I Hope Google Doesn’t Ban Us... - Abusing Unlimited Google Drive

just over a year ago we deployed an insane solution to our storage problem the petabyte project a petabytes of raw archival storage I mean that thing is freaking awesome we have yet to have any problems with it but there's still a major issue with this deployment it's not geo redundant at all which means that if there were a fire in the linus media group warehouse or i mean really any kind of natural disaster we could potentially lose our entire back catalogue that is anything that we haven't already uploaded to youtube so we endeavor to find a way to as inexpensively as possible backup the entire server that's all 370 terabytes of currently stored data plus anything we would want to add in the future so that's easy enough right right you know what else is easy your move over to a better chair like the ones from noble chairs their icon series real leather edition gaming chair was designed in Germany and inspired by luxury car interiors learn more at the link below just hope they weren't inspired by like the trunk of a luxury car because that would be very uncomfortable [Music] now there are a lot of different ways that we could go about backing up our server some of them easier and some of them harder than others but almost all of them are gonna be limited by one thing our internet bandwidth I mean don't get me wrong we have a symmetric gigabit connection I'm not complaining but when you're talking about hundreds of terabytes that are already in the archive and then up to a couple of terabytes a day being added things can start to take a while like like months a while now our first idea was to build something locally fill it up with data here using our 10 gigabit network and then ship it off-site a sort of like ah thank you Jake oh wow petabyte project part 2 now this solution wouldn't actually expand our storage capacity because it would just be an identical server or that is to say two servers with the same data on it but since our internet service provider offers us inexpensive colocation it would actually be very cost effective from an ongoing standpoint except for one small problem if we had to buy two more decked-out sixty drives store inators we'd be looking at with the drives included upwards of seventy thousand US dollars so converted to Canadian rubles that is getting dangerously close to six-figure territory you can you can take that away so so that eliminates hard drives you good ok just remember lift with your back with a twisting jerking motion yeah so that eliminates hard drives what about tape storage a rackmount tape library like this one from HP enterprise only costs about five to seven thousand dollars and high-capacity 12 terabyte LTO eight tapes are about a hundred and sixty bucks apiece so for over 500 terabytes of uncompressed backup capacity that's actually looking pretty good by comparison but there's the fact that we'd need two of them and it looks like we're still spending well over 20,000 US dollars up front lump sum throw that on the black card you know how it is so hardware based solutions are not looking too peachy what up what about shoot what's it called it's kind of like buzzword II just disruptive no walk chain no cloud cloud storage you guys were all shrieking at us back when we originally built petabyte project for not using cloud storage for our archive in the first place so I think this is where you come in we're gonna check out some AWS here there buddy this is glacier so this is like slow start the demo okay so if we just wanted to pack up everything we got right now many years terabytes $1,500 a month Wow plus support you know you need support 1667 so if we wanted to store the full what is it about 760 terabytes that we have like that that we could have oh wait $3,400 a month I mean I get it I guess these guys have to cover the upfront costs that they're paying for that same hardware and they've got you know geo replication and all that kind of cool stuff as well but like holy balls wait hold on a second go go back to that no no no this is before you even actually pull any date out of it okay you have to pay to pull data out both go the cheapest one yeah we want to pull the whole thing another two grand so so this is great so let's say you're your office burns down and you've got to pull all your data out of the cloud you get a nice handy dandy build for $2000 to add insult to injury that's that's the slowest that's the slowest speed so let's say let's say you need it all of it right away real fast oh oh Oh 12 grand no big deal whatever it's fine don't worry about it casual right casual and the crazy part of this is that other enterprise solutions from the likes of Google Microsoft and Backblaze aren't priced that differently so what are we gonna do I'm not paying did three to five grand a month to start data on tape wait does this goes to heaven limited storage well yeah but there's no way that's actually unlimited well I mean it's gotta be that would be false advertising wouldn't the $10 per user tier unlimited cloud storage or one terabyte per user if fewer than five users so we just give five users that's like $50 a month that's nothing it can't be unlimited I guess we gotta try to find out if this loophole is actually gonna work we fired up a Windows 10 VM on our utility on raid server and install the tool called our clone so Jake's got the unlimited Google Drive account set up and working so it should just be a matter of running the command and seeing what happens so maybe start with channel super fun super how BIG's that oh that might take a while but remember guys this is over a hundred drives spread across and two completely separate boxes that are networked to each other wow this is taking forever I think we had index the entire petabyte project and I think we had almost a million files on it it took like literally I think a couple hours to do but I did index a little thing windirstat doesn't work it dies it like just can't handle that much okay so should we see how it's going here oh it's it's not going at all what the heck what oh there's a limit so you were right yeah it is limited it's limited but it's limited in a way that the advertising is not false so it's unlimited data yeah as long as it's 750 gigs per day as it turns out Google saw bastards like us coming a mile away and it looks like if you don't want to have your upload cut off you're only able to do 750 gigs a day otherwise you have to wait an additional 24 hours for an upload band to pass so what we would have to do then is slow our uploads to just around 8 megabytes a second which would mean that our current 370 terabytes would you got that calculator handy 307 terabytes so who would take about two years so while Google hasn't limited our uploads they have effectively made it completely impractical for us to abuse their system this way guess that makes sense oh wait nope we're not defeated yet new plan so you're actually required to pay for a minimum of five D suite accounts in order to unlock that unlimited storage tier but that got us thinking and actually I'm gonna give Jake full credit for this idea what if we used that limitation to our advantage check this out so it turns out that the 750 gig per day upload cap is per each one of our users here so by just adding a couple more accounts user six here and mr. Jake tiny we can actually end up even if we limit each account to not go over 750 kids a day we can still end up maxing out our upload speed to drive at about 40 to 45 megabytes a sec now it's not the prettiest solution but this has been going for a week and each one of our instances here has now done about four terabytes of data yeah it's a lot of data a lot of data so conclusion time then I guess I mean for now there's there's no guarantee whatsoever that Google isn't gonna shut down this workaround and there's a fair number of Googlers out there I think that watch our videos so us making this video sort of increases our chances but for now at zero upfront cost and seventy dollars a month for our 7g suite accounts that's less than a thousand dollars a year we have got what is quite literally the least expensive multi terabyte backup solution that you could have we're basically terrible people I'm okay with it though I can live with myself on the plus side though this supports encryption on upload and download it does and there are no fees for pulling the data down in the event of some kind of a disaster I mean who knows how fast it's gonna be that helps me sleep better at night so there you go we're pretty happy even if anyone watching at Google isn't hi are you - Bret I'm sorry to tell people your name ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction when you call ting you don't speak to a robot you get put through directly to a person who can help you and you don't pay extra for the privilege the average team bill is just 23 bucks a month per device and they've got cheaper data rates then ever it's now just $10 a gig beyond the first gig so go try out their savings calculator over at Linus 2018 ting comm if it turns out you'll save on ting they'll actually cover 25% of your cancellation fee for your existing contract up to $75 and using our link that's Linus 2018 ting comm you can get 25 bucks in service credit or towards a new device go check it out at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you were for Google well you know what to do but if the video was awesome getting subscribe hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the description is if you're a Google shareholder you're probably not stoked on this either also linked in the description is our merch George has cool shirts like neither of the ones I'm wearing give an LT t-shirt like this one cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 5,153,898

Rating: 4.9141407 out of 5

Keywords: back-up, off-site, storage, petabyte, server, media, digital, hard, drive, tape, google, amazon, aws, glacier

Id: y2F0wjoKEhg

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/distortedpsychosis]

I have a feeling Google might not like the way Linus uses their product, but on the other hand they may see this as free advertising knowing most people won't use their limits. It's all speculation we're doing right now but from a business perspective, there are many plus points of Linus doing this. It's not just gsuite, but the more Google can integrate into a business, the better. Google Docs, Analytics, the ad platform, Gmail, Compute Engine etc etc. The more you rely on google, the more money you'll give to google.

They'll put up with a few abusers to attract the big money to potentially move ppl away from Amazon, Microsoft and Dropbox to keep all their business resources in one place.

Just remember, companies often pay for more than just gsuite. They'll pay into the ecosystem of Google.

On the other hand, Google could hate this and enforce limits on new accounts. I doubt they'll do it to existing accounts to not anger loyal customers (who can and will just go to their competitors). Also google have a history of leaving existing accounts alone when they make changes.

[u/maxismad]

ITT: People acting like all of Linus subs will watch this video and then dump 100's of TB of data into the system.

[u/Goldoni91]

Welp boys it was fun while it lasted.

[u/hezekj]

Tbh it's not all bad, he didn't mention that they don't enforce the 5 user requirement, so that video won't probably bring too many users to the service.

Also they don't forcefully delete your files even if they decide to completely discontinue the unlimited plan.

[u/RimsOnAToaster]

Remember when homeboy uploaded nearly two petabytes of porn to Amazon Cloud Drive last summer? Did that cause Amazon to shut down the unlimited tier, or was it just a coincidence?

[u/Flaqq]

I wished he would credit rclone more. In the last image he even cropped the name out - no link whatsoever at the end. Cmon. If you use a 3d party tool that is the key in your solution you could treat it with more respect.

I am subscriber of his channel and he has nice projects and interesting insights, but I feel really uncomfortable with his 'acting character voice'. It annoys me a lot. Just give me the info in a normal speaking voice. Why all the drama. But that is just my view of things. A lot of people like him for that.

[u/AmakusaKun]

lmao google knows everything, why are you mad? thats so stupid

[u/itsmonstr]

Welp, let's hope Linus doesn't single-handedly fuck up unlimited g-suite for everyone.

[u/hearwa]

After watching the video I'm convinced they just ripped all the knowledge from perusing /r/datahoarder and are passing it off as their own.