Sometimes it is not important what limit you set, but rather how you communicate it. Well, Google just made a slip-up, which it is now trying to smooth over with talk of stabilising its popular Google Drive storage. Regardless of your purchased capacity, your Google Drive is now limited to 5 million files. In practice, this might not be a problem in normal use, but if you were to buy more capacity and create lots of small files, you could run into trouble.
A member of the disk service nicknamed ra13 shared his story on Reddit, in which he described how he stopped uploading anything to the cloud as of February 12 because he has more than seven million files stored on the drive. However, he has only used 1.6 TB of the total 2 TB he purchased. Google did not warn him in advance, it just quietly implemented a new policy and the storage suddenly became unusable. The business sector also complained about the problem logging system in February. The change disrupted the veterinary society’s operations, but other businesses complained as well. Google sells 2 TB of data for €10 a month,
Google subsequently confirmed that the limit is in place, so it is not a bug in the code. However, it did not publicly confirm the limit and only privately informed affected accounts of the new limit through notifications displayed to customers when communicating with the support team. The problem is that Google is changing the rules for paying customers without proactively notifying them in advance. Nor has it updated the documentation.
Update:
On the @googledrive twitter account, the company announced the lifting of the 5-million threshold. It again mentions optimizing the system in the name of maintaining stability, though it doesn’t elaborate on the issue. However, it will look for other solutions to ensure the best service functionality for everyone.
If we need to make changes, we will communicate them to users in advance.
— Google Drive (@googledrive) April 4, 2023
The question is what steps Google will secretly take again in the future.
Source: zive.cz, reddit, google, Image: AI
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