
Microsoft is cutting free OneDrive storage from 15 to 5 GB - rfjedwards
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Microsoft-OneDrive-storage-changes-bf91132d-d0cb-4cbb-96ba-86278c5c1c2f?WT.mc_id=PART_OneDrive-Email_OneRM_StorageChanges_FAQ&ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
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deprave
If you read the announcement you get an idea of just how messed up this is.

Quoting: "We overcommitted with our free storage limits and we want to focus
on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that
benefit the majority of our users. If we continued with the current offerings,
we wouldn’t be able to sustain our growth and deliver the reliable service
that you count on."

Quoting further: "We will be actively communicating with our users as these
changes start rolling out via email and in-product notifications. These
notifications will start at least 90 days before the changes take effect to
ensure that you have enough time to act or make changes."

In other words, Microsoft, a $400 billion company with $100 billion of cash in
the bank, misled consumers when it said it could provide a service better than
Dropbox, a measly startup. It can't sustain its growth, so you get 5gb cloud
drive, or about a third the size of a GMail mailbox.

But wait, there's more! You thought you could rely on their cloud offering to
backup your data? well, you'll have 90 days to clear that space. Because you
can't really get any peace of mind from Microsoft.

I don't understand people who can avoid Microsoft products and services yet
still opt to pay to this awful company.

~~~
ars
> well, you'll have 90 days to clear that space.

Actually 18 months.

Did you actually read the announcement?

Say what you will about what they are doing, but at least they are giving
people plenty of time to get their data.

(Or did you mean something else with "clear that space"?)

~~~
deprave
"If you do not claim this offer, you will need to purchase additional storage
or remove some of your files. Otherwise, 90 days after you receive your first
notice, your account will become read-only."

Examples for things that will break once your account is read-only:

* Any program that modifies files on open (Word, Excel, others)

* Any program or device that would sync to a cloud folder on OneDrive

* Any existing workflow that relied on OneDrive files for easy access and/or sharing

Have you ever mounted a filesystem read-only? You should try it and then come
back and tell us that people have plenty of time. They might not lose their
data immediately, but virtually anything that touches OneDrive will break once
it becomes read-only.

~~~
nomel
> You thought you could rely on their cloud offering to backup your data?
> well, you'll have 90 days to clear that space.

Your wording suggested the data backup was at risk. You can still rely on the
safety of the data backup, they're doing fine there, even after 90 days. Just
don't expect to be able to add additional data, which will of course break
workflows trying to do that. The data is safe though.

------
mikestew
I wish MSFT would get their shit together on their "cloud drive" offering.
First it was...I don't recall, what was the product they bought? Anyway, that
turned into Live Drive or something, which was in parallel for a short bit
with Sky Drive. So which one do I use? Which one will win the internal power
squabble? Oh, okay, OneDrive won out (what?), here's your 15Gb, umm, make that
5Gb. (EDIT: just looked on wikipedia to try and find the name of the
company/product they bought. Could find it, but found the list of prior names:
"OneDrive (previously SkyDrive, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Windows Live
Folders)". _Five_ different names?)

Gawd, I'm supposed to trust this with family photos? I happily pay Apple for
iCloud. The only change I've seen them make is to increase storage for the
same amount of money. I pay you, you give me the product we originally agreed
to. So far Apple has held up their end of the bargain. Pick your own provider
if you don't like Apple. Dropbox works just fine, host your own with OwnCloud,
hell, put it on your Synology NAS with DS Cloud (which I highly recommend).
Just don't use the MSFT product.

~~~
insulanian
> First it was...I don't recall, what was the product they bought?

It was called "Live Mesh", and it was good until they started "improving" it.

~~~
homero
Yes live mesh was amazing. I had to switch to Dropbox which now holds a live
mesh folder

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pmx
I have never made use of the 1tb space that comes with office 365 exactly
because ms do these sorts of things. If you're storing 1000gb and later they
suddenly decide to reduce you to 500gb, what do you do? Any course of action
is going to be painful.

~~~
elahd
Went through this with Dropbox when I lost space provided under a time-boxed
promotion. I could keep data that was already in my Dropbox, but I couldn't
add anything more until I dipped below the new limit.

~~~
orbitingpluto
Well I tried out Symantec's/Norton's Cloud Storage (25GB freebie) They lock
you out.

I expect what Amazon does: Amazon just let me keep the files, but won't let me
change aanything when they removed their free ofering.

Dreamhost had 50GB of backup which they no longer offer, their file
permissions were so mangled you could traverse and download stuff from a good
portion of their clients.

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l0c0b0x
It's sad, really (Seeing a grown company make these kinds of 'mistakes').
We're using OneDrive for business, and it is a PAINFUL solution to even deploy
it in a windows-only environment without some major hacks that you need to
keep maintaining (due to the fact that Microsoft keeps making arbitrary
changes to that environment)--not to mention user data synching, even on
Windows 10 hosts. Not to mention the amount of issues you get when you hear
from uses who used to have Microsoft accounts with their corporate email
addresses, and now are having issues connecting because Microsoft is confused
about who you really are--and no, there is not corporate way to fix this
proactively :|

Frustrated? YES!

------
chinhodado
I wonder how much MS is saving by cutting the free storage from 15 to 5 GB. I
assume most people using the service are using less than 5 GB anyway. Is it
worth it considering the huge amount of PR backlash that this caused?

~~~
sghi
I was wondering if they're not actually using it as a cost saving exercise,
but one to encourage people to pay up for the paid version.

I imagine there's a few people using between 5 and 15GB that before were on
the free version but now would have to pay to carry on using it.

------
aleyan
I never used OneDrive, but I was a hotmail user back in the day. Sometime in
late 2003 early 2004 Microsoft decreased the max inbox size from 6 MB to 2 MB
[1]. A few months later gmail came out with a 1 GB inbox. It was clear to me
Microsoft was standing on the wrong side of internet history then and it looks
that way to me now.

[1] I could not find a citation for this. Sorry, you will just have to trust
my memory from a decade ago.

~~~
ninv
For 3 Months, i did not log on to my Hotmail account and they deleted all my
emails & contacts and locked my account.

Gmail was savior in those time. I had perfect email id on Hotmail but even
that couldn't stop me from switching to Gmail.

------
insulanian
There is a saying in my culture, which describes those, who give a present and
later take it back, as "dog eating what he threw up".

I'm migrating 40 GB of photos from OneDrive to AWS since days.

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tlogan
Why? I really wonder why.

I doubt that 15GB vs 5GB really matter from point of view of costs.

I'm concern that is solution to "solve" some scalability problems with their
design or infrastructure. This reminds me when Evernote issued ridiculous API
throttling - that point of time was beginning of the end of Evernote.

This could be also that they are hoping that people will upgrade OneDrive
storage - but I doubt that 15GB matters: 15GB today is 5GB in one year.

------
0x0
That's less than what I have on my free dropbox account...

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yborg
Can't you grandfather your 15GB by ... asking? That's what I did.

~~~
vmarsy
Yes they let you the option to grandfather the old plan, like they did when
they reduced from the original SkyDrive with 25GB.

I currently have 140GB free (15 original + 15 camera roll + 10GB loyalty (+
100GB bing bonus you would get with Bing rewards, this one expires at some
point))

I find it nice that they let you keep the old free plans

~~~
chadgeidel
I got the "info" email a few days back. I thought I had some storage because
I'm paying for my Hotmail account (I use it daily as it's my oldest remaining
email account, and it's my "Microsoft Single Sign On" account), but apparently
that offer has been rescinded.

I, too wonder how long the Bing "award" data is good for. If that were to go
away I'd have to move a bunch of data. maybe I should just pony up for Office
365.

~~~
vmarsy
on
[https://onedrive.live.com/?v=managestorage](https://onedrive.live.com/?v=managestorage)
My 100GB bing bonus says it's valid through February 2017 (I thought the bonus
was valid one year, I got it sometime in 2014 or 2015, so I'm fine with that)

I'm not a big user of Onedrive, I'm currently using only 8GB, so I don't
really care about it, even when I go down to 40GB, I will still have space.

------
zekevermillion
I tried to use onedrive for business and it was so bad, I faced an internal
user revolt! I now pay extra for another service with identical specs on paper
but far better performance.

~~~
basch
once mesh replaces groove stuff like this might not happen.

microsoft seems to think they can take their time though, and doesnt have it
scheduled till the end of the year.

they are going to lose a lot of people to dropbox/googledrive/box by the end
of the year, because groove.exe is so terrible.

~~~
alsocasey
Any chance you might be able to expand on this? I don't dislike OneDrive, but
I've started to run into more and more issues with various machines falling
out of sync unless I restart the OneDrive service to force changes to be
detected... Dropbox has the same issue on those machines, so I'm not really
sure what 'causes it.

~~~
the_ancient
OneDrive and OneDrive for Business used different client, the "Current"
OneDrive for Business is the "groove" client, it basically a simply file
scanner and sync to a Sharepoint Document Libary, it is terrible (This is the
same Client that is Integrated into Office 2016/2013 as well... awful)

the OneDrive "Consumer" client was/is based on the orginal Live Mesh product
that MS bought

Last year MS announced they were merging the Code Base and Having OneDrive for
business operate on the better OneDrive for Business Client, this is the Code
name "Next Generation" Client for OneDrive for Business.

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/OneDrive-for-
Busine...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/OneDrive-for-Business-
Next-Generation-Sync-Client-release-
notes-845dcf18-f921-435e-bf28-4e24b95e5fc0)

Dropbox clients is still better than both of MS offerings however.

~~~
basch
>merging the Code Base and Having OneDrive for business operate on the better
OneDrive for Business Client

You got that backwards. Mesh is the good client, groove is the bad one. The
next gen one is the consumer client getting sharepoint support.

Currently, right now, mesh can sync OneDrive for Business but not OneDrive
Groups.

------
jbandela1
This makes me think that Microsoft is having trouble with the Azure storage
back end. Maybe it is not as scalable as they would like everybody to believe.
Microsoft wants to be "cloud first, mobile first". An key area of that
strategy is to get your users to store their information with you. The fact
that they are making it less likely for users to store their information with
them, is very suggestive that there are deeper underlying issues.

------
basch
this was announced lathered in doublespeak back early november.

[https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/](https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/)

------
7952
I wonder if it would make more sense with this kind of product to offer longer
term contracts (say 4 year) and avoid the monthly billing. No one would ever
buy a USB hard drive on a monthly rental, that would be ridiculous! Regular
billing for something so mundane just invites people to cancel and lets MS
meddle with pricing.

~~~
copperx
ISPs rent their modems to most of their customers.

------
itsrob
Except they aren't: [http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890966/microsoft-
onedriv...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890966/microsoft-onedrive-
free-storage)

~~~
GauntletWizard
An opt-in system for existing users? That's mean-spirited and insulting.

------
antjanus
Haven't they recently cut back from free storage to like 15gb. But if you
stored photos or something, they'd expand it to 50gb? And now it's 5gb?

I've been seriously using OneDrive for years now (under all of its names).
Even got family members signed up so I could share photos with them because
Dropbox's 2gb (I've got 20gb due to referrals) was not enough.

My wife recently reached her limit even after she deleted most of her files
and was just like "Wtf is going on?"

Great, now I gotta migrate all my shit to another service. Heard Amazon's
equivalent was pretty worth it but this really sucks. I've always preferred
OneDrive to pretty much anything else on the market.

------
grawlinson
I have a Surface Pro 2, solely purchased for it's notetaking abilities (a la
OneNote) and OneDrive is too tightly integrated into this.

All OneNote files are saved in OneDrive's folders, and OneNote doesn't make it
easy to switch to another location. Every time I save a new file (in any
Microsoft product, not just OneNote!), it will default to OneDrive even though
I have changed the default save locations.

I have moved all my data away from MS, but due to OneNote, I cannot move
fully. I wish I could.

~~~
lstamour
Looks to me like it's possible, it's just not the default, as you say. I
remember when OneNote first introduced syncing -- you'd basically put the
OneNote notebook on a shared drive and I believe it would warn you if others
were making edits at the same time. I don't see why that's not still possible
today. That said... OneNote on other platforms does not have this feature,
apparently, which now suddenly seems strange. Do they think their competition
is Evernote?

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excalibur
Yet another garbage solution from Microsoft that would be far less repulsive
if they weren't actively working to cram it down your throat.

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reustle
They sure are good at this. Next, it will be moved to 500 MB.

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-reneges-on-
unlimited-...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-reneges-on-unlimited-
onedrive-storage-promise-for-office-365-subscribers/)

~~~
niij
What you posted is a recap of all of the announcements in the Original
Article.

------
otempomores
I always wondered if two users upload the same catpicture and the only
difference is metadata.. Does theire cloud hash that..merge that and create a
ref to that file. So twice the pr disaster not only does there offer not
scale.. The same thing goes for there tech

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feduzi
Microsoft sends emails with "Try Microsoft Office 365" every week. I wonder
when I'll get a notification about this space reduction :)

Thanks for posting this!

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lurkinggrue
Man, now I'm really glad that I avoided OneDrive.

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michaelrhansen
bait and switch?

~~~
santoshalper
On a free service? It has now gone from 7.5x larger than Dropbox's free tier
to only 2.5x as larger. Oh well.

