a backup/backout plan is probably a good idea.

I would say too, STOP ENCRYPTING non personal data. If Google can dedup large amounts of data it hugely reduces their costs for storage and even makes your data more secure since your blocks of data don't need to be unique in their system. If you have TBs on top of more TBs of "Linux isos" they get what it is and they are playing ball with us.

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Of course, there are no guarantees.

That article however is a little misleading as the author continued to reference the business plans despite the Google rep clearly saying that an enterprise plan was now the solution for unlimited storage.

As a business we try to ensure we have a number of backup and storage solutions and Google (even with the price increase moving to Enterprise) seems to be the best value option

Encrypting our clients data is something we promise them and it is all unique so de-duping isn't relevant in our case. I would imagine there will be many companies in the same boat as us.

Despite the fact a lot of people have their media collections stored on their servers, I would have thought this would still only account for a small percentage of their total storage

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Google is using de-duping on block level not on file level. So its still de-duping even if the data is encrypted.
It is less then on unencrypted files but its still a lot.

this article is really stupid.
They talk if they had a "conversation" with someone, but all they do is posting some statements, all users got per email or google wrote online.
there is absolutely no "new" information in it.

given that each rclone crypt uses custom passwords to encrypt files, not sure how google could de-dupe that in an effective way