Edit: To clarify:

Is it even possible, financially speaking, to keep adding storage? I mean, advertisements don’t even make a lot of money, is the indefinite growth of server storage even sustainable?

Or will they do what Twitch does with old content and just delete them?

  • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    If you’re asking if YouTube has a finite amount of storage, the answer is yes. Assuming no safeguards were in place, you could theoretically fill up all their storage.

    If you’re asking whether they will run out of storage… probably not while it is considered important. YouTube can buy additional storage space (the good ending), or they can delete content they deem unimportant (the bad ending). Or, they could decide that YouTube is “finished” and elect not to increase its storage. It’s their storage, so they call the shots.

    Really, everything hosted “in the cloud” is hosted locally on someone else’s storage. If that storage dies, the data dies, unless you or someone else has a backup.

    Edit: fixed for clarity

    • Clent@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Confidently incorrect.

      YouTube is owned by Google. Google is a cloud provider. Therefore YouTube is hosted on its own cloud.

      Services are setup to automatically spin up more resources as needed.

      Your claim that the cloud can lose data because of hard drive failure is ridiculous.

      You do not understand how any of this works.

      • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Your claim that the cloud can lose data because of hard drive failure is ridiculous.

        Yes, that was a simplification of the reality that the data exists in storage somewhere. Killing one drive shouldn’t cause the data to be destroyed, but if you killed enough of their data centers, eventually you would see data loss.

        Services are setup to automatically spin up more resources as needed.

        Eventually, you can find a load large enough overwhelm these services. My point really was that theoretically you could overwhelm the system, but that it is unlikely to happen.

        YouTube is owned by Google. Google is a cloud provider. Therefore YouTube is hosted on its own cloud.

        That’s a bit of a cop-out. I guess I should have said “in a cloud that isn’t self-hosted”. Like yeah if I build my own cloud then I trivially control my data, but that’s usually not the case.

        You do not understand how any of this works.

        Well I’m not in the IT department but I do have a baseline understanding of how cloud computing works. Your data has to “live” somewhere, possibly multiple “somewheres”. If you compromise all the “somewheres”, or at least the locations of the desired data in the “somewheres”, the data is gone.

        Edit: I edited my original comment to reference “storage” rather than hard drives specifically.

      • flyingjake@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        I work in cloud computing and it’s amazing to me how magical people like you think it is. Yes Google owns YouTube, but could still run out of resources if Google chooses, they are still at the mercy of their provider.

        Services may be setup to dynamically grow but they are still consuming finite physical resources and would run out if the provider doesn’t expand those resources.

        The cloud most certainly can lose data due to hard drive failure and other hardware issues; the services are designed to make that very unlikely, but cloud services also have disaster recovery options you must implement if you want to be truly isolated from a given hardware footprint.

        • Clent@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          So if Google allows to runout of space the it willing. That is quite circular.

          The amount of data YouTube is processing is not going to be affected by a small brigade.

          Please cite when YouTube has lost content because of storage failure.

          Do you understand the infrastructure Google has built around their services to prevent data loss?

          I’m not arguing any fool with a cloud account cannot lose data. This is specifically about YouTube.

      • qaz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Your claim that the cloud can lose data because of hard drive failure is ridiculous.

        Did he claim that then?