Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users Dropbox has decided it's time to limit its unlimited Advanced plan. Rather than giving people “as much space as needed,” as it did previously, now users are capped, starting at 15TB. The cloud storage locker and enterprise productivity aspirant explained the reason for the change in a missive that revealed some rather creative …
Why so many downvotes?
I also think it is a good idea; I even put my family photos on a private GitHub repos (mirrored to GitLab and BitBucket as a bonus).
I also taught my father (eventually...) how to use Tortoise Git just so he can store his music collection there.
Sure, I am effectively misusing the "good graces" of Microsoft but I don't exactly lose sleep over that :)
Because this very article shows why this is bad: GitHub will notice, and they won't like it.
As per their Acceptable Use Policies:
"We also reserve the right—after providing advance notice—to delete repositories that we determine to be placing undue strain on our infrastructure."
They further note that less than 1GB is ideal, and less than 5GB is highly recommended. That's nowhere near enough for large file storage.
If people like AC keep abusing this system, they'll eventually set hard caps, which will hurt large open source projects where leniency is going to be attained through some horribly application process.
Why can't people just be grateful for free services, instead of abusing it to it's maximum potential and hurting everyone else in the process.
Whilst Microsoft's Office 365 doesn't quite have unlimited storage, they've just announced they're applying extra restrictions on storage. Like Dropbox, they claim that a tiny percentage of users are using a disproportionate amount of storage.
I think the numbers I've seen are under NDA so I can't quote them here, but the figures for Office 365 are worse than Dropbox's.
After that, you can try to negotiate for more by explaining your use case to a concierge, who might grant your user additional 25TB single-user SharePoint sites if you happen to be a large org that spends a lot with them already. If it looks like you’re “abusing” your “unlimited” storage then they won’t supply any more storage space. Microsoft also recently decided that “unlimited” archival for Exchange Online Plan 2 now means 1.5TB, as clearly too many businesses would (intelligently) keep a single licensed mailbox set up to retain copies of everything passing through their systems as a cheap alternative to proper mail archival solutions.
All this cloud nonsense is a farce designed to create better market conditions (i.e IT brain drain) so that businesses have no choice but to pay more for less. Hard drives are cheap, backups are easy and RAID still rules the day for large storage pools.
And that is a foolish attitude on the part of those businesses. The minute a business is no longer profitable, bam - gone. If they make a mistake and lose years of your data, their responsibility begins and ends with "whoops, sorry about that." You'd think they would have learned about unnecessarily relying on others when covid blew up supply chains. And, there have been a number of cloud problems with outages, data theft, ect. All that risk, just to save your own hide from a 5 story fall into a dumpster full of broken glass and machinery.
Exactly. See yesterday's article about CloudNordic and all the people asking where their data has gone! I will quote my comment from that discussion:
For that reason, it is essential that if you use a cloud service, you have a disaster recovery plan which handles the cloud provider effectively disappearing into a wisp without warning.
Agree apart from the RAID thing (even though mdadm has saved my ass for more trouble that i care to think about). network distributed filesystems + 10 Gbps network rules the day for large storage pools (see the ceph filesystem). I would NOT build large arrays with cheap 10 TB disks like i did in the old days when 2 TB was all the rage. I get cold sweats just thinking about the probability of two bad (tiny) sectors on a 10TB resilvering, Not to mention the time a takes to resilver 10 (or more) TB, with seriously degraded performance.
I disagree that backups are easy, at least not if you do it right. One of the drivers of cloud storage abuse where I work was people trying to set up off-site backups, which is not cheap or easy. We have an on-site data center but nothing off-site.
I think there's no limit on how many videos you can upload, though it seems there are daily upload limits. I suppose you could upload terabytes of white noise to dick around, but they'll probably delete that and ban the account. It's almost certain that somebody tried.
No, not white noise. Each file is a cat video con-cat-enated (*snerk*) with your encrypted data file. Users play your "video", see a cat video, and that's it. Hopefully, Google's streaming system doesn't require the cat-video-watcher to download your entire 20GB combined cat-video-plus-data file to watch just the cat video.
they do indeed.
my last large video was 5.03gb (70min long discussion on the right to repair) x264 video. If I hit 'download' on youtube to get a copy, the version that downloads is 303Mb.
It's why when you upload, you have to wait while it transcodes it, first into 360p, and then into the rest (first the SD versions, then 1080, and then 4k ones if the file is 4k)
They compress the videos you upload in a variety of formats, and I'm sure they will pick the maximum efficiency settings on their compression engine.
Presumably you could upload a sequence of qr codes and modem-type noises with sufficient redundancy and error correction that you are still able to recover the original data, but I'm not sure what the effective bit-rate would be.
There used to be kits for hooking up your computer to a VCR and using video tape as a backup media, so I'm sure if the error correction was good enough to allow data to survive being recorded on low resolution analog video tape, you could create a video file containing data that could be uploaded to Youtube and the data could still be retrieved even after recompression.
"...error correction was good enough to allow data to survive being recorded on low resolution analog video tape..."
I'm seeing that as a low pass filter plus noise.
I'm not sure if the new fancy digital lossy compression algorithms for video can be modelled in the same way.
I'm not sure how you can "abuse" an Unlimited storage plan by storing too much. What did they expect if they used that word to describe the service? Go and look up the meaning in the dictionary, it means "having no limits", it serves them right if they got screwed by their own false marketing.
I came here to say the same thing.
Remember when network data was more expensive, but to get more customers, some residential ISPs offered "unlimited bandwidth", .. then they all did.... yet when people started using that bandwidth, they too moaned about abusive behaviour.
Same situation.
The only abuse is by companies offering something and then backtracking.
If you really don't want users to go over 35TB, then cap it at 35TB and quit the bullshit advertising.
TFA lists several examples where customers store silly amounts by grossly violating Dropbox's T&Cs, e.g. by subletting their storage to other users. I don't think it's unreasonable to call such conduct "abusive".
And you'll note, Dropbox isn't trying to take any kind of action against those people. It's just announcing - with plenty of advance notice - a change to its pricing structure.
So why the hate?
"Hate" is perhaps a bit strong. But basically it's because they advertised unlimited storage and then bitched about it when some users took them as their word.
If they don't like people violating their T&C's by subletting storage, they should take specific action against those users. Otherwise it's the usual "unlimited (but not really)" marketing scam. Which should be outlawed as blatant false advertising.
Fair enough if there were clear T&C's being violated (as opposed to the vague weasely ones the ISPs used), but it's still unfair to call it "abuse" for those that simply used more space than the company expected.
And as Jimmy2cows said, "hate" is far too strong. I don't use dropbox, I don't care really, but it does bug me when "UNLIMITED" is quoted when it's not meant (And if there is "hate", it's more directed to the ISPs I mentioned - sorry dropbox!)
P.S. Not my downvote!
Completely agree with your point. As already said above, this is in exactly the same ballpark as Internet providers pretending to offer unlimited access, but complaining when you actually use it.
So <1% of users are using >35TB of storage. And ? You said "unlimited". If your business plan is not capable of handling that, it's your failure.
Especially since you are "offering" that plan to professionals. Guess what, there are professional video makers, and video takes up a lot of space. And even if they are not professional video makers, you said the plan was unlimited. Your terms.
Dropbox is decidedly a useless company. They don't know what they're doing, and they don't know how to do it.
Doesn't matter, they'll be gone soon enough.
I also take exception to the term. I get the point and it's valid to some extent, but it isn't abuse if they agreed to provide it. What they really mean is "more than we were expecting". Changing the product based on that is reasonable, but calling people who bought and used a product as specified abusers is unreasonable.
This is, however, why I tend to be a bit nervous about unlimited packages. I understand how much I could use one of those and if the provider hasn't specified some limit* to it, I start to wonder whether they really planned for people to use them as much as possible and whether they'll find a need to change things when people do.
* There are ways to limit an "unlimited" plan without immediately being contradictory or hypocritical, such as the "unlimited data" internet plan which eventually limits the speed but doesn't cut you off or charge you more.
This is, however, why I tend to be a bit nervous about unlimited packages.
In my day job, I refuse to purchase services with "unlimited" in the sepcification. I always push our lawyers to replace "unlimited" with an explicit number in the contract. My lawyer loves me for it, but it always blows the minds of the sale droid desperate for their commission.
"One could argue that a speed limit is a limit."
Yes, which is why you have to be careful about checking what they said was unlimited. Technically, the speed is going to have a limit if only because the hardware they've connected to it has a maximum cap on how fast it can go. If I have a 1 GBPS line coming in, it won't matter if I have 10-gig capable hardware, the bits won't move in or out of my network that fast. For ISP contracts, the thing most likely to be advertised as unlimited is data consumption, not speed, and they'll often have something in the contract about how speeds may be decreased after a certain amount of data transferred depending on load. I consider this to be a valid limit if they don't throttle too aggressively, because they haven't removed my ability to move data through and because they told me at the start. I take more exception to ISPs who have an "unlimited" thing that still has a data cap somewhere after which either they charge more or degrade the service to uselessness, which I last saw with a mobile provider who had an unlimited plan where unlimited meant 15 GB. This was a few years ago. I'm hoping they got hit with a false advertising complaint.
Dropbox's unlimited appears to really have been unlimited, but now that they are adding a limit to it, I think they need to find a new name for it.
The point of any all-you-can-eat plan is that you know you'll be in the red with some individual users. The skill lays in correctly estimating how many such users you'll have, and how hard they'll hit you. Then you set the price in such a way that you make enough money out of normal users to be in the green overall.
There is no such thing as "abuse", unless the T&Cs explicitly define it (though reselling the space is probably there, in fairness). There is only a carefully defined equilibrium between users you make money from, and users you lose money to. The users you lose money to are not "abusers", because their existance is part of the plan (and if it wasn't, your plan sucks).
If you can't do the balancing act, then don't do an all-you-can-eat service.
At least Dropbox here is outright dropping the unlimited plan, rather than shamelessly keep advertising it, but at the same time harassing the so-called abusers. Early 2000s ISPs with "unlimited" bandwidth, I'm looking at you.
No, the people who don't stick to the rules are a different category who can be hit with the terms of service they violated. Even after that, an unlimited program will have some people using a lot more than others, with the possibility that people following the rules and using more are being subsidized by those who opted for unlimited but don't use that much anyway.
In Dropbox's case, resale of storage is probably already in the terms as not allowed, and unrelated individuals pooling storage could be added if it's not. People who want to store 50 TB of their own data and bought the plan that said you could do that are not breaking any rules, even if Dropbox now wants them not to. Dropbox can change the products they offer, but they shouldn't call that kind of user an abuser because they chose a product Dropbox offered based on what Dropbox said you could do with it, then used it in the way they wanted and the product let them, and have not broken any rules. If Dropbox was still running an unlimited service, they would probably lose money on that person and make money on the person who bought unlimited but only stores 4 TB in it. They probably knew that at the start but didn't expect that they'd have so many users using lots of storage. Instead of trying to crack down on those who are using it for explicitly disallowed things, they're just ending the unlimited service (the article makes it sound like it will still be called unlimited though, which I hope they don't do).
No. If you advertise an unlimited service, and you're losing money to some users, they are not "people who don't stick to the rules". They are just users, the same as every other, except that they are on one side of a curve. There are other people who are on the other side of the curve.
Your job as a provider of an unlimited service, is to set a price where you can sustain the entire curve.
If you can't sustain the entire curve, then you can't provide an unlimited service. That's absolutely fine. The marketing people might moan, but they'll get over it.
On the subject of being forced to, I have a chromebook I keep over my mums that I use when I'm staying with her, and EVERY time there is a chromeos update, dropbox is installed as an android app, with startup privileges.
Every time, I uninstall it, I don't use dropbox at all. Damn annoying.Even worse that a U2 album (just!)
That would be my guess. Chrome OS and Android are pretty clean if you use the standard image, except you can't use the standard image outside a virtual machine, so in both cases you're stuck with whatever mess the manufacturer put on including any bloatware or malware they decided would come with it. I'm guessing money changed hands for that, although with some preinstalled software I've seen, I start to wonder whether companies are really getting much value from having their apps preinstalled on cheap phones or laptops.
I've done some googling. Whilst the chromeos part is "clean",Google does allow manufacturers to effectively preload android apps (the OEM can place a startup config which is used each time arc is rebuilt/updated)
Fortunately, the apps are installed as if a user installed them, so can be deleted again. I guess this is what is going on..
https://www.omgchrome.com/chromebook-oems-ship-android-bloatware
My interest is piqued now - I'll check it out when I next visit my mum!
Cheers
Thanks.
I'm guessing that that's the case, but I don't remember.
The thing does still receive full updates from google, has had ARC replaced with ARCvm (which it isn't powerful enough to handle :-( Asus Chromebook CM3) and has even been through a complete reset "powerwash" - I do have the thing in 'developer mode' and can access as root the arcvm partition, so I may have a look sometime next time I'm over there.
I guess rhere must be some vendor-specific area that is untouched that contains it.
Last night i had the pleasure of downloading a 110GB image ISO from a one drive Sharepoint. It took 2 tries, failing at 12 GB the first try. Over all about 4 hours to do the download and the another bunch of hours to put it on a boot stick using Rufus. I wonder about who imagines a 110 GB image is a good idea.
Or alternatively it could be the offline one size fits all build image that supports a hundred or so different clients with all the files, applications, drivers etc they need to coexist nicely on a corporate network.
Which is the case for the 110GB image I needed to download recently when the powers that be decided I no longer needed that old build server on prem because we'd moved to cloudy bollocks based system and had it switched off.
At $WORK, I was looking at alternatives to using physical DDS3 tape drives, and found a company that makes a tape drive emulator. It writes the data to a CF card, while looking to the host computer to be a SCSI-connected tape drive. Ok, works for me. Can I copy the data off of the CF card? Nope, proprietary format. Ok, what about the software they made to work with the drive, with a 30-day trial period? Hey, it's got a "back up the drive" option. So I tried it. It created a 16GB file, presumably an uncompressed disk image of the 16GB card, which I had written only 100 kB to.
We let the trial period elapse.
It depends. What was in it? If it was an image that came with a lot of big files, then it's inconvenient to distribute it as one big file instead of multiple files you could put together yourself, but the size might have been unavoidable. I have seen system images around that size when there is really that much data on them and they find it more convenient to distribute the image as a whole rather than instructions to recreate it and hoping that users will follow them faithfully. This is especially the case if a specific version of Linux is required because you know some users will try to run it on whichever version they already have or if a lot of building from source is needed.
If not, I'm guessing it was someone who has a disk of a certain size, likely 128 GB with a recovery partition of some type on it, who just copied the entire thing and didn't bother using a better image format or running it through a compression program before uploading it. I would hope that anyone who knows how to do that also knows that xz exists, but there are no guarantees.
SD Card?
A 128GB Samsung Pro Plus Micro SD card costs £15 at Currys. You can probably get it cheaper, but if you buy if from Currys you can be sure it isn't a fake.
Amazon (Actual Amazon, not market place) charges £17.99, the Samsung Store charges £16, Amazon Marketplace / Ebay charge about £10, but a £5 saving for a potential fake isn't worth it, it is going to cost a lot more than £5 of my time to test it.
They're very common for nearly all SBCs. It is not at all unusual to get an image that's pre-built for some SBC, especially one that's built into another piece of hardware, which comes with an OS, software, and the drivers for that hardware rather than instructions to install the drivers and software from somewhere on a basic version. Of course, they usually make a compressed image and expand filesystems to fill in the rest of the space so you can use as small a card as possible. Still, an image that big is possible if there's a lot of stuff or they didn't compress it.
There is at least one system I know of for getting SD card images which are actually that big. There is a program called Kiwix which provides compressed versions of websites like Wikipedia that can be read offline, and they have a version which turns a Raspberry Pi into a hotspot where people can connect and view the content served from it. The images with Wikipedia included are around that size, though they're not distributed through SharePoint.
I've seen both Dell & Cisco servers with SD cards inside them - usually two in a mirrored configuration.
They usually use the SD card as the O/S boot device as ESXi isn't a storage hog for nor does it require high performance. (The shared storage the VMs sit on however, is a very different kettle of fish)
I don't know whether that is supported, but it really can cause problems. If you're planning to download a 110 GB file, you don't expect it to finish any time soon, so you might not bother watching the download. If you come back a couple hours after starting and realize that it stopped after twenty minutes and has been doing nothing, you now need to restart it and keep checking back to see if it happened again. I've experienced this once when trying to download a file about 700 MB from a server that did support resuming downloads but kept failing for some reason every 12-18 MB. Continually going back and pressing the resume button got annoying, but it's not like I could just write a script to pull the partial download from Firefox and do it there. I kept considering whether I should write a script to do it automatically and start over or to keep switching windows to press the button every five minutes (it wasn't a fast server).
Yes, how dare anyone use an unlimited storage plan as though it were unlimited. Cypto is a blight on the modern world, for sure, but that doesn't make them leeches of a plan that claimed to have no limit. And that's the real issue here. DropBox is just using crypto a scapegoat to deflect from their own lying incompetence.
Companies always say that some small percentage of users are the problem. OK, taking them at their word, wouldn't it make more sense to just take some kind of action against those small number of users and leave the rest of your customers alone? Just tweak the user agreement terms slightly to say that if you use more than X amount of storage or bandwidth in a given period, they reserve the right to flag your account for closer review and potential action.
The way they always decide to roll it out to everyone makes it seem like either A) they were lying about the number of users, and/or B) they're just using it as an excuse for a cost-cutting measure.
What the page linked to actually says is:
To prevent abuse, Dropbox has established the following limits for accounts:
Dropbox Basic and trials for Dropbox Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise: 20 GB of bandwidth and up to 100,000 file downloads per day.
Dropbox Plus, Family, Professional, and Standard: 1 TB of bandwidth and unlimited file downloads per day.
Dropbox Advanced and Enterprise: 4 TB of bandwidth and unlimited file downloads per day.
So it's not actually a problem after all.
15TB is not enough or near close enough for content makers, or digital agencies. They claim 15TB is enough to store 7500 hours of HD video which is misleading because that is processed footage stored in heavily compressed video such as x264, h265, VP9 or even AV1. They claim genuine business customers don't use that much but a real business that deals in video will have hundreds of terabytes, are these not legit companies? raw footage 7500 hours which actually be in in excess of 4.05 petabytes of raw footage. The issue is Dropbox is being used as a backup service without requiring the file to be stored locally. If they really wanted to solve the issue from the legit, and not legit, enforce the local rule, like Blaze does.
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