[mngdtt]

The title is wrong. He had the option of paying for the space at least for the time that it takes him to download and archive the data himself.

[eemil]

Had? He still has that option.

Just buy 48 seats of Google Workspace Business Plus to get 240 TB pooled storage.

237 TB is a lot of storage, 864 USD/month is actually pretty cheap to store it all in the cloud. For comparizon, Backblaze B2 costs 6 USD/TB which works out to 1422 USD/month.

As much as I despise Google, this is simply a case of RTFM.

[nhumrich]

Source? None of the emails shown said anything about buying additional space.

[jsnell]

The first email shown in the article ends with the call to action of "get more storage" and a link. Pretty obviously that would be buying additional space, not getting it for free.

(But it would cost something like $5k-10k/month, not the ~$10/month that he seems willing to pay.)

[jsolson]

The second one has a link labeled "free up or get more storage."

I suspect it links here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/12005619?sjid=1774262812...

[kristofferR]

Pretty clear blackmail. "We are gonna delete your data before you have a chance to download it, unless you pay us thousands of dollars"