YouTube is known to reduce the quality of old videos. The resolution is often the same (e.g.1080p), but the image quality is way worse compared to when those videos were new. They’re probably doing it to reduce their storage cost.
Will youtube eventually run out of storage?
Submitted 1 year ago by WtfEvenIsExistence@sopuli.xyz to [deleted]
Comments
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 1 year ago
out@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
I would get bandwidth is their main concern.
httpjames@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Google datacenters are global. They store petabytes of data in each and are constantly evolving to Google Cloud customer needs and their own, meaning they are always expanding their storage network with new servers and drives.
In addition to the hardware expansion, YouTube engineers are experimenting with ways to encode videos in much more efficient formats, such as AV1. Basically, encoding is how a video is stored. The engineers are trying new standards to retain original video quality in much smaller file sizes, leading to more video storage capacity without the need to upgrade servers as quickly.
reddithalation@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
lol you can store petabytes in one rack, much less an entire data center.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Storage for YT is not like storage for your computer. The question to ask is not if Google has enough hard drive space to keep old videos, but what it costs Google to keep old videos available.
First keep in mind that there isn’t just one giant server at YouTube. Everything is replicated onto many parallel servers. And enormous datasets that are too large for any one server are “sharded” across many. Perhaps it takes 1000 server clusters to store one copy of everything.
Now you have to parallelize copies of those 1000 so there are redundant servers that can scale up to meet viewer capacity. This is a server “grid.”
But only some videos are being watched millions of times today. Only those server nodes need 100x redundancy for scale. The long tail of less watched videos might barely need a single node to be made available.
So there is a massive “head” of videos that need tremendous server capacity to be available enough, and a very long and thin “tail” of videos that don’t require much resources at all.
The “head” grows as YT’s overall audience gets bigger. It’s very resource hungry and is probably their main challenge.
The “tail” gets longer as the total library of videos grows. But the tail is thin and making it longer isn’t that expensive.
I’m sure there is also a threshold below which they will drop videos. Made over 1 year ago. More than 30 seconds long. Has never been viewed once. Auhthor account hasn’t been visited in a year either. Drop it. No one will ever know.
Nemo@midwest.social 1 year ago
No, they just add more servers.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 1 year ago
and maybe delete videos that have been, you know… abandoned…
yoz@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Google is a trillion dollar company. TRILLION DOLLARS!
xusontha@ls.buckodr.ink 1 year ago
If your product scales with your size, your pure revenue doesn’t matter as much. Video is expensive
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 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 drives, so they call the shots.
Really, everything hosted “in the cloud” is hosted locally on someone else’s hard drive. If that drive dies, the data dies, unless you or someone else has a backup.
Clent@lemmy.world 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@lemmy.sdf.org 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.
flyingjake@lemmy.one 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.
qaz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Your claim that the cloud can lose data because of hard drive failure is ridiculous.
Did he claim that then?
nutsack@lemmy.world 1 year ago
they will delete content
hikaru755@feddit.de 1 year ago
That specifically excludes accounts with YouTube channels though, if I remember correctly
amanaftermidnight@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But first, will YouTube run out of video IDs? Tom Scott answers: youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8
thessnake03@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just based on the url you shared. 11 characters needed. 26 lowercase letters + 26 uppercase letters + 10 numbers = 62 possible characters choices. 62^11=5.2x10^19 possible ids
amanaftermidnight@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Its base 64. 26 uppercase + 26 lowercase + 10 digits + - and _. And there’s 11 places, so in total it’s 64^11^.
independantiste@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
There’s a physical limit to everything (I’m talking more land space here), especially since a site like youtube will only get more expensive to run as time goes. I expect them to start deleting content that doesn’t make them money like videos with under 5 views that are over a year old relatively soon especially with the current economy. This would make sense for them and would free up a lot of their storage. Google doesn’t disclose the profit margins of youtube but I am pretty sure they are not very large especially now with 8K HDR videos being available
Jamie@jamie.moe 1 year ago
They’re already wiping inactive google accounts and all related content. It’s going to be problematic for old videos where the owners haven’t used the account in some time.
I have a friend that passed away past the limit, I’m going to need to make sure to archive all of his stuff or else it’ll all fall into the youtube void.
nafri@lemmy.world 1 year ago
can’t wait until Google has a planet dedicated as its server ☺️
pancakes@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
They could call it something clever, like Google Earth.
guyrocket@kbin.social 1 year ago
Or the death star.
zakobjoa@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If we build a planet sized computer I got a question for it.
sour@kbin.social 1 year ago
does the set of all sets include itself
atocci@kbin.social 1 year ago
Can't wait to live on the Jupiter Brain with the homies
WtfEvenIsExistence@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Oh they might already have it: Planet Earth
Yepthatsme@kbin.social 1 year ago
Go back into an old email account and try old links. I did that and found links that work from the early 00’s but there are a lot removed.
My first reddit link was from 2007. Memories…
JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Google has said they’ll start deleting long inactive accounts. I’m guessing they’ll go for unlisted next. Eventually they’ll try and prune their catalog to not have tons of unprofitable videos.
kratoz29@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I have wondered the same from time to time, but I really don’t think so, every time tech becomes better and smaller (for the most part), it wouldn’t be crazy to think we can double or triple the current amount of normal storage we have in a few years, without compromising size at all, and Google has the funds to adapt these new tendencies first than most folks.
UncleBadTouch@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
more than 6x10^80 bits might be a bit to much
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
Once YouTube contains all the data in the universe, it will open its protective crust so as to scan itself, completing its thousand year task. Once their task is complete, they will ensure that no new information arises in the only way possible: By destroying the universe.
nfsu2@feddit.cl 1 year ago
I do not think do, but I read google is scraping for money from every paid user so maybe yes. Plus many people are leaving the platform to decentralized options.
NekoKamiGuru@ttrpg.network 1 year ago
Tom Scott did a video on this , it is quite informative .
regalia@literature.cafe 1 year ago
No lol
LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.
Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn’t need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they’ll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.
Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don’t like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we’ll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $13.64/TB. Call it $14 even to keep the numbers easy. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they’d be able to buy 7,142,857 of those hard drives. In a single year. That’s 7,142,857x20TB = 142,857,140 TB of storage, also known as 142^note^ ^1^ exabytes.
That’s a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube’s compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That’s 900,558 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube’s annual revenue.
1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024^n^ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren’t correct. It’d be 123 exbibytes instead.
AceBonobo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wouldn’t assume Googe pays less for storage. They need to pay for land use in many countries, power usage, redundancy and the staff that manages all of it.
They also need powerful servers with fast caching storage and a lot of RAM. They also need to pay for the bandwidth.
As far as I know, they save multiple copies of each video in all resolutions they serve. So an 8K video will also have 4K + 1440p + 1980p + 720p + 480p + 240p + 144p Possibly also 60Hz and 30Hz for some of them and also HDR versions.
You have to add all that to the cost per TB. Finally, there is the question of how much additional storage they need per year, 100 PByr? Presumably also increasing yearly?
LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I wasn’t calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.
All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.
With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.
6mementomori@lemmy.world 1 year ago
what is that ^note^ notation?
LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s a superscript. You can see it in the comment editor options. It’s:
^text^which looks like ^text^You can also check a comment’s source by clicking on the icon that looks like a dog eared piece of paper at the bottom of it.
You999@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I know you are saying Google doesn’t have to worry about redundancy to simplify the math but I think that makes it completely useless.
Redundancy is not just about having another copy incase of data loss but more importantly for enterprises redundancy allows for more throughput. If each video was on a single hard drive the site would not be able to function as even the fastest multi actuator hard drive can only do 524 MB/s in a perfect vacuum.
LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s far from useless.
How much of a factor off do you think the estimate is? You think they need three drives of redundancy each? Ten? Chances are they’re paying half (or less) for storage drives compared to retail pricing. The estimate on what they could get with $100m was also 134 EB, a mind boggling sum of storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using up on the order of 1 EB/year in needed storage. There’s also a lot more room in their budget than 0.34%.
The point is to get a quick and simple estimate to show that there really will not be a problem in Google acquiring sufficient storage. If you want a very accurate estimate of their costs you’ll need data that we do not have. I was not aiming to get a highly accurate estimate of their costs. I made this clear, right from the beginning.
The most popular videos are all going to be kept in RAM, they don’t read them all off disk with every single view request. If you wanted a comment going over the finer details of server architecture, you shouldn’t have looked at the one saying it was doing back of the envelope math on storage costs only, eh?