200 TB isn’t that crazy of an amount but also can’t believe that shit you built up as a student is super worth it.

talk to the heads of your uni and tell them your problem and if there’s a chance to delete the account after you saved the photos. btw think about deleting duplicates or smth cause that’s a lot of data

Well… that’s a horrible situation to be in, but, apart from the advices given by folks, another solution will be grabbing 10pc’s, and make them download 20TB each, if you can have different connections, the better.

I know using 10pc’s is not that easy, but thats the only solution I can think of right now given the emergency. With that maybe you could save half of the information. Of course you need to buy some HDD’s

I got my 2000000,000000 Gb stored on my dropbox and need to move it by tomorrow. Its the most important data in the world - bummer that i only thought about it just now. Im willing to invest 10$ for initial setup, anyone have a service in mind?

been my primary backup for the almost decade I’ve had it
I need to move it or lose it

What do you mean by this?
Do you have other local copies and another backup or is this your main archive of everything?

Are you just looking for a convenient way to transfer this all to another cloud provider to maintain an off-site backup without having to re-upload from your local archive stored on your own hardware (probably stuck behind a gigabit modem) or are you in panic mode because this is the only complete archive of your data that exists?
Will you be losing your backup or your data if this doesn’t get moved?

You will probably have to use cloud to cloud data transfer services here because it is unlikely you’ll be able to download everything in the short time left. Consider getting everything moved to a pay-per-GB cloud storage service temporarily, just to save everything, then build your own server and look into colocation hosting for a cheaper long term solution. With those you own the hardware and rent rack space where it’s powered and connected to the internet, which means you can save a lot of money in the long run. Or just keep your server at home. Or build two and do home + colo so you have a real backup.

You can fit 15 drives easy in a 4U case and with 22TBs that’d be 330TB raw. Plenty of space for 200TB after setting up some redundancy and having some hot spares.
No matter what you choose you are going to be spending thousands of dollars to store this data if you wish to keep it and that’s why your account is being deleted. One day all this shit will fit on an SD card or single SSD, but that day is not today.

i wasn’t expecting this much judgment and vitriol asking this question LOL

the way i wrote is how i’m used to saying it in real life (as in the unit of measurement… excuse me for not reducing it when i wrote the post)

and it’s literally every single photo, screenshot, video, etc. that i’ve taken over the last 8 years that has been automatically uploading and stored in the Google Photos. idk why that sounds so unreasonable but if it helps I’m also a content creator and it’s possible my file sizes are large due to the quality i’m recording them in.

Another point to clarify is that my prior university is purging all accounts. there’s no way to save the account or get the deadline extended (even if i were to take another course).

I really appreciate those that have commented with genuine feedback and suggestions. I understand I’ll have to prioritize what can be saved and I also need to get a move on with saving it due to download and upload speeds.

Honestly, the best you can do right now is to select a handful of your best collection and download it using campus network (get your most trusty professor if possible to borrow his office to store your system while downloading it). 200 TB over 7 days would require something in the neighborhood of 300 MByte per second minimum (and 5 HDD running simultaneously to avoid bottleneck). That’s basically asking for the nigh-impossible: 2.5 Gbit (I suggest going for 4 Gbit) over network that you cannot really trust its throughput

Another option I could suggest is to rent something like Mega for a month or two while you download everything you can at your connection speed