One of the advantages of being on an exponential growth curve is that this figure has been way lower in the past. Just go back 5 years and it's only a fraction of that. 5 more years and it's even lower. The gmail/drive/etc. data that come from Google's first decade of existence probably fit into those 4.3 petabytes.
I used to work on a certain Google product and I remember thinking a petabyte was big when our raw content store crossed that milestone. Now Linus Tech Tips can put that much storage in a single box.
Advantage in the sense that they have to store less. 4.3 petabytes times the age of Google in days is way way more than they actually have to store, as the time period when they were adding 4.3 petabytes daily is short in comparison.
So the advantage of being on an exponential growth curve is that today's problems are tiny in comparison to tomorrow's problems? That seems like a disadvantage!
How prevalent is that? Some nerds doing this is a drop in the ocean. Rather my bet would be on Youtube as the hungry beast that can't get enough storage. There's a loooooooot of videos that have single digit views yet need to be accessible at any time, instantly. Video is large. Doesn't youtube even keep the original file nowadays?
In my experience, this is super common. Lots of average computer users send video clips, uncompressed 48 megapixel photos from their cell phones, PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos and 48 megapixel images, pdfs, and on and on. At the company where I work now several people have a 1MB gif of the company logo that they put in their signature.
Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plenty of space, so there was no need to ever delete anything, and people believed it. Now you have a decade of emails with giant attachments or embeds that may or may not ever get looked at, and that keeps growing.
Deduplication solves that problem. There is only one (or very few) instance(s) of that gif on Google servers. That's why encryption will not be available anytime soon. Storage requirement would explode.
If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".
When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)
Opera was sold to Chinese investment fund, they are scamming short term loans in Africa now.
Vivaldi was created by old Opera exec with same goals as old Opera. Their problem is not being scammy, neither is privacy. Their biggest problems are code quality - UI in javascript is sloow, closing tabs or fullscreening youtube video takes one full second. Then there is culture of secrecy - pretending open source by dumping uncompilable tar.bz2 code shreds from time to time and keeping bug tracker behind closed doors in order to not show how (not) many people work on it and what bugs they ignore for years.
I tried Vivaldi for a long time, but a couple of things drew me back to Firefox eventually. The biggest problem was that it kept signing me out of Google for some reason. I've seen threads about this elsewhere, so I'm not the only person facing it. Then, the containers feature in Firefox was very useful as I have multiple "identities" in different spaces, so I could isolate them in their own containers to prevent spillover.
I interviewed at G and eventually matched with teams writing software for core networking functions. In that process, the discussion came out that the software was responsible for roughly 11% of traffic...for the entire Internet.
I think the main issue is storage Moore's law has really hit a wall and it is no longer the case that the data Google stores grows slower than storage per dollar like in the early days. Google's freebie business model is going to have to drastically change if the two exponents have crossed paths and they'll have to do it fast because, exponents.
oh damn. I've created an account for my newborn son on my (free) google workspace domain and send him emails every few weeks with updates and photos. He'll receive the account when he's like 12. Will these be deleted too?
Same with the Google Pixel thing, where Pixels had less storage than iPhones, but Google constantly ran ads saying that wasn't an issue because you'd have unlimited storage for all your photos and RAWs, forever, with no restrictions, as long as they were auto-uploaded by Google Photos from the Google Camera on your Google Pixel.
And now even compressed jpegs have a size and time limit.
In fairness, they've persisted this policy for the given phones being advertised.
The OG Pixel said original quality for life, and that persists.
Every other Pixel until Pixel 4 had a time limit on unlimited quality original uploads, and THAT persists.
And even for Pixel 4 & Pixel 5, they're persisting the unlimited "high quality" storage option that they advertised the phones as having.
Don't get me wrong, I'm annoyed enough about them dropping unlimited original on the 4/5 that I download the 4k videos off of Google Photos and re-upload them over an old Pixel I have to get them to not count against my storage limit. But the ads have matched their current commitment, and they haven't reneged on any of the policies advertised for that given phone, at least.
If you make "forever" claims in your ads I feel like you shouldn't be able to say later that "forever" was true five years ago, but today it retroactively means a finite timespan.
That's a neat idea, but I'd be really, really distrustful of putting an effort of genuine feelings into a platform hosted by somebody else. That's a long time for Google not to screw it up, and it'll be sad when they do screw it up.
Some years back, I tried to take photos out of a random family album to scan them. The album was built so there was a plastic sheet in front of the photos, to hold them in place / protect them. Well, that sheet ended up ripping bits out of the photos, and it's glossy enough that I can't scan the photos through it. Be careful with assumptions of how long physical products last.
Also, books used to be printed on better paper; modern cheap books will not last as long as the old ones did. I have a couple of collector's edition books printed on acid-free paper...
:-) It's not like I'm using an old analog camera, or delete the files after printing.
It's just nice to a/ have an extra copy just in case and b/ it's more enjoyable/sentimental than looking at photos on a laptop, smartphone or TV.
At least my kids really enjoy it a lot. They liked to look at the albums my mom made from my pictures when they were between 2 and 5, still do today, even though they perfectly know how to navigate to all the photos on a tablet. That's when I decided to do it.
I would be surprised if they did this for Workspace accounts. Deleting data from a organization would be a disaster for Google. I.e. an account may be at a center of a lawsuit or subject to data retention laws.
Hmmm is my G Suite account different from a Workspace account? I got this email a few weeks ago saying I hadn't logged in for awhile and they were going to delete my data: https://i.imgur.com/XAEXQWb.png
This subthread is confused. Google will delete long idle nin-domain users and idle domains, but will not delete long idle users within an active domain.
This I believe only applies to the root/admin account of the GSuite domain. Extra users created in the account are just extra user slots for that account.
I have been writing a journal addressed to my son. It is just a markdown file. But this system has a flaw that is I go back and edit old entries.
I would never trust a 3rd party for this kind of project. But I like that you cannot edit your emails. It just feels more honest.
Now I am thinking of sending him hand written letters by mail. And just save them until he is old enough. I can add photos or his other favorite things in the letters. It would be a lot more fun to open these letters in the future instead of reading a text file.
ProtonMail just launched an import/export tool that not only allows you to store your mails locally, but provides easy migration paths from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. Might be something to look into, and will also probably be a boon to privacy overall.
Regardless, all you'd have to do is log into it once a year to avoid this. You should probably be backing it up externally at least this often if you care about the content...
I used to do exactly this. However, a couple of years ago when my second child was born I got a family domain and gave them both local email addresses. Then it was just a matter of getting a cheap email host and migrating over from gmail.
I also have a regular ema backup script that backsup the inboxes so the emails are always available offline!
I recently had an idea for a similar service that uses a storage account of your choosing as a backend. The plan was to market it as a “vault” for your emails and attachments.
Basically, you get an email address, and any email you send to it is streamed to a storage account of your choosing, with optional minimal processing (e.g., convert your emails into Markdown prior to storage).
I spent a while setting up the mail processing backend using Postfix + a mail filter written in Rust.
I ultimately ended up scrapping the project because:
A) It didn’t seem like there was a large enough market of paying customers.
B) There already are a few services that do something like this, but with a focus on attachments.
I'm not seeing the Inactive Account Manager on my paid Google Workspace account, so I don't think it applies there. If it does on legacy free domains, I'm guessing that you'll get a notice in one of the admin newsletters.
I have read about users who are receiving someone else's mail. They have some account that has been set to forward mail. It then appears that either (a) Google assigns the address to someone else (perhaps due to inactivity) or (b) someone else keeps inadvertently typing this email address. The mail gets forwarded to some other user.
If this is true, this calls the whole notion of "Gmail security" (and more generally large third party email provider security) into question. Now think about all the changes Google makes in the name of "security". One misspelling or typo and it is all for naught. The mail is sent to another user.
Does it really make sense to use a free third party email provider like Google for important purposes. It seems like we are making identity theft even easier (not to mention online ad services). One thing we know is Google will not discourage use of Gmail for important matters linked to a real identity. They want more personal information, not less. Meanwhile Google discourages automated creation of accounts not linked to real identities, which would be safer if compromised.
Yes. I can prove that this is real. I had a Gmail account that I registered when I was younger and did exactly that - setup a forward to my alt (which over the years became my primary). A few years ago I started receiving emails for another person with my same name. Legit work emails, party invites and the like. Turns out that person was using my original email.
I never contacted anyone about this for fear Google would just delete both accounts to save their own asses.
Still receive those emails to this day.
However recent times have convinced me that it's time to move away from the big ol G. This is space issue is one of them.
There's also at least two alternative explanations.
I also get a lot of emails to an account I own from someone who keeps using my email instead of theirs. You'd think they would have noticed they aren't receiving them by now, but apparently not. Are you also totally sure that it's not just someone else entering an email address they don't own for work and party invites?
And for a second explanation, are you sure it wasn't hacked/stolen?
There's groups of people out there that bruteforce and then sell OG accounts, such as short twitter handles and common firstname.lastname email accounts.
The fact that the forwarding rules are still setup and working actually leads me to think it's more likely someone else stole the account rather than that it was deleted and recreated, assuming someone else really has access to it.
There's other possible ways your account could have been compromised too, like having a backup email address for it on some other email provider or domain that did go under or get compromised, but a weak password or a re-used password from a leak seem most likely for the compromise route.
Do you have evidence somehow that the account wasn't stole in that way?
The emails aren't just one way. I don't see the emails in my sent items, but when the receiving party replies (his boss) I see the original email that was sent from my old email address.
The party invite was from a real person, not those evite sites.
I can no longer login to the old account and my recovery options no longer work.
While yes, the possibility of a hacked account crossed my mind, but Gmail is pretty loud when someone logs in from a new ip.
This has been atleast 2 years now.
Maybe I should call him. He isn't doing well with his realtor sales.
Another explanation is the address changes Google introduced. I’m not sure when, but my firstlast@gmail.com became addressable as first.last@gmail.com. Someone else originally created first.last@gmail.com and I get their emails.
Periods have always been discarded by Gmail when routing mail, as well as signing in. If you own firstlast@gmail.com, you've owned first.last@gmail.com all along, as well as fi.r.s.t.la.s.t@gmail.com for that matter.
You're getting that other person's email because someone has the wrong address for them.
I've got several of these for one active email in particular. I've always thought it was bad data entry. There is a cluster in the US south - Georgia, Texas and Alabama.
At first I tried to rectify the mistakes but gave up due to lack of response.
Google suggests available addresses when signing up to Gmail. Perhaps they could try to address the problem of mispellings and typos by at least warning the user about the Levenshtein distance from similar, already registered addresses, and the potential for misdirected email as a result.
Curious if one would even receive the notification emails prior to content deletion.
Once you hit the 15gb limit, you stop receiving emails within 24 hours. 2 years is plenty time versus "Hey. You are out of storage. In 24 hours, we're cutting off communication." [1]
The one time I ran out of quota in Gmail, because Google backup for MacOS has a serious bug, I did not receive the notice because the same batch job that disables delivery for your account is the one that sends you the email. I didn’t get the message until a week later when I figured it out and deleted some photos. Pretty dumb.
Also, Gmail delivers an in-band message about your quota, but not in Inbox, Inbox for iOS, nor the Gmail app for iOS nor Gmail for mobile web. ONLY Gmail classic for desktop web. So I didn’t get those banners, either.
In other words I still find this quota system difficult to use despite the fact that I was the tech lead of Gmail delivery SRE for years.
It's high time for somebody to make an appliance running open protocols that behaves like cloud applications but that is owned and hosted at one's home. Maybe it's what NAS is turning into, but open, and more broadly conceived: for email, chat, etc.
I imagine unreliability of home networks just makes this a bad idea for things like email even if you somehow managed to get around all the other obstacles like security/privacy/trust issues (spam, etc.)
But all of this is separable: storage at home, transport/computing provided by Google. So security and trust verification can come from Google (or any other provider) but emails stay home. Or photo processing provided by Google, but photos stay home. That would however relegate them to a pipe and service provider and possibly force them into openly competing, so they would never do that. Owning your data for the lock-in is the point.
That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it?
Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/