How is it that 4 years after the start of this project we still have to tell people that their dedicated cloud storage is for their projects and not their 8TB server backups or 600000+ vacation pictures…
We literally have processes sending you mails that keep telling you should sort your crap and you still manage not to listen. And then we get support tickets like “cloud storage abnormally slow” “bug in performances” etc… The last gem being a small company CEO that contacted our CEO about this “problem”, he had syncd his entire workstation and told his employees to do the same…

I’m not sure how to convey the stack of feelings I have regarding all of this. I want not to care but I can’t. I want to get angry but what’s the point.

I don't know what the root cause of the performance perform is but it's you can send emails about it your can probably have consequences for it.

Back in the day I had the same issue with users and the office file service. The issue was that we didn't have infinite storage and that everything gets archived (snapshots, replicated, and off site backups). So the employees holiday pictures and music archives get at least 3 copies and after deletion stays in snapshots a long time.
After numerous warnings and questioning if the really want us to have their private life we just started to except a purge. There was a save place they could store media. But all the default places like desktop, docs and Picasa/iTunes folders where purged. Now even the assholes that has to be told 3 times lost their data suddenly started to learn.

You as a cloud provider might be doing the same by just increasing cost by charging for IOOPS above a certain amount exorbitantly for example.

Yes and we’re definitely doing that when these cases happen it’s just a lengthy process, in the sense that deleting thousands of items at once is not a very fast operation much less when it starts becoming TBs of data. This is why it’s not automated and why we only do it when it happens although… if we had automated it from the start these things wouldn’t be possible in most cases. As things are right now there is not much I can personally do, it’s in the hands of higher ups, I can only suggest what would be best 😬