[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.

[rocky1138]

FTA "A single google doc can store about a million characters. This is around 710KB of base64 encoded data."

This means that in order to reach the limit of the drive space given away for free, they'd need something like 15,000 Google Doc files (15GB) if they counted toward your space limit. I doubt a lot of paying customers even reach that.

The real limit (file size) is reached by binaries. Videos and PDFs, usually.

[mirimir]

I see.

But then, I suspect (as others note) that Google will notice when you have 50GB of Google Docs full of base64.

Seems an iffy way to store stuff.

[londons_explore]

There's a good chance they won't. For privacy reasons, engineers can't just start peering at your files.

They'd have to write a base64 detectors and automate the detection and banning of the accounts without the engineer ever seeing your files.

Any bugs in that code, and they'll ban innocent people.

[mirimir]

Wouldn't it be simpler to just set a generous limit for the number of Google Docs files? Say, 15 thousand?