$20 a month gives you "unlimited" storage at google. they gladly take my encrypted files for years now and I'm up to 80TB. i think its more than reasonable to pay them for that type of service and be slightly above board (the account type i have says i need a minimum of 5 people but its just me).
Which means that if for whatever the reason they decide to close your account - say one of the pictures in those 80TB triggers something that looks like CSAM [1] - and you are seriously up the creek.
Ditto if someone gets hold of your phone and changes the login on your account, or they decide to not let you in because something "looks suspicious".
You are brave. I hope, for your sake, you have a local backup.
How long does it take for you to download 80TB? From what I can see Google allows you to download 10TB per day but who knows when they will change that limit.
Previous average lifespan of a human being. Just needed a number to stop the analysis at. The one that comes bundled with the implication "Welp, I'm dead now" felt appropriate given that if you are dead, and the data is too hard to access, probate will likely be the end of your data storage foray. Any longer, and you're most certainly talking organizational scale preservation efforts.
Price per TB appears to have fallen below $8. So that's $640 worth of storage. Basically, if you were to buy your own hard drives it works out to about $20/mo over two years..
This particular account while loss making for them it is not by all that much.
A comparable Cloud Storage account on GCP with Coldline storage would be $320/month ($0.004 GB/month) or just $96/month for archival ($.0012/month).
The actual cost to Google is probably < $80/month for this 80TB ( most of the data is going to be in stored in a version of archival given the standard restrictions of 10TB on export.
80TB is also an heavy outlier, given the typical available bandwidth today and disk sizes commercially available for most users it will take a lot of dedicated investment of effort and time to upload this amount of data into the cloud.
Also Google's personal storage pricing is not competitive for pure storage, Backblaze is only $7/month for example. The higher price and value is derived from able to integrate into other Google products and provide storage for those like Gmail, Photos etc.
A well chosen model has an AFR of well below 1%.
To get about say, 100TB, you'd need a dozen drives or so with ZFS and a nice enclosure. It is unlikely even one of them will fail in a given year and you will not experience data loss.
