Just over a year ago,
we deployed an insane solution to our storage problem.
The petabyte project.
A petabyte 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 catalog.
That is anything that we haven't already uploaded to YouTube.
So we endeavored to find a way to,
as inexpensively as possible,
back up the entire server.
That's all 370 terabytes of currently stored data,
plus anything we would wanna add in the future.
So that's easy enough, right?
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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 water.
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 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 two.
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 co-location, 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 60 drive store-inators,
we'd be looking at, with the drives included,
upwards of 70,000 US dollars.
So, converted to Canadian rubles,
that is getting dangerously close to six figure territory.
You can take that away.
So, that eliminates hard drives.
You good?
Yeah.
Okay, just remember, lift with your back,
the twisting, jerking motion.
Yeah, I was working on that.
So, that eliminates hard drives.
What about tape storage?
A rack mount tape library, like this one from HP Enterprise,
only costs about five to $7,000.
And high capacity 12 terabyte LTO8 tapes
are about 160 bucks a piece.
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 about, shoot, what's it called?
It's kind of like buzzword-y, disruptive, blockchain.
No.
Oh, oh, oh, 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 download.
Okay, so if we just wanted to back up everything
we've got right now.
How many-ish terabytes?
$1,500 a month.
Wow.
Plus support.
Oh, yeah.
You know, you need support.
Yeah.
1,667.
So, if we wanted to store the full, what is it?
About 760 terabytes that we have?
Something like that, that we could have.
Holy!
$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!
Holy balls!
Wait, hold on a second.
Go back to that.
No, no, no.
This is before you even actually pull any data out of it.
Okay.
You have to pay to pull data out.
So, let's go the cheapest one.
Yeah, sure.
Let's say we want to pull the whole thing.
Another two grand?
So, this is great.
So, let's say your office burns down
and you've got to pull all your data out of the cloud.
You get a nice handy dandy bill for $2,000 to add in something.
Any consul to injury?
That's the slowest.
That's the slowest speed.
So, let's say we want to-
Let's say you need all of it right away.
Real fast.
Oh, gigabytes.
Oh.
Whoa!
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 three to five grand a month
to store data on tape.
Wait, does Google still have unlimited 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 it be?
Unlimited cloud storage.
With the $10 per user tier, unlimited cloud storage,
or one terabyte per user, if fewer than five users, so.
We just get 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's actually gonna work,
we fired up a Windows 10 VM on our Utility Unraid server
and installed a tool called Rclone.
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?
Channel Super Fun.
How big's that?
Oh, let's see.
That might.
That might take a while.
But remember, guys, this is over 100 drives
spread across two completely separate boxes
that are networked to each other.
Wow, this is taking forever.
I think we had, I indexed 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 the whole thing.
WinDirStat doesn't work, it dies.
It like, just can't handle that much.
Okay.
Should we see how it's going here?
Oh, 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's not false.
So it's unlimited data.
Yeah.
As long as it's 750 gigs per day.
Uploaded, yeah.
As it turns out, Google saw Bastards Like Us
coming a mile away, and it looks like, if you're going to do it,
you're going to have to do it.
You're going to have to do it.
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 ban 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, uh,
you got that calculator handy?
370 terabytes.
Oh.
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 G 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,
so user 6 here and uh, Mr. Jake Tyvie,
we can actually end up even if we lose, uh, our users, folks,
we can actually end up even if we lose, uh, a few more accounts,
if we limit each account to not go over 750 gigs a day, we can still end up maxing out our upload
speed to drive at about 40 to 45 megabytes a second. 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. It's a lot of data. So conclusion time then,
I guess. I mean, for now, there's no guarantee whatsoever that Google
isn't going to 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 $70 a month for our seven G Suite accounts,
that's less than $1,000 a year, we have got what is quite literally the least expensive
multi-tasker, multi-tasker, multi-tasker, multi-tasker, multi-tasker, multi-tasker,
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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 going to 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,
our YouTube rep. I don't know if I'm supposed to tell people your name. Oh, yeah. Probably
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So thanks for watching, guys. If you work for Google, well, you know what to do. But if the
video was awesome, get subscribed, 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, oh, I guess if you're
a Google shopper, you can check out the link in the description. And if you're a Google shopper,
shareholder, you're probably not stoked on this either. Also linked in the description is our
merch store, which has cool shirts like neither of the ones I'm wearing. Do you have an LTT shirt?
Like this one, cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.