Hefty cloud storage recovery fees.
Discussion
A client of mine has recently approached an architectural designer to obtain drawings produced in 2013 for the previous owner of their house.
The designer wants to charge them £250+VAT for 'cloud storage recovery fees'. When I google 'cloud storage recovery fees' I can't find anything close to that magnitude of cost.
Are they lying to justify stiffing my client for some drawings?
They are also saying they have no idea what's in the archive until they've paid the fee, which smells wrong and makes him double wary of simply paying and hoping.
The designer wants to charge them £250+VAT for 'cloud storage recovery fees'. When I google 'cloud storage recovery fees' I can't find anything close to that magnitude of cost.
Are they lying to justify stiffing my client for some drawings?
They are also saying they have no idea what's in the archive until they've paid the fee, which smells wrong and makes him double wary of simply paying and hoping.
Not quite the same, but the company I work for transitioned to SAP about 7 years ago. In theory we still have access to the data from the old system, but in practice most of the people who used it (and the IT people who maintained it) have now left. If we had to find something we'd almost certainly need to bring in some outside help.
It's a common thing with cloud storage to have long-term "cold" storage like Amazon Glacier or the Azure Storage Archive tier - usually cheap to put in, slow and more expensive to get out again. Ideal for things like work you've done that might not ever be needed again but worth keeping just in case.
Unless it's terabytes of data it won't have cost them anything like that to store for 8 years and retrieve. If they need an outside company to do it for them though it's possible that it would cost that in someone's time to fulfil the request.
Unless it's terabytes of data it won't have cost them anything like that to store for 8 years and retrieve. If they need an outside company to do it for them though it's possible that it would cost that in someone's time to fulfil the request.
sjg said:
It's a common thing with cloud storage to have long-term "cold" storage like Amazon Glacier or the Azure Storage Archive tier - usually cheap to put in, slow and more expensive to get out again. Ideal for things like work you've done that might not ever be needed again but worth keeping just in case.
Unless it's terabytes of data it won't have cost them anything like that to store for 8 years and retrieve. If they need an outside company to do it for them though it's possible that it would cost that in someone's time to fulfil the request.
I'd be surprised if its even a gigabyte of data. Is it reasonable, if using an outside service, that they've no idea what's even in the archive prior to paying to access it?Unless it's terabytes of data it won't have cost them anything like that to store for 8 years and retrieve. If they need an outside company to do it for them though it's possible that it would cost that in someone's time to fulfil the request.
Think of it like a digital version of the old archive box systems for paper filing - you stick the past years filings in boxes, hopefully label/record what's in each box, it all gets picked up in a van and taken off to a warehouse somewhere.
You want something back for Client X from year Y, you ask for the relevant box(es), it comes a few days later and then you rummage through the contents to get the bit of paper you needed.
The actual costs to Amazon or whoever is irrelevant if it's a few hours of someone's time to retrieve this stuff, and I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to charge a fee to get this stuff for someone that wasn't their original customer.
You want something back for Client X from year Y, you ask for the relevant box(es), it comes a few days later and then you rummage through the contents to get the bit of paper you needed.
The actual costs to Amazon or whoever is irrelevant if it's a few hours of someone's time to retrieve this stuff, and I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to charge a fee to get this stuff for someone that wasn't their original customer.
This AWS S3 pricing page should give you an idea of their actual cloud retrieval costs. Even if they're using a different cloud service, the ballpark should be similar.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
The point is, even if we're talking several GB, cloud costs are pennies.
So what they're actually charging is £250 for someone's time. If the files are stored in a format accessible for the layman then yeah, they're taking the piss a bit IMO. If those files need a bunch of work to make them readable for the client as opposed to specialised software, perhaps not.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
The point is, even if we're talking several GB, cloud costs are pennies.
So what they're actually charging is £250 for someone's time. If the files are stored in a format accessible for the layman then yeah, they're taking the piss a bit IMO. If those files need a bunch of work to make them readable for the client as opposed to specialised software, perhaps not.
The information should be mostly PDFs, possibly a few word.doc files and hopefully some AutoCAD .dwg files.
Nothing that esoteric, and it should be a matter of drag into dropbox and e-mail the link.
If they said 'it's a flat fee for recovering old files from archive' I'd believe them, even if it is a bit steep, but it's the 'storage cloud recovery fees' that make them look a little suspect.
Nothing that esoteric, and it should be a matter of drag into dropbox and e-mail the link.
If they said 'it's a flat fee for recovering old files from archive' I'd believe them, even if it is a bit steep, but it's the 'storage cloud recovery fees' that make them look a little suspect.
NDNDNDND said:
A client of mine has recently approached an architectural designer to obtain drawings produced in 2013 for the previous owner of their house.
Does your client have any right to have the drawings at all?We've had plans done for our house, but might move instead. It's been suggested that we could sell the plans to whoever buys the house.
Whatever, I guess the designer can charge whatever they like.
Sheepshanks said:
NDNDNDND said:
A client of mine has recently approached an architectural designer to obtain drawings produced in 2013 for the previous owner of their house.
Does your client have any right to have the drawings at all?We've had plans done for our house, but might move instead. It's been suggested that we could sell the plans to whoever buys the house.
Whatever, I guess the designer can charge whatever they like.
I'm trying to figure out if what they've said is actually true and, so far, it doesn't seem to be. My client doesn't want to be £300 out of pocket, only to be given the single, low-res PDF he already has.
NDNDNDND said:
No, I agree. On the face of it I've advised the client that it's good value. However, the way they've justified the fee feels strange and, when asked to provide a schedule of information, they've refused saying they cannot access the archive before payment.
I'm trying to figure out if what they've said is actually true and, so far, it doesn't seem to be. My client doesn't want to be £300 out of pocket, only to be given the single, low-res PDF he already has.
"Cannot" is a loaded term, I'd suggest. They probably can access the drawings, if they wanted to. But they would have to take somebody off other, probably fee-paying work to do so. Chances are they aren't great with archive storage and something produced 8 years ago may well not be in a formal document management system - so in the first place they might have to work out where it is; if their filing system isn't great, they might need to look in old backups or long-term storage, which isn't often accessed. So they can't justify the effort, without actually being paid for it. As you say, there might only be one crappy drawing there which you decide you don't want, so they've wasted all that time and effort.I'm trying to figure out if what they've said is actually true and, so far, it doesn't seem to be. My client doesn't want to be £300 out of pocket, only to be given the single, low-res PDF he already has.
Put yourself in their shoes. There is no upside for them in this. You're not a customer, you're not going to be a customer, this is a distraction and ancient history to boot. And they've probably priced accordingly.
NDNDNDND said:
A client of mine has recently approached an architectural designer to obtain drawings produced in 2013 for the previous owner of their house.
The designer wants to charge them £250+VAT for 'cloud storage recovery fees'. When I google 'cloud storage recovery fees' I can't find anything close to that magnitude of cost.
Are they lying to justify stiffing my client for some drawings?
They are also saying they have no idea what's in the archive until they've paid the fee, which smells wrong and makes him double wary of simply paying and hoping.
I'd be wary that they actually have the data to recover and this price is to stop this being found out.The designer wants to charge them £250+VAT for 'cloud storage recovery fees'. When I google 'cloud storage recovery fees' I can't find anything close to that magnitude of cost.
Are they lying to justify stiffing my client for some drawings?
They are also saying they have no idea what's in the archive until they've paid the fee, which smells wrong and makes him double wary of simply paying and hoping.
I'd definitely have a no complete data, no fee clause if you do go ahead as it would be too easy for them to come back with 'the data is corrupted' when they don't really have it.
From the effort side, the cost is not huge if the data is stored away somewhere and needs to be retrieved.
98elise said:
Were the drawings used for a build or extension? If won't the local authority planning department hold a copy? You can normally get copies from them for a few pounds.
Yup!Just checked our local authority planning department on-line portal and found the plans for our extension from 2000.
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