When does free tier data gets deleted?

Hello,

Today I looked into my storj account, which I registered when free tier had around 150gb, for fun and testing purposes, and found my old data. Why is it still there? Last year storj announced to begin to delete free tier data of users not paying until May 2024. Or do I miss something? I thought after almost a year it will be gone. Unfortunately I cannot delete it, because it tells me “access denied”. Do I need my passphrase to delete the data, or do I need to buy premium to gain back full control and then delete it? It’s just 20gb BTW.

Thanks in advance.

I don’t remember deletions having an end-date: more that they hoped to balance them with natural growth… so had flexibility to adjust what-to-delete-and-when.

But if you don’t need it, I’d be confident that if I just ignored it… it will be trashed.

There was an announcement about EU1 deletes some weeks ago: Data Cleanup Plan But it seems like it did not happen so far.

The limits have been set to zero, so you also cannot delete the stalled data. There was a fix for that, the deletion limit is not set to zero anymore, so more fresh expired accounts allows to delete the data.

Since your account is more old, then there are three methods

  • add a payment method to the account, it would be unfrozen and delete the data asap, to do not incur any additional charges for usage (the billing registering the usage since the beginning of the month). Then you can request to delete your account via https://supportdcs.storj.io.
  • Or you may also use a GDPR Erasure/deletion request if you are an EU resident.
  • Or you may leave it as is, and it will be deleted sometime in the future automatically (ETA is unknown)
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Why is this limited to EU residents? Why not just let anyone submit the request? And where is CCPA?

And this would be useful to purge PII only anyway, it’s quite useless for encrypted data; to purge it one just needs to lose encryption passphrase. No involvement from storj is needed.

So many questionable choices….

GDPR is a law that only applies in the EU, therefore, people wo do not reside in the EU cannot make official GDPR data deletion/erasure requests via de GDPR form on our help desk portal.

However, this does not mean that we would not also honor requests from non EU customers who also want their data to be deleted, including those who the CCPA rules apply to, or residents of other countries that have implemented different privacy protection laws.

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Was surprised to see my test data still there long after the cleanup for free data as well. I ended up depositing some storj to the account and deleting it to clean it up. Now time for some live data.

I understand that. To condense my vague ramblings to a specific question:

Why is there specific entry for GDPR but not CCPA and other states laws?

In yet other words, why do regulations of EU across the pond get better treatment than laws of 17 or so states of the country the company is based in?

In yet third way: if there is a specific entry for GDPR there must be specific entries for CCPA, ColoPA, CTDPA, UCPA, etc.

The reason is that we have not received a single CCPA based request and only very few from other countries. We do have a procedure in place for complying with CCPA requests which of course we will follow should we ever receive such a request.

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I have a question too. Why keep free and unpaid data in the network? Wouldn’t it be better company wise to just delete the data and safe some money? Or isn’t it that much anymore?

As I understood the Statement from Last year, they wanted to delete the unpaid free tier data step by step as new data gets in, to make it more tolerable for the node operators, so they don’t loose too much data, and earnings.

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Exactly what @gingerbread233 is stated.

We also want to have a capacity right away, when the big customers would be onboarded. I hope - to Storj Global.

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Today, I tried logging into my StorJ account to see if my data got deleted now. It tells, that I can’t login. My login credentials I used were correct. Does that mean the account with it’s data got fully deleted now? TiA

If you registered longer than 60 days ago, it’s likely deleted or at least added to the deletion queue and will be deleted by the following batch. If the account in the deletion queue, there is no way back, so you may assume that it’s deleted or unavailable (the satellite deletes segments, so objects disappearing, when the account is empty, it will be deleted as a final state, thus your email would be locked until then).

My account is a bit older, I got the 150GB free tier back then. When I opened this thread, my account was accessible and data was shown, but not accessible, due to lack of funds. So I let the data rot because it will be deleted anyway. That’s why I checked today, to see if it was already done. As you told, my email will be locked until full deletion. So it seems it’s in locking state now, and will be deleted? How far has the deletion be done from StorJ?

Yes, old accounts were in that state longer than they should, but finally they were catched up when the previous batches were processed.

I have no idea. Deletions are happening by segments, then accounts. I’m unable to build a report for the one account. I can only check the state, but it’s not needed, since you cannot login, this is mean that the account either already deleted, then you should be able to create a new account with that email address, or in the deletion state. In the latter you will be unable to register a new account with the same email address until it will be finally deleted. Empty accounts may stay longer, because seems it’s a separate process and they cost nothing.

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