I believe we shared that we are adjusting free tier limits due to abuse, and that may get adjusted further in order to limit ongoing issues around it. Some potential free tier abusers likely created many accounts which have not been purged yet. Some growth is going to be due to this free tier abuse.
If you ask me how much and such, I don’t know because I don’t know what any one abuser is doing that breaks terms of service versus legit usage of the network. That is something our engineering team is working on.
Synthetic (test) data is not put on production servers. Minus some QA style testing data that is small for performance tracking and bug checks, etc.
No one at Storj is looking to add extra data to enlarge expenditure, except where JG already mentioned.
We do have a newsletter where we announce business deals and happenings when it makes sense to do so. We don’t control customers, so even if they were to tell us, “We have 500 PB of data we are going to upload!” doesn’t tell us when, how quickly, and for how long. We do have capacity planning discussions with customers. But to tell SNO’s that 500 PB is incoming is outside of our knowledge. It all depends on the customer’s timing, not our own.
I would expect some of this data to be erased at some point due to cleansing the abusers off the platform. Storage allotments will lower. The timing is unknown right now. I am making an assumption. It “could” be all legit data. Probably not though. Once the free tier abuse is managed, we will have a better idea of customer data flow.