
Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64 - lordpankake
https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds
======
reaperducer
Base64 is such a wonderful gift.

Back when the commercial internet was just getting its act together there were
companies that would give you free online access on Windows 3.1 machines in
exchange for displaying ads in the e-mail client. (I think one was called
Juno.)

The hitch was that you could only use e-mail. No web surfing. No downloading
files. No fun stuff.

But that's OK, since there were usenet- and FTP-to-email gateways that you
could ping and would happily return lists of files and messages. And if you
sent another mail would happily send you base64-encoded versions of those
binaries that you could decode on your machine.

The free e-mail service became slow-motion file sharing. But that was OK
because you'd set it up before you went to bed and it would run overnight.

Thank you, whomever came up with base64.

~~~
romanhn
That reminds me of the first time I accessed World Wide Web. Back in '96 I was
browsing a computer magazine and happened upon a listing of useful mailing
lists, one of which returned the contents of web pages for a requested HTTP
address. Same magazine had an install CD for the free Juno email service.

Being a teenager, the first web page I ever requested was www.doom.com, which
returned a gibberish of text to Juno's email client. It was an HTML file full
of IMG tags (one of those "Click here to enter" gateway pages), but I had no
idea what I was looking at at the time. Somehow figured out to open the file
in IE2 and saw... a bunch of broken images :)

I still vividly remember the sense of wonder that the early Internet evoked.

EDIT: Just checked the Wayback Machine. Looks like www.doom.com was not
affiliated with the game at the time, so I must have browsed to
www.idsoftware.com instead.

~~~
xamuel
It's really sad thinking how kids these days totally miss the wonder of the
early internet.

In my case, it was at the public library. The lone internet computer was
constantly booked. But by watching over a library clerk's shoulder, I was able
to see the password needed to unlock the text-based library catalog terminals
(which terminals were plentiful and always available). (My parents worked at
the library, or else I never could have pulled that off.) Once unlocked, I was
able to use Lynx to telnet into my favorite MUD game. Unfortunately it didn't
last long until a librarian caught me, which I think resulted in me being
grounded from the library for a month or something like that.

~~~
300bps
_It 's really sad thinking how kids these days totally miss the wonder of the
early internet._

And before that, the wonder of bulletin board systems. I got my first modem in
1985!

~~~
xamuel
Username checks out ;)

------
whack
For anyone else who's as confused as I initially was: Google Drive allows
unlimited storage for anything stored as "google docs". Ie, their version of
Word. This hack works by converting your binary files into base64 encoded
text, and then storing the text in collection of google-doc files.

Ie, it's actually increasing the amount of storage space needed to store the
same binary, but it's getting around the drive-quota by storing it in a format
that has no quota.

~~~
markstos
Seems like a good way to earn yourself a Terms-of-Service ban.

If this considered an abuse-of-services now, the terms could be updated to
clarify.

The finger print of big chunks of base-64 encoded blobs in Google Docs could
be easy to spot.

If Google cares to notice this and take action, they can and will.

~~~
jerf
It's an arms race situation. Once you give me an information channel like a
"word document", I've got an endless variety of ways to encode other things
into it. I can encode bits as English sentences or other things that will be
arbitrarily hard to pick up by scanning.

If I were Google, I wouldn't try to pick up on the content, I'd be looking for
characteristic access patterns. It's harder to catch uploads, since "new
account uploads lots of potentially large documents" isn't something you can
immediately block, but "oh, look, here's several large files that are always
accessed in consecutive order very quickly" would be harder to hide. It's
still an arms race after that (e.g., "but what if I access them really
slowly?"), but while Google would find a hard time conclusively winning this
race in the technical sense, they _can_ win enough that this isn't fun or a
cost-effectively technique anymore (e.g. "then you're getting your files
really slowly, so where's the fun in that?"), which is close enough to victory
for them.

So, I'd say, enjoy it while you can. If it gets big enough to annoy, it'll get
eliminated.

~~~
imtringued
They can just throttle access to Google documents to something like 4 GB per
hour and then block obvious abuses. If people start encoding bits as English
sentences they are reducing the amount of useful data they can download within
an hour which is exactly what you want.

~~~
jerf
"They can just throttle access to Google documents to something like 4 GB per
hour"

No, that's not likely to work. I'm sure there's far more legitimate users
using 4GB of documents per hour than abusers right now. You have to remember
things like bulk downloading, bulk scanning, bulk backing-up, shared automated
accounts doing all sorts of legit things, etc. are all legitimate use cases.
You can't just throw out all "big uses" or your enterprise customers are going
to pitch a fit, and that's a bigger problem than people abusing your storage
for a while.

(Those things will still have different access patterns than abusers, but
thinking about how that will manifest and could be detected is an good
exercise for the reader.)

~~~
Someone
I would guess those enterprise users _pay_ for Google docs, and could be
exempted from throttling on that basis.

If they don’t, Google wouldn’t lose much by throttling them, would they?

------
binwiederhier
In the same spirit, I made a few "just for fun" plugins for my (now abandoned)
encrypted-arbitrary-storage Dropbox-like application Syncany:

The Flickr plugin [1] stores data (deduped and encrypted before upload) as PNG
images. This was great because Flickr gave you 1 TB of free image storage.
This was actually super cool, because the overhead was really small. No
base64.

The SMTP/POP plugin [2] was even nastier. It used SMTP and POP3 to store data
in a mailbox. Same for [3], but that used IMAP.

The Picasa plugin [4] encoded data as BMP images. Similar to Flickr, but
different image format. No overhead here either.

All of this was strictly for fun of course, but hey it worked.

[1] [https://github.com/syncany/syncany-plugin-
flickr](https://github.com/syncany/syncany-plugin-flickr)

[2]
[http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~binwiederhier/syncany/trunk/fil...](http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~binwiederhier/syncany/trunk/files/head:/syncany/src/org/syncany/connection/plugins/pop3_smtp/)

[3]
[http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~binwiederhier/syncany/trunk/fil...](http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~binwiederhier/syncany/trunk/files/head:/syncany/src/org/syncany/connection/plugins/imap/)

[4]
[http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~binwiederhier/syncany/trunk/fil...](http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~binwiederhier/syncany/trunk/files/head:/syncany/src/org/syncany/connection/plugins/picasa/)

~~~
userbinator
Anything that persists can be used to store arbitrary data... I remember
(around a decade ago now, I'm not sure if these still exist) coming across
some blogs that ostensibly had images of books, details about them, and links
to buy them on Amazon and such... I only understood when I came across a forum
posting from someone complaining that his ebook searches were clogged with
such "spam blogs", and another poster simply told him to look more carefully
at those sites, but not to say anything more about his discoveries. You can
probably guess what you got if you saved the surprisingly large "full-size"
cover image from those blogs and opened it in 7zip!

I feel less hesitant about revealing this now, given how long ago it was and
that more accessible "libraries" are now available.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
IIRC the “mods are asleep, post […]” 4chan meme originally came from “mods are
asleep, post high res” threads where to an outside observer they were just
posting high-resolution images of inane things, but there was actually
steganography of some sort going on to hide child porn (I think) inside the
files.

One of many Internet jokes with sinister origins.

------
justinjlynn
Sounds like a great way to lose your Google account (and all your other linked
Google services) for ToS violations to me.

~~~
m-p-3
I would make sure to not do this in an important Google account.

~~~
mcbits
I've seen a few stories of businesses and their employees all losing their
Google accounts, just because the company hired a freelancer who had
previously been banned, and Google detected the association. (Pretty sure they
got the accounts back after some public outrage.) I wouldn't risk
_intentionally_ violating their terms if you're not quite ready to wake up one
day 100% Google-free, or very good at hiding your tracks.

~~~
warp_factor
The fact that this is even a remote possibility should worry everyone of the
ugly monopoly that Google became.

I found myself in a similar situation a couple months ago. An android App
falsely charged me on the Play store. After trying to contact Google for
multiple weeks I gave up and disputed the charge on my credit card. This
resulted in Google coming after me for 8.99$ and threatening me to close all
my Google accounts including gmail, calendar, photos, drive and everything I
rely daily in Google.

That was a wake-up call for me. I decided to move everything OUT of Google.
That company got too much power, it should worry way more people.

~~~
iKevinShah
> I decided to move everything OUT of Google

Have you been successful in it? Any guidelines / tips? How hard is it?

~~~
guitarbill
The sooner you start, the better. I've moved most of my
email/contacts/calendar away [0], and the longer you give yourself to catch
the things you've signed up for but forgotten, the better. Youtube was also a
pain, but I transitioned my subscriptions manually to a different account.
Maps seems like it'd be the trickiest if you're invested. I wasn't a heavy
user, and maps still works pretty good when you're logged out.

[0] I use fastmail + custom domain, which works great, but you have to guard
the domain very closely.

~~~
vageli
> [0] I use fastmail + custom domain, which works great, but you have to guard
> the domain very closely.

What do you mean by guarding the domain? To prevent large volumes of spam?

~~~
LostJourneyman
I think OP means that you have to make sure you don't forget to/neglect to
renew it and make sure you don't accidentally lose the domain for any reason.

~~~
vageli
Thank you for the clarification. I use a dedicated card for domain hosting
(with autorenewal enabled) to prevent this specific issue but I recognize most
people likely don't do the same.

------
userbinator
Base85 would probably be a better choice for storing binary as text, since it
has a ratio of 5:4 instead of 4:3.

On the topic of "unusual and free large file hosting", YouTube would probably
be the largest, although you'd need to find a resilient way of encoding the
data since their re-encoding processes are lossy.

I like the "Linux ISO" and "1337 Docs" references ;-)

~~~
marquis-chacha
You'd be at the mercy of them potentially changing their encoding scheme
unannounced and corrupting your files.

~~~
DonHopkins
Back in the day of email gateways between different networks, there used to be
a terrible problems with all the tin-pot dictator IBM SYSADMINs at BITNET
sites who maintained their own personal styles of ASCII<=>EBCDIC translation
tables, so all the email that passed through their servers got corrupted.

EBCDIC based IBM mainframe SYSADMINs on BITNET were particularly notorious for
being pig-headed and inconsiderate about communicating with the rest of the
world, and thought they knew better about the characters their users wanted to
use, and that the rest of the world should go fuck themselves, and scoffed at
all the unruly kids using ASCII and lower case and new fangled punctuation,
who were always trying to share line printer pornography and source code
listings through their mainframes.

"HARRUMPH!!! IF I AND O ARE GOOD ENOUGH FOR DIGITS ON MY ELECTRIC TYPEWRITER,
THEN THEY'RE GOOD ENOUGH FOR EMAIL! NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!!!" (shaking fist in
air while yelling at cloud)

It was especially a problems for source code. That was one of the reasons for
"trigraphs".

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234582/purpose-of-
trigr...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234582/purpose-of-trigraph-
sequences-in-c)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs)

>Trigraphs were proposed for deprecation in C++0x, which was released as
C++11. This was opposed by IBM, speaking on behalf of itself and other users
of C++, and as a result trigraphs were retained in C++0x. Trigraphs were then
proposed again for removal (not only deprecation) in C++17. This passed a
committee vote, and trigraphs (but not the additional tokens) are removed from
C++17 despite the opposition from IBM. Existing code that uses trigraphs can
be supported by translating from the source files (parsing trigraphs) to the
basic source character set that does not include trigraphs.

~~~
blackflame7000
I always wondered what the purpose of trigraphs were other than to help win
obfuscated code contests haha

------
furyofantares
Even URL shorteners offer unlimited storage if you jump through enough hoops.

To encode ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ first get a short url for
[http://example.com/ABC](http://example.com/ABC), then take the resulting url
and append DEF and run it through the service again. Repeat until you run out
of payload, presumably doing quite a few more than 3 bytes at a time.

The final short url is the your link to the data, which can be unpacked by
stripping the payload bytes then following the links backwards until you get
to your initial example.com node.

~~~
jerf
I've lost track of the number of times I've seen variants on "Hey, a link
shortener is a fun first project for this new language I'm learning; hey,
$LANGUAGE_COMMUNITY, I've put this up on the internet now!... hey, uh,
$LANGUAGE_COMMUNITY, I've had to take it down due to abuse." There are
numerous abuse vectors. Optionally promise to get it back up real soon now, as
if there are actually people depending on it.

Maybe it isn't a bad first project, but on no account should you put it up on
the "real" internet and tell anyone it exists.

------
DonHopkins
In 1998, the EFF and John Gilmore published the book about "Deep Crack" called
"Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip
Design". But at the time, it would have been illegal to publish the code on a
web site, or include a CDROM with the book publishing the "Deep Crack" DES
cracker source code and VHDL in digital form.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker)

[https://www.foo.be/docs/eff-des-
cracker/book/crackingdessecr...](https://www.foo.be/docs/eff-des-
cracker/book/crackingdessecre00elec.pdf)

>"We would like to publish this book in the same form, but we can't yet, until
our court case succeeds in having this research censorship law overturned.
Publishing a paper book's exact same information electronically is seriously
illegal in the United States, if it contains cryptographic software. Even
communicating it privately to a friend or colleague, who happens to not live
in the United States, is considered by the government to be illegal in
electronic form."

So to get around the export control laws that prohibited international
distribution of DES source code on digital media like CDROMS, but not in
written books (thanks to the First Amendment and the Paper Publishing
Exception), they developed a system for printing the code and data on paper
with checksums, with scripts for scanning, calibrating, validating and
correcting the text.

The book had the call to action "Scan this book!" on the cover (undoubtedly a
reference to Abby Hoffman's "Steal This book").

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book)

A large portion of the book included chapter 4, "Scanning the Source Code"
with instructions on scanning the book, and chapters 5, 6, and 7 on "Software
Source Code," "Chip Source Code," and "Chip Simulator Source Code," which
consisted of pages and pages of listings and uuencoded data, with an
inconspicuous column of checksums running down the left edge.

The checksums in the left column of the listings innocuously looked to the
casual observer kind of like line numbers, which may have contributed to their
true subversive purpose flying under the radar.

Scans of the cover and instructions and test pages for scanning and
bootstrapping from Chapter 4:

[https://imgur.com/a/7pHSAT1](https://imgur.com/a/7pHSAT1)

(My small contribution to the project was coming up with the name "Deep
Crack", which was silkscreened on all of the chips, as a pun on "Deep Thought"
and "Deep Blue", which was intended to demonstrate that there was a deep crack
in the United States Export Control policies.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker#/media/File:Ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker#/media/File:Chip300.jpg)

The exposition about US export control policies and the solution for working
around them that they developed for the book was quite interesting -- I love
John Gilmore's attitude, which still rings true today: "All too often,
convincing Congress to violate the Constitution is like convincing a cat to
follow a squeaking can opener, but that doesn't excuse the agencies for doing
it."

[https://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/cracked/des/cracking-
des....](https://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/cracked/des/cracking-des.htm)

Chapter 4: Scanning the Source Code

In This chapter:

The Politics of Cryptographic Source Code

The Paper Publishing Exception

Scanning

Bootstrapping

The next few chapters of this book contain specially formatted versions of the
documents that we wrote to design the DES Cracker. These documents are the
primary sources of our research in brute-force cryptanalysis, which other
researchers would need in order to duplicate or validate our research results.

The Politics of Cryptographic Source Code

Since we are interested in the rapid progress of the science of cryptography,
as well as in educating the public about the benefits and dangers of
cryptographic technology, we would have preferred to put all the information
in this book on the World Wide Web. There it would be instantly accessible to
anyone worldwide who has an interest in learning about cryptography.

Unfortunately the authors live and work in a country whose policies on
cryptography have been shaped by decades of a secrecy mentality and covert
control. Powerful agencies which depend on wiretapping to do their jobs--as
well as to do things that aren't part of their jobs, but which keep them in
power--have compromised both the Congress and several Executive Branch
agencies. They convinced Congress to pass unconstitutional laws which limit
the freedom of researchers--such as ourselves--to publish their work. (All too
often, convincing Congress to violate the Constitution is like convincing a
cat to follow a squeaking can opener, but that doesn't excuse the agencies for
doing it.) They pressured agencies such as the Commerce Department, State
Department, and Department of Justice to not only subvert their oaths of
office by supporting these unconstitutional laws, but to act as front-men in
their repressive censorship scheme, creating unconstitutional regulations and
enforcing them against ordinary researchers and authors of software.

The National Security Agency is the main agency involved, though they seem to
have recruited the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the last several years.
From the outside we can only speculate what pressures they brought to bear on
these other parts of the government. The FBI has a long history of illicit
wiretapping, followed by use of the information gained for blackmail,
including blackmail of Congressmen and Presidents. FBI spokesmen say that was
"the old bad FBI" and that all that stuff has been cleaned up after J. Edgar
Hoover died and President Nixon was thrown out of office. But these agencies
still do everything in their power to prevent ordinary citizens from being
able to examine their activities, e.g. stonewalling those of us who try to use
the Freedom of Information Act to find out exactly what they are doing.

Anyway, these agencies influenced laws and regulations which now make it
illegal for U.S. crypto researchers to publish their results on the World Wide
Web (or elsewhere in electronic form).

The Paper Publishing Exception

Several cryptographers have brought lawsuits against the US Government because
their work has been censored by the laws restricting the export of
cryptography. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation is sponsoring one of these
suits, Bernstein v. Department of Justice, et al ).* One result of bringing
these practices under judicial scrutiny is that some of the most egregious
past practices have been eliminated.

For example, between the 1970's and early 1990's, NSA actually did threaten
people with prosecution if they published certain scientific papers, or put
them into libraries. They also had a "voluntary" censorship scheme for people
who were willing to sign up for it. Once they were sued, the Government
realized that their chances of losing a court battle over the export controls
would be much greater if they continued censoring books, technical papers, and
such.

Judges understand books. They understand that when the government denies
people the ability to write, distribute, or sell books, there is something
very fishy going on. The government might be able to pull the wool over a few
judges' eyes about jazzy modern technologies like the Internet, floppy disks,
fax machines, telephones, and such. But they are unlikely to fool the judges
about whether it's constitutional to jail or punish someone for putting ink
onto paper in this free country.

* See [http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/Bernstein_case/](http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/Bernstein_case/) .

Therefore, the last serious update of the cryptography export controls (in
1996) made it explicit that these regulations do not attempt to regulate the
publication of information in books (or on paper in any format). They waffled
by claiming that they "might" later decide to regulate books--presumably if
they won all their court cases -- but in the meantime, the First Amendment of
the United States Constitution is still in effect for books, and we are free
to publish any kind of cryptographic information in a book. Such as the one in
your hand.

Therefore, cryptographic research, which has traditionally been published on
paper, shows a trend to continue publishing on paper, while other forms of
scientific research are rapidly moving online.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has always published most of its
information electronically. We produce a regular electronic newsletter,
communicate with our members and the public largely by electronic mail and
telephone, and have built a massive archive of electronically stored
information about civil rights and responsibilities, which is published for
instant Web or FTP access from anywhere in the world.

We would like to publish this book in the same form, but we can't yet, until
our court case succeeds in having this research censorship law overturned.
Publishing a paper book's exact same information electronically is seriously
illegal in the United States, if it contains cryptographic software. Even
communicating it privately to a friend or colleague, who happens to not live
in the United States, is considered by the government to be illegal in
electronic form.

The US Department of Commerce has officially stated that publishing a World
Wide Web page containing links to foreign locations which contain
cryptographic software "is not an export that is subject to the Export
Administration Regulations (EAR)."* This makes sense to us--a quick reductio
ad absurdum shows that to make a ban on links effective, they would also have
to ban the mere mention of foreign Universal Resource Locators. URLs are
simple strings of characters, like [http://www.eff.org;](http://www.eff.org;)
it's unlikely that any American court would uphold a ban on the mere naming of
a location where some piece of information can be found.

Therefore, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is free to publish links to
where electronic copies of this book might exist in free countries. If we ever
find out about such an overseas electronic version, we will publish such a
link to it from the page at
[http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/](http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/)
.

* In the letter at [http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/comp_law/jvd/pdj-bxa-gjs070397.h...](http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/comp_law/jvd/pdj-bxa-gjs070397.htm), which is part of Professor Peter Junger's First Amendment lawsuit over the crypto export control regulations.

[...]

~~~
sagebird
It seems like a cute and irrelevant distinction that electronic software would
be published in a book. If researchers created a computer that processed
information using proteins in plant cells instead of electrons, and such a
computer could execute programs on this book directly instead of “scanning”
it, would not the textbook be software? When laws say “electronic versions” I
don’t think they literally mean to refer electrons, but rather, computer-
consumables/executables.

Was this tested before a court and did they accept this sort of obviously
subversive behavior? (Not that I personally agree with the laws restricting
crypto export.)

~~~
croon
IANAL, but if the distinction clashes with the crypto export laws, does it not
follow that crypto export laws clash with the first amendment? Which then
makes them unconstitutional and the focus should be on whether that is wanted
behavior and the constitution should be amended, or not.

~~~
JudgeWapner
> The First Amendment made controlling all use of cryptography inside the U.S.
> illegal, but controlling access to U.S. developments by others was more
> practical

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States)

------
reneberlin
I think in the long run, the user could risk the complete google-account if
they begin rating the uploads a violation of TOS.

I advise a totally seperate account when using this tool.

But anyways, something inside me likes it. Nicely done. Good job :)

~~~
lordpankake
This is a complete hack job and probably useless if Google changes free
storage for docs.

That being said, they currently allow the guys at /r/datahoarder to use gsuite
accounts costing £1 for life with unlimited storage quotas. These are
regularly filled to like 50TB and Google doesn't bat an eye.

~~~
kevingrahl
As a data hoarder myself with somewhere around 300TB on G Suite Business,
please tell me more about those £1 for life accounts!

~~~
lordpankake
Search them up on ebay! Loads of IT admins for schools sell a random email
with you. Pretty scammy.

------
nemosaltat
Anyone remember Gdrive? I can’t find it now, but I think it was probably early
or mid 2000s. It let you store files as a local disk (FUSE) via Gmail
attachments.

~~~
BlackRing
I remember using it back in 2005 iirc, and it was amazing. The files had a
label called gmailfs.gDisk which is how it could keep the "file system"
separate from the rest.

Now Google generously offers Drive with 15Gigs of space.

~~~
clarry
15 gigs would've been generous in 2005, now it's not.

~~~
tln
Are there competitors who offer more for free?

~~~
coolspot
Mega.co.nz

------
joebergeron
Me and a friend came up with a similar idea of a sort of distributed file
system implemented across a huge array of blog comment sections. Of course
you’d need a bunch of replication and fault tolerance and the ability to
automatically scrape for new blogs to post spammy-looking comments on, but I
thought it was a pretty funny and neat idea when we came up with it.

~~~
jmkni
I heard about a subreddit a while ago, where every post/comment was a random
string. It was speculated at the time that something similar was going on.

------
markbnj
Very neat, but it seems to me the issue with all wink-wink schemes like this
is that you're ultimately getting something that wasn't explicitly promised,
and so might be taken away at any time. So while interesting you couldn't
really ever feel secure storing anything that mattered this way.

~~~
blackflame7000
Yea but you could store unlimited backups across multiple accounts. (Not
advocating this however)

------
Scaevolus
You can also just use GSuite with a few users to get unlimited Google Drive
storage.

[https://support.google.com/a/answer/139019?hl=en#6_storage](https://support.google.com/a/answer/139019?hl=en#6_storage)

~~~
judge2020
That references "for education", but it's also true for GSuite Business (and
enterprise, but not basic). You'll need to be paying for at least 5 users, or
$60/month.

~~~
nefitty
Here's the business info:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782)

------
wmichelin
Someone is going to notice a few accounts with insanely high storage usage,
and then comes the ban-hammer. Enjoy losing your Google account!

~~~
sircastor
I think that depends on their tools and how they evaluate data usage. If the
reporting states that the accounts are using very little storage because it's
using the same measuring stick that the client does them it's invisible. The
question comes up during an audit of the system when the disk usage doesn't
match the report. Then again, if this is used by few people it may just look
like a margin of error.

~~~
londons_explore
It'll more be that the Google docs "live editing" backends are expensive to
use disk and memory wise. They store complete version history with each
keystroke of a document.

There's a good chance a megabyte of "document" costs Google a gigabyte of
internal storage...

~~~
Outpox
> They store complete version history with each keystroke of a document.

I would expect them to only store a diff between each version instead of
storing the whole thing. Couldn't find much about this after a quick search.

------
thrownaway954
Honestly this isn't ground breaking, we have been using BASE64 to convert
binary to ASCII as a way of "sharing" files all the way to USENET days. While
applications like these make it easy for the masses to participate in the
idea, they don't bring anything new to the table.

That all said, this is really cool from a design perspective and I poured over
the code learned a lot.

~~~
aembleton
It's also how email attachments work.

------
kccqzy
Google doc allows you to upload images from your computer. Why not just do
that? With proper steganography no one will bat an eye on a few docs with some
multi-megabyte pictures.

------
_bxg1
I had an (evil; don't do this) idea a while back to create a Dropbox-like
program that stores all your data as binary chunks attached to draft emails
spread across an arbitrary number of free email accounts.

~~~
mmastrac
This existed just after gmail launched. Can't recall the name of the program,
but I played around with it to store a few hundred MB in a test account.

~~~
hcs
GmailFS?
[https://web.archive.org/web/20060424165737/http://richard.jo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060424165737/http://richard.jones.name/google-
hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html)

~~~
mmastrac
That might have been it!

------
robador51
I may be mistaken, but as far as I'm aware Google docs synced to your local
machine are nothing more than links to documents in the Google Drive cloud.
None of the data inside those docs is actually stored locally. I found this
out the hard way when I decided to move away from GD and lost a lot of files.

So buyer beware I guess.

~~~
throwawaygoog10
Should you want to move from Google services, the best way of ensuring you
keep your data is to use Takeout [1], which exports your documents as both doc
and html files.

[1] [https://takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com)

------
morpheuskafka
You could do the same thing with QR codes in Google Photos, the compression
required for unlimited storage wouldn't affect them.

------
retroplasma
Related: unlimited private incremental storage on Usenet (concept):

[https://gist.github.com/retroplasma/264d9fed2350feb19f977575...](https://gist.github.com/retroplasma/264d9fed2350feb19f977575981bb914#idea)

TL;DR: An alternative to NZB, RAR and PAR2. Private "magnet-link" that points
to encrypted incremental data.

------
Causality1
Reminds me of the old programs that would turn your Gmail storage into a
network drive by splitting everything into 25MB chunks. Utterly miserable
experience with terrible latency and reliability.

~~~
follower
Yeah, there were a couple of projects that implemented that functionality
(mentioned more in my comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917018)
if you're interested).

Also, "Utterly miserable experience with terrible latency and reliability." is
such a great customer endorsement quote. :D

------
MatthewRayfield
I couldn't find it with a quick search, but I remember many years ago someone
creating a similar scheme for storing files inside of TinyURLs.

You would run the uploader and get back a list of TinyURLs that could then be
used to retrieve the files later with a downloader.

But you couldn't store too much in each URL so the resulting list could be
pretty big.

~~~
klyrs
This is a favorite lunch topic at work. AFAIK we stumbled on the idea
ourselves, but I'm not surprised to hear it's unoriginal. Rather than a list,
our design is a tree structure where leaf nodes contain data and branch nodes
contain lists of tinyurls...

------
anonuser123456
Because I'm sure Google has NO data on pathalogical docs file sizes. I can't
wait for the follow on 'Google banned my account with all my life's data that
I didn't back up anywhere for no good reason'

------
blackflame7000
I wonder if this could be used to create a P2P network like bit torrent except
trackers point to blocks at google doc urls instead of peers/seeds

~~~
throw4way19
I discovered that a lot of pirate stream sites are already doing something
similar (but not exact) to this.

They store fragments of movies (rather than the full videos) in Google Drive
files and then combine them together during playback. Each fragment could then
be copied and mirrored across different accounts, so if any are taken down
they can just switch to another copy. Pretty clever (albeit abusive) solution
for free bandwidth.

------
lofties
Very cool! About a year ago I had a similar idea, but to store arbitrary data
in PNG chunks[1] and upload them to "unlimited" image hosts like IMGUR and
Reddit.

[1] [http://blog.brian.jp/python/png/2016/07/07/file-fun-with-
pyh...](http://blog.brian.jp/python/png/2016/07/07/file-fun-with-pyhon.html)

~~~
collinmanderson
I have a feeling PNG might work on Google Photos too, but I haven't tried it.

~~~
binwiederhier
If you wanna give it a shot, try the code I linked here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19916126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19916126)

Although if Picasa (predecessor to Google Photos) worked with BMP, it may be
better to do that because it's much easier and more space efficient to encode
arbitrary data in than PNG.

------
mikorym
So, are the +- 700 kB files too small to register as taking up any space?

~~~
ptman
google drive doesn't count docs, spreadsheets or presentations against your
quota

------
kyrra
Not so unlimited given these restrictions:
[https://developers.google.com/apps-
script/guides/services/qu...](https://developers.google.com/apps-
script/guides/services/quotas)

------
mirimir
Could someone please ELI5 how Google Drive doesn't include text files toward
usage?

~~~
angelsl
These aren't text files, but Google Docs files, which Google doesn't count
against an account's quota.

~~~
mirimir
OK, I did see that.

But I don't understand why Google would do that. For most users, aren't Google
Docs files a substantial part of their usage? Or do people mainly store
backups?

~~~
ShinTakuya
Simple, Google wants to encourage people to use their office suite so they
indirectly subsidise it in this way.

------
irrational
I've wondered if someone could do the same thing with videos and jpgs. Amazon
prime, as one example, allows you to store an unlimited number of image files
for "free". What if there was a program that would take a video file and split
it up into its individual frames as jpgs and stored them on Amazon prime. When
you wanted to watch the video the program would rebuild the video file from
the individual jpgs on AWS.

~~~
michaelmior
My guess would be that the latency of this approach would be far too high to
be practical. But you could probably abuse the JPEG format to stuff bits of
the video into image files. I think you'd probably still need to spend a fair
amount of time buffering before you could start watching without lag.

------
giomasce
To me it looks like iodine
([https://code.kryo.se/iodine/](https://code.kryo.se/iodine/)): very nice as a
hacking tool to prove a point, but unlikely to be actually helpful in all but
very peculiar situations. As a hacker, of course, I value a lot the first part
of it!

------
oldman123456789
I do the same on a different cloud storage provider. I won't name it because I
don't want to be banned from it!

------
yeukhon
I don’t know anyone remember but some years ago I remember seeing a file
compressed from 1GB to 1mb. And I was amazed.

~~~
jl6
42.zip?

~~~
dvhh
even more dangerous for bot

[https://rehmann.co/blog/10-gb-27-kb-gzip-file-present-
http-s...](https://rehmann.co/blog/10-gb-27-kb-gzip-file-present-http-
scanners/)

------
wsgreen
Nice! I did a similar hack to get unlimited Dropbox space by creating many
accounts and distributing the files across the accounts.

[https://github.com/WarrenGreen/InfiniteDrop](https://github.com/WarrenGreen/InfiniteDrop)

------
yalogin
How is this different from encrypting the binary locally, and store the result
as hex strings?

~~~
rahimnathwani
It's 75% more space efficient. And it's automated.

------
anilakar
Correction: unlimited as long as it takes Google to fix this oversight in
quota calculation.

~~~
throwawaygoog10
It isn't truly an oversight, it's an abuse of the fact that Docs/Sheets/Slides
are not counted toward your quota. Their storage model is a little more
complicated than a standard stream of bytes like an image or a text file.

------
baroffoos
Has anyone actually tried storing a large amount of data like this? I feel
like creating a new google account and using it as a backup for a 300gb folder
I have.

~~~
acuozzo
Yes. It's called: Post to alt.binaries.* on Usenet.

It's effectively the same thing under the hood. Binaries are split and
converted to text using yEnc (or base64, et al.) and uploaded as "articles".
An XML file containing all of the message-IDs (an "NZB") is uploaded as well
so that the file can be found, downloaded, and reassembled in the right order.

This form of binary distribution has been around since the '80s if you change
some of the technical details; e.g. using UUencode rather than yEnc.

Spend $5 for a 3-day unlimited Usenet account with e.g. UsenetServer.com and
upload it.

If you want it to stay up, then make another account in 3925 days (the
retention period), download it, and then reupload it for another 10+ years of
storage.

------
nichochar
This is very clever, and a neat interface.

On the one hand, I think this is great, on the other, I hope it doesn't force
google to add limits that bother me in the future :P

------
zelon88
Couldn't you also embed data into images and upload them to Google photos, or
is that discarded when they convert and compress the image in the backend?

~~~
PetahNZ
Depends how you encode it. A bunch QR codes, no problem. But encoding into the
individual pixel, probably not so much.

~~~
zelon88
I mean include binary data in an image file. So you would have a 300x300px jpg
picture of a flower that's 20mb which you could unpack to a binary file.

~~~
c8g
storing original photo will use google drive space quota (if you don't have a
pixel phone).

only high quality is unlimited (reduced size)

so, if your data survive photo compression technology, you can do it.

------
kevingrahl
I think I already saw this a few (>6) months ago on reddit, have you
changed/improved anything in the meantime?

------
purplezooey
Damn 4:3? That ain't too bad.

~~~
quickthrower2
Base 64 gives you 6 bits per character. Assuming a character requires 8 bits
to store eg in UTF8 then yep that’s 8:6. Might be better with compression
getting you closer to 1:1.

------
localhostdotdev
already better than s3 :) makes me think of
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/)

------
borplk
So what makes the data not count against the usage?

------
karjudev
It's such a weird trick that I love it!

------
dogma1138
Google UseNet.

------
laylomo2
Thinking outside the box.

------
sdan
Nice!

------
gaspoweredcat
very clever, well done!

~~~
ConcernedCoder
yeah! let's hope no google employees see this ... oh wait

~~~
throwawaygoog10
:)

------
oyebenny
ELI5 please?

~~~
dvhh
The script split file into small base64 chunks that are stored into
"documents" (mime type: application/vnd.google-apps.document ) that apparently
don't count against google drive quota.

------
booleandilemma
Google, give this man a job!

------
jonnycomputer
Too bad there is no similar trick for atmospheric carbon.

~~~
jonnycomputer
everyone can go fuck off

