Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits
arstechnica.com
Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits::Some people have taken "as much space as you need" too literally.
Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits::Some people have taken "as much space as you need" too literally.
You can’t abuse something that has no limit. Stop calling things unlimited and then blaming users when they are not.
I read somewhere about someone who took a zip file, copied it and zipped it with the copy over and over again until the file size ballooned to petabytes. I would consider that sort of pointless use of storage to be abuse.
Then put an * and say that there are a couple well documented exceptions, like zip bombing or don’t call it unlimited and call it up to 100TB for x dollars.
Aaaand? It's like if phone companies called dial-up abuse.
Sure you can, they did it here. All you can eat buffet doesn't mean I should take all the crab legs every time they bring out a new tray.
You either get it or you don't. But these people who abuse and exploit things are why we will never have nice things
Sounds like your buffet should plan for more crab legs to be made each time
Why, you know there isn't mythical endless and free source of crab legs right?
Nobody should reasonably think there is. "Endless" is advertising. You're suppose to still respect that its a business and that other people will want some as well.
If there's not then they have no business selling an unlimited supply of it.
Where I'm from services should be as advertised, legally so.
It's was unlimited. People uploaded whatever they wanted. The business had to reassess because these gluttonous people took it too far and so the service ended.
In what world are "unlimited" and "all you can eat" synonymous with "too far"?
"Too far" implies a definite limit, which is the antonym of unlimited and all you can eat, regardless of the business's ability to sustain it. If there is a limit, don't advertise it as unlimited or all you can eat that's false advertisement.
In what world is anything unlimited
In the marketing department apparently.
Companies should stop saying unlimited if we all agree nothing is unlimited, don’t you think?
We should be more responsible with services offered regardless what the service is otherwise. Growing up i remember life time guarantees, they no longer exist because these people who abuse services
Lifetime guarantees are absolutely still a thing. But it’s normally for higher priced items since the quality of the average ware went down.
I agree with you that customers should become more responsible for the decisions they make. But we’ve proven time and time again (for decades if not longer) that customers are not rational actors that know everything about everything. Ads would never work if that was a thing.
But here we are. There are laws against false advertising and words have exact meanings. The fact that “unlimited” is still not false advertising baffles me. It should be.
I guess you’re okay with predatory wordings in product descriptions that target people who don’t understand that things cannot be without limits? Just because they should know better, ignoring the fact you don’t know everything? Where do you draw the line? Would you blindly trust a single drug description saying it cures cancer, though no such thing can ever exist?
No, they no longer exist bc they were never sustainable, but they knew that in the first place and sold it as "life time" bc they knew they could make money by lying to customers. Lying is bad and we all agree businesses shouldn't lie, no?
Whose lifetime. Your lifetime, my lifetime. Maybe the product lifetimw
That's kind of the point: Companies shouldn't be allowed to advertise anything as unlimited when it is, in fact, not.
They shouldn't advertise lots of things but personal responsibility could have resulted in this service still being available so the bigger issue to me is the self regulation. I would bet good money the reason people used this much storage was for commercial reasons which would be abusing a personal use account. Which people should be pissed at rather than the unlimited.
Companies shouldn't be allowed to lie about services, full stop.
They didn't lie. Users could upload whatever they could. But individuals uploaded so much it made the company reassess what they offered. So like in life, the rest of us lose out because a handful of assholes abused a system
In what world do Nigerian princes email random people and offer to send them millions of dollars? Is it ok to scam old people and idiots because they should know better?
No, if it was unlimited, I should be able to pipe /dev/urandom to it for fun if that's what I choose to do. What's this about "gluttony"? They sold the service as that.
You can do it doesn't mean you should which is my point. I can leave trash in a theater because they offer a service where workers clean it up. Doesn't mean I should even though it'd advertised as part of the theater experience.
I'd go so far to say that we're dealing with a culture of people who are in capable of self regulating and that is why so many things are worse for people today. Just because its offered as a service shouldn't mean I push its limits regardless of the gimmick used to advertise it.
Why are you arguing on behalf of a company? Why use the word unlimited if it is not unlimited?
I'm not. Do you have access to this service anymore?
No one does because of a handful of abusive people who took it too far. This isnt the only case of this either. I'm arguing because I've lost many good services because of people that cant self regulate themselves
Why would you need to regulate the usage of an unlimited service? Aren't you paying for the luxury of not having to regulate yourself to a fixed limit?
Why would you need to regulate anything. Why can't I leave my shopping cart where ever I like. Why shouldn't I leave all the trash in my seat. Why shouldn't I throw cigarette butts out my window. There's lots of advertised services that are limitless that doesn't make it right to abuse it
Then why advertise it as "unlimited" or "all you can eat"? That's false advertisement.
Because we all know its a business and that unspoken thing is the same everywhere, you have access to a service just don't be a dick about it.
If the theater specifically advertised itself as a place where you could leave as much trash as you wanted, then yes, that would make it reasonable to do.
And the data was unlimited until they had to take it away because some users
The business advertised something to differentiate itself from the free market, it's not the free markets fault if the business cannot sustain what it advertised
It partially is the fault of the user
What? How? The user is simply taking advantage of what is being offered
The theater has a service where they clean up after customers right. So I can take advantage of the service by leaving all my garbage on the ground. Hell I could bring my own garbage from home and Leave it for them. Taking advantage of services in some cases creates a risk that you'll lose that service for everybody else and that should mean any service we use should mean we assess if the way we use any service is creating that risk
Yea but all you can eat buffets have a clear limit: The stomach size of the guests. It’s not an unlimited dinner. It’s specifically limited to the amount you can eat. (Besides that, a lot of all you can eat places have a time limit of an hour or sth).
If dropbox or google offer unlimited storage, then it’s only reasonable to use that storage. After all, that’s what you signed up for. It’s not abuse if they tell me it’s okay beforehand. As long as the terms of service don’t specify a limit, there is none. And if the terms of service do specify a limit, then unlimited is false advertising. If they don’t want you to use as much data as you like, they should have called it the 20TB plan or whatever they see as reasonable.
A way to offer unlimited storage but "cripple" it enough, so users won’t fill your server quicker than you‘d like, would be to only allow a certain size of uploads per month. So you have unlimited storage but you can only upload, say, a 100GB a month. That way, it‘d take almost a year to fill up a Terabyte and you can still claim unlimited storage. That would of course also cause backlash but you could technically still offer unlimited storage.
Yes all that works and better. It still shouldn't change that I should also recognize that taking a service to its limits would cause me and others to lose it.
But there weren't limits... it was unlimited...
And that's not reasonable to anybody who is going to upload 20TB. Every party involved knew what would happen
Why do you get to decide what is reasonable? I could see pro videographers shooting in 4k easily hitting that mark just doing their job. You're acting like this was a case of trolls ruining it for normal people when you have literally zero evidence that it wasn't people just using it how they were told it could be used. If you have bad actors abusing your system, the solution is to remove the bad actors, not punish everyone else for thinking you weren't lying.
We all get to decide because we're responsible for our actions. I should always ask if I'm using or abusing a service and if it'll negatively impact others. Or I don't and I run the risk of running things into the ground and losing a good thing for everyone.
You brought up a professional videographer as and example. A professional should be using a commercial service that is set up for that. This was personal use storage which I would bet was not used for personal storage, instead it was used commercially.
Oh if only you had bothered even opening up the article. literally the second line:
Just don't call those things unlimited then?
Calling unlimited shouldn't mean that people upload things that are not reasonable. The issue here isn't calling it unlimited because a reasonable person gets that its a gimmick that will have limits. Pushing it to that limit is the problem.
I feel anyone should assume there are limits because there is nothing in this universe that is unlimited.
I can reason what it actually means and that there is a point I would be abusing the system.
The amount of cool things I have lost out on because another person abused a system might be close to unlimited. It gets tiring after a while. Anyone remember steam sales before they were forced to offer refunds and people started to abuse that.
Id rather not have guard rails everywhere in life to stop me from being abusive. But abusive people exist and force the rest of us to live with the consequences of their actions
What is not reasonable then? Everyone would have their own ideas of what is reasonable. Why advertise anything as unlimited when it is not? Having a limit in their advert let's people know what they can use rather then being told randomly at some point that they have had too much.
Advertisements should not lie about the product. They do it to get more sales, and then complain when it gets abused. You cannot have it both ways.
Its gone now right. They had unlimited because these people were able to upload their crap. Now its gone because of these people. So it was unlimited up until these users forced them to reconsider.
We all should self regulate. Like at the buffet, there are good reasons why I shouldn't take an entire tray to the table. Its like how some people leave garbage in the theatre because its giving the cleaners jobs. Just because there's a way for me to justify an abuse doesn't change that its an abuse of a service being offered. The more we lean on the side of people who abuse systems the worse off we all are
how is good is the dropbox boot for you to keeping licking it?
Unlimited is unlimited. It's what was advertised. I am sorry Dropbox failed to look up the word before using it in marketing. The customers are using it as the advertising said it could be. Not the fault of the customer for using to product as intended.
You're referring to Mandarin Buffet aren't you
Yes, God I love that place.
Then you know full well that just because they shouldn't take all the crab legs doesn't mean they don't/won't take them all. If I go for crab legs and none are available, I'll blame Mandarin and give them a crappy review. People will be people. Can't blame them.
You can blame them. That's the point. Its the "customer is always right" culture thats the problem. Anyone should blame the individual who takes all the condiment's at the fast food restaurant causing the store to start charging. Just like we can blame the people who forced the company to take this service away from us.
Now we all need to pay more for less because these people.
The sad thing is that the full quote is "The customer is always right IN MATTERS OF TASTE".
I just don't get it. If it's unlimited - in what universe is using it beyond 15TB considered abuse?
I get the reseller part, I get the stupid chia mining part. But if they can say that was the problem - then get rid of those users, as clearly you have already identified them. Don't shift the blame away from your dumbass marketing team onto your users and play an innocent company.
I can't believe how much support dropbox is getting. People seem to accept, without questioning, every bollocks pr statement these days.
I worked for a company that was offering unlimited storage to its too tier customers.
I brought it up in a meeting when we first started talking about it.
"Okay but you don't mean unlimited. That's bad PR waiting to happen."
What did they say to your remark?
Roughly
"what do you mean?"
"You cannot offer something that doesn't exist. If Amazon decided to become a client, we'd be in a world of hurt."
"It's fine none of our clients use more than a few hundred gigs"
This was in 2018. They still offer unlimited storage. So I guess, what do I know?
Wow that’s low. If I’m paying for unlimited I expect to at least go over 2TB since I have the space
How much? I have about 65TB that could use a cheap backup!
A little over $150/mo
Their service isn't storage, has nothing to do with it. But at a certain level of storage, it's... A steal.
May I ask what the company is? You don't have to disclose it publicly if you don't want, I have matrix setup on my profile here.
What's the company? I need to migrate away from Dropbox.
what would they do if some user just decides to use more than their "limit"? like hundreds of TB?
Boot them, most likely. Or eat the cost, and look to shutter the free space/apply limits ASAP.
Not unlike Amazon Cloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox here. There was someone on the datahoarders Reddit who famously shoved a Petabyte of Data into their Cloud Drive offering, and likely contributed to it being shut down as a result.
hope they had an offline backup.
Got thrown out of a window
Especially since 15TB isn't all that big. It's not tiny, but it's also not out of the reach of a reasonably high end computer, or for a video editor who might need a lot of space for raws/recordings.
It's not like they're looking at users eating up Petabytes of data, or something silly, where some restriction might be understandable.
Wait, the cap is 15TB? I run a small image processing business and I'm right about there with my businesses data, currently.
...guess its time to NAS, but I'd really rather pay someone else than assume the hassle
A NAS really isn't that much of a hassle once you get it up and running. I've got a Synology DS918+ and love it. Although I'm sure you'd want something bigger (and newer) for supporting a small business.
That would be fine from a storage standpoint, except that the up front investment is significant compared to what I've paid Dropbox so far. I have to be my own resilience, redundancy, security, and and integration specialist. Can you even connect to a NAS on Android? I'd have to set up tasker or something for auto photo upload. Our power is not reliable and goes out frequently. I would have to learn how to expose it to the world outside my network. I'd have to monitor and replace dead drives. And that's just me, while the other people on my account also need space and access, where they either have to set up their own NAS or use mine, so I'd have to look into file sequestration. I'll have to re-automate everything to not use Dropbox APIs. There's a much bigger mental load hidden behind "getting it up and running" that made paying someone else attractive. I'd've paid up to triple for continued unlimited storage, but now that there's no option entirely and the highest limit is stupidly low, I have to rethink my entire workflow.
I'm on my 15 so I don't have time to list everything but a lot of your assumptions are wrong about what you'd have to learn/ need to set up on your own. Synology has a suite of apps for all your use cases that makes it quite easy to set up. And there's apps for your phone (yes android) to connect to it from outside of your network.
A good weekend of shmedium effort and you can have it all set up and running no problem.
If your powers unreliable btw you should invest in a battery backup UPS to protect sensitive products.
Ah, I do have a UPS for sensitive electronics, though I need another one for some other networking equipment anyway. That does make it feel more approachable. Maybe when my life stops taking a big steamy dump I'll look into this with more earnest. Thanks for the overview!
You make excellent points. I think the key difference for me when I got the NAS was that I wasn't replacing an existing system. That and I actually enjoy playing with storage and networking, so I'm able to cover most of those bases you mentioned myself.
For the power issues, you may want to look into getting a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for anything you want to stay powered. Larger ones can get pretty expensive, but you can usually find some smaller ones for a decent price that I think would be fine for small business use. I've used and had good experience with UPSs made by APC.
I do have a UPS for some of my stuff. I was planning on getting another small one for some networking stuff, but no reason I couldn't get a bigger one to cover another device.
How the fuck do you abuse unlimited access? This is just a company blaming an idea that was always going to be unsustainable on their customers and not their own damn lack of forethought.
It was a business plan and they found hardly any of the plan subscribers were actually businesses, and I'm guessing reselling your unlimited data was against the ToS.
And why the fuck would that matter? If they can't handle some random's porn and piracy collection, how the fuck would they handle a legit business? lol
Reselling an account would hurt their bottom line, but still have no effect on providing the storage. Imposing a limit doesn't stop that though, other than perhaps by making the product worthless and therefore unworthy of reselling.
Because some people where using it for crypto mining some coins that depend on storage space.
Because it "hurt their bottom line" in some measurable way. Yeah I'd be pissed if I were a subscriber of this plan. But either you accept the caveats of using someone else's infrastructure or you roll your own. ¯\(ツ)/¯
If you offer me "unlimited Hotdogs" and proceed to be offended by me eating infinite Hotdogs, you did not offer "unlimited Hotdogs".
That's "false advertising" Baron von Jenius.
🤣 Kudos for being the first to lobby that particular insult 🍻
They advertised a service, people used the service and it was as advertised, the service was deemed to be unprofitable due to usage, they announced the discontinuation of the service and no longer advertise it.
I don't see any mention of unlimited storage in any of their plansEdit: they do say "as much space as needed - Customizable" for the Enterprise plan. So that's likely how they're distinguishing the "legitimate business" users, to still offer a plan for clients needing more storage and probably has tiered/progressive pricing where it gets cheaper per GB/TB the more you use, but lets DropBox feel like they've vetted these high use clients to avoid the use cases they mentioned.https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison
https://www.dropbox.com/plans
As long as subscribers to the unlimited plan retain unlimited storage through the end of the term for which they had already paid, then DropBox is fulfilling the terms of the service they sold. And the last two paragraphs of the article seem to indicate that DropBox is indeed doing that
So I don't think false advertising applies here.
This was dumb AF anyways. If you really have a problem with a few large accounts, you just make their access rates to their data atrocious. There's no way the plan guarantees an access speed.
They didn't mean unlimited use. They meant "sign up, forget about it and pay us forever".
Corporate bootlickers: OMG they're actually using our unlimited service as if they were unlimited. THIS IS ABUSE!1!
Isn't there a special term in court for entering a contract that you have no intention of fulfilling as you promised in the first place?
Capitalism
Or there is actually a limit to storage.
You're right. Then we agree that Dropbox promoting "unlimited storage" is false advertising.
You can’t abuse unlimited. That’s why it’s called “UNlimited.” I hate this two faced, corporate back sludge that always, and I mean always, puts it on the consumer as if they did something wrong. When in reality, it’s the company that is redlining or needs to boost those unsustainable goal of doubling revenue every quarter, ad infinitum.
The real narrative is Dropbox needs money so they are scrambling to cut every expense. No matter what spin they put on it.
If they were just honest about it and say "this is expensive so we need to put the prices up", I would have a lot more respect for that.
“Times are tough we just can’t do unlimited anymore.” What’s so hard about being honest in business?!?
Bad PR, that's why.
You can DDOS using an "unlimited" VPS, and DDOS the same provider. Is that abuse? Of course it is. You can't expect a for profit to allow people to upload petabytes of junk all at once.
It depends on the ToS. DDoSing might be considered unreasonable use.
But if you're using VPS to stream 4K content 24/7, that would be heavy and reasonable use.
Similarly, if I take the unlimited Dropbox plan and resell it, that's probably against the ToS.
If I'm uploading 50TB of blu ray rips for backups, that's... Heavy use but entirely acceptable based on what they're advertising.
For your last sentence, Dropbox can't tell whether those are legitimate backups that the DMCA gives you the right to, or rips from a piracy site. Uploading data that's all 1's is just dumb and is designed to "test" the server, in the same way a teenager might test their stepdad.
Just violating the TOS, which means you are using a service or product outside its intended usage.
Downloading from a plan that has no cap, even if you download a lot, is simply making use of the service for its intended purpose. (Which obviously isn’t to DDOS someone.)
Why you’re defending DB here, a faceless corporation, is probably a better point of discussion.
You shouldn't try to benchmark some random server by uploading and downloading files that consist of the bytes
FFrepeatedly. Store all the crap you want, just don't ruin it for others.Then it was never unlimited to begin with, wtf?
everything here is wrong, and blaming the users is wrong. Please try to read past the PR speak. and shame on ars for not doing that.
the unlimited plan is going away to force companies that were using it, to switch to their new unlimited plan which is now called Enterprise and will generate a lot more money for them. The plan still exists, they've changed the requirements so you can only get it if you spend a lot of money.
I remember in the 90s, my dial-up provider started offering an "unmetered" plan with no per minute charge (for younger people, believe it or not we were once charged by the minute for connecting to the internet). After a short while we were inundated with emails from the ISP complaining that people were "abusing the service" by going on the internet for "hours at a time". Just reminded me of this and how it's an old excuse.
No, you can't "abuse" an unlimited service by using too much, it's unlimited.
Can you even imagine how lame someone's life must be to go on the Internet for hours at a time though? Oh wait...
Users: Use the product as it was designed and advertised.
Corporations:
Like when Microsoft took away unlimited OneDrive and wrote a passive aggressive blog post about how some dude used it to store like 75TB of movies
Don't offer unlimited if you can't deliver unlimited. FFS
Don't use the fucking word unlimited if it has limits? Something that has a limit, no matter how high, is not unlimited.
What they meant to say was "We didn't have the foresight to monetize these heavy users, so we will be doing that now. But first we'll create the problem..."
Eh... If you offer unlimited you have to live with unlimited.
Fuck these people but thats also on Dropbox.
Calling it “abuse” is a weird PR move. If your service is good enough, this is bound to happen with an unlimited storage plan. This is basically a win on their part since they got people to sign up for their service. Why shame your user base?
"Abused"? Is it unlimited or not? I don't see how as much as you need can be taken too literally. It's either true or it isn't.
"Abused" service they were advertised. Now it is misadvertisement.
This reminds me of how Skype always had limits in the fine print of its unlimited calling plan back in the day when we paid for minutes on cellphones.
Or, y'know, how current cellphone data plans are only unlimited up until the point where you've used enough and then become "deprioritized."
Or how backblaze offers unlimited plans on Windows and Mac but not on Linux because Linux users tend to actually know how much storage they're using.
Companies have a number that is the profitable point for whatever unlimited plan they're offering. They just want to be able to advertise "unlimited" since that's what customers want and they hope people don't go over their "profitable usage" metric.
My only concern about throttling it as 5TB for small organizations is that I could see that being a problem for freelance video editors. 8K video can take up a lot of space.
At some point though I feel like if someone would be using Dropbox for 8k videos, they should be wondering if they are using the right solution for their needs. I would say ~absolutely~ (edit: maybe) not.
Temporary storage of, say, a documentary with hundreds of hours of video so it can be transferred from the cameras to the editor who is working remotely seems like exactly the sort of thing Dropbox is for.
Maybe I’m applying too much of my own personal use case for how I use tools like Dropbox then. I’m using it for documents I actually want synchronized between devices, with a cloud backup and history. I suppose if you’re looking at it for a cloud storage solution, ignoring the desktop sync aspect then I can see where that makes more sense.
I just have a hard time wrapping my head around using cloud storage for such large files being an optimal solution but then again if storage cost is the biggest objection, unlimited storage sounds like it’s removing said objection and you don’t have much choice if you’re working as a remote team so great point, I hadn’t thought about it like that.
It could also be good for a sharing solution, since putting it on dropbox, and sharing the link would be fairly simple compared to having to deal with the complications of sending larger videos in other ways.
If you have hundreds of hours of 8k footage, no one is going to edit it off of Dropbox.
If you have the storage capacity to hold all that footage elsewhere, you also have the capability to enable uploading directly to that storage.
No one is using public cloud storage for these kinds of use cases, unless they’re extremely foolish.
That being said, offering “unlimited” and then reneging on it is also, IMHO, foolish.
I'm glad I have a NAS.
But does your NAS has UNLIMITED storage?
It has more than I need for now. Isn't that effectively unlimited? I could definitely see myself filling it up eventually as my media library grows, though.
I always hated the term unlimited when it's not really unlimited. Is it really abuse if you're using it as intended?Edit: I eat my words. People are assholes. I thought this was referring to providers of unlimited storage or bandwidth, only to say "oh, you've using it too much, so we're going to throttle you."
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This was intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.
The company said in a blog post yesterday that it was retiring its unlimited storage policy specifically because people were buying Dropbox Advanced accounts "for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage."
Dropbox also says that this behavior has been getting worse recently because other services have also been placing caps on their storage plans—at some point within the last year, Google also removed similar "as much as you need" language from its Google Workspace plans.
Rather than attempting to police behavior or play whack-a-mole with the people abusing the service, Dropbox has imposed a 15TB cap on organizations with three or fewer users.
An additional 5TB per user can be added on top of that, with a maximum cap of 1,000TB per organization.
New customers will be affected by this policy change immediately, as you'll see if you check the current pricing for Dropbox Advanced plans.
The original article contains 354 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Abuse is certainly the wrong term, putting the blame on the user. Still, I think a 'fair use' is no longer given if you upload 20 terabytes or so. As usual, a minority overuses free services until they have to shut down or restrict usage.
Dolla dolla bill
Am I the only fucking rational person here that doesn't give a shit? Things change either pay for the new storage limits or don't. Can we move on now? Can we talk about something that isn't about a big business making a big business move that you disagree with because you hate said big business and only want to use Linux? We get it. Windows bad.
Let's move the hell on then.
EDIT: Lemmy users really do need to find something else to do with their fucking lives besides complain about subscriptions.
The goal is to call out bullshit advertising and maybe get marketers to stop putting blatant lies in the ad copy. We know that storage costs money and that it cannot be truly unlimited, and it would be nice to get ad creators to stop bending the truth.
I agree, you should definitely move on.
No, no I don't think so
Makes sense, and their implemented solution also seems reasonable to me.
Honestly they're giving existing users at least a year with their current storage capacity and plan.
Google gave like 60 days. Dropbox are handling this much better.
Uhu, exactly. I get that it’s frustrating, but the simple fact of the matter is that offering unlimited storage capacity (or unlimited anything for that matter) will inevitably attract people who will abuse it. Their new plans are functionally unlimited for most people, while also curbing that abuse.
That’s not to praise Dropbox too much (they shouldn’t have offered unlimited in the first place, but it’s an easy way to draw people in), but I still can’t fault them too much for how they handled this.