
OneDrive Changes - sharms
https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/
======
mrmondo
This has been a very common 'bait and switch' tactic from Microsoft over the
years. In recent years we've watched O365 'benefits' for non-profits /
charitable organisations be targeted and reduced several times while
competitors offerings have remained the same or increased. I could understand
this if quality was improving over time but we haven't found that to be the
case either. Microsoft's cloud offerings have been plagued by outages and
extended periods of unavailability across the O365, exchange and sharepoint
online servers. Last year we measured at O365 availability at an
embarrassingly poor 78% while the number of times Microsoft acknowledged
problems on their service status page was less than 1/20th of the number of
times an outage occurred. What's more - it's not just us, I've heard from many
small to medium businesses that experience the same poor performance, it seems
for every one person that says 'oh we never have problems...' I find 5 people
that are dissatisfied or worse - have already left for an alternative or on-
premises product. Related note: It's scary how often we notice problems that
occurred internally within Microsoft's hosted environment - just start looking
at the full email headers of emails from Microsoft's outlook / O365 domains
and you'll notice a disturbingly large number that have spent time bouncing
around their internal mail servers due to poorly configured / managed DNS and
mail relays.

~~~
cdubzzz
Can you provide some specific examples of reduced benefits for non-profits? I
have been an IT admin at a non-profit for three years and found O365's
introduction of Enterprise level non-profit plans has been a huge money saver
for us.

I do agree that their availability has been less than stellar. We have lots of
odd issues with Exchange and SharePoint can be a real damn pain at times.

~~~
mrmondo
I can't remember the exact number but we used to get something like 300
licenses, then they reduced it to 200, then earlier this year they reduced it
to 100. I believe too that a single user can use more than one license
depending on their account type. We spend more time dealing with the issues
with O365 both on the licensing and stability front than we did with our own
hosted exchange which is saying something since that wasn't very well managed
TBQH.

~~~
cdubzzz
Ahh, interesting. I'm guessing you are using the Business Essentials or
Business Premium licenses? Microsoft's website[1] does still say 300 users. We
actually use the E3 package at the discounted rate so we have unlimited (for
now anyway!).

[1] [https://products.office.com/en-
us/nonprofit/office-365-nonpr...](https://products.office.com/en-
us/nonprofit/office-365-nonprofit-plans-and-pricing)

------
MichaelGG
Lame. I understand killing unlimited. But 15GB to 5GB? That's less than
Google, and quite easy to fill with photos. Doesn't Amazon also offer
unlimited photo storage as well?

They even admit that the average is around 5GB. So the 15GB to 5GB seems to be
aimed at annoying/hurting average users that are close to or a bit over the
limit. And 5GB is trivial to fill with even a moderate amount of photo taking.

And the paid plans are getting nerfed. $1.99 used to be 100GB, now it's 50GB,
with no way to increase? How does that make sense? Edit: Ah it's to push
people to sign up for Office365 which offers 1TB. I bet someone thought this
was an oh-so-clever move.

Well, I guess MS Online/Live/whatever has always been a bit of a mess with
zero clear direction.

~~~
Joeri
iCloud is 5 GB, despite having to store a lot more data out of the box than a
onedrive account, and apple pushes hard for people to buy more storage.
Probably someone at microsoft thought they were just falling in line with the
competition. Where they miscalculate is that people put up with apple's bad
deal around storage because they love the other aspects of their products. I'm
not sure there is as much love for the other aspects of microsoft's products.

Still, 1 TB for office 365 is a good deal, and with this change i'm more
confident it will remain. I have the 30 gb of free onedrive storage mostly
filled, and was doubting whether to get a subscription to expand my storage.
Now they're giving me one. I feel like that's a good deal.

~~~
yeukhon
Just to point out.

> Still, 1 TB for office 365 is a good deal, and with this change i'm more
> confident it will remain.

If you are a student (or have been a university student), you can get MS
Office at a very good discount for a 4-year subscription with 60 minute/month
Skype credit and 1TB.

> apple pushes hard for people to buy more storage.

But the storage is really cheap for 1 year in the US I literally think that
was a steal. They made me to believe it of course, like you said they
literally market many users to get more storage.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT201238)

------
jitix
This move shows that users cannot trust microsoft to keep their promise.
Atleast when google discontinued free google apps accounts they didn't disable
them or remove features.

Another point is that in many cases, a person becomes hooked to a free service
for personal use and that affects buying decision for their contacts who are
looking for a paid account, or at work for larger accounts where the service
provider makes the bulk of the money. I think this move by microsoft will slow
down adoption of Office 365.

Many businesses take inputs from employess before adopting new technologies
(atleast in tech sector), and imagine a situation where 1 or more employees
got cheated by microsoft because of this move and managed to convince their IT
dept to go for google apps instead of Office 365.

~~~
geff82
This move shows that you generally should not trust cloud offerings, if they
mainly replace what you already had at home before. Onedrive already "took" my
files away, as they degraded features on the PC. Where before in Win 8.1 we
had a proxy representation of the Onedrive-files so the feeling was we could
access them as they were local, we now have to sync every folder there is in
order to access them, which I can't do on all my devices as my Onedrive size
exceeds most available space. So everything I can't sync feels like "gone", as
I can only access it through the browser.

~~~
jitix
The main problem is that cloud storage has become a necessity - you NEED to
sync things like music, pictures (important ones atleast) and documents across
devices if you want to save time. There is no clear solution to this at this
moment - you either trust a cloud provider who can screw you like MS anytime,
or you host it yourself paying exorbitant hosting fees. It does not help that
hard drive quality has been falling with failures being more common even on
"power saving" drives like WD Green.

------
jbandela1
There are a lot of people attributing malice to Microsoft's announcement. I
think it is mostly incompetence. I think the underlying Azure storage
technology is behind Google's and Amazon's and does not have the same ability
to take advantage of decreasing costs due to improved technology. How else do
you explain everybody else dropping their prices and/or increasing their
quotas while Microsoft reduces their quotas. Google still has unlimited
storage for photos up to a certain size and 1080p video. Then again they are
not using Azure Storage.

That Microsoft is having problems with scaling Azure also makes sense of the
announcement that they are reducing the free tier storage. If you looked at it
from just that they are being abuses by people storing 75tb then reducing the
free tier storage does not make sense. However, if they are having issues with
the underlying Azure Storage and are wanting to relieve pressure on it, then
reducing the amount of storage and the number of accounts because of existing
users migrating to other cloud storage providers makes sense.

If you are considering Azure for your cloud provider, consider that their halo
internal customer OneDrive decided that Azure Storage did not allow them to
fulfill what they promised to their customers and they are being forced to cut
back at the cost of a huge customer backlash and loss of goodwill. If Azure
Storage cannot be relied upon by their internal customer, how can your company
rely on it?

~~~
curiousDog
Is Onedrive hosted on Azure storage though? During the last two Azure outages,
O365 services remained unaffected and someone on here mentioned that they're
completely separate. You may still be right about the scaling problems though.
Why else would they take such a huge PR hit?

~~~
jbandela1
According to this Quora answer it seems they are now.

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-
OneDr...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-OneDrive-and-
Azure)

------
rogeryu
This is the problem with Microsoft - you cannot trust them with their offers.
First they offer 15GB free space, then they limit it to 5GB. Like many of
their online services, they make mistakes and offer something that in the end
is not profitable (enough). Then they offend their users and prove they are
not to be trusted in the long run. Google is jumping up and down with joy.

Time and again, they make this mistake. They change names for their services
continuously. They should keep all old users on 15GB or whatever was offered,
and new users take the 5GB account. That is the correct way to handle this.

~~~
CaptainZapp

      First they offer 15GB free space, then they limit it to 5GB.
    

Actually 30GB if you automatically upload your pictures taken on a Lumia.

While I can appreciate that the unlimited service is not provided so that
users can store dozens of TB (which may be within the terms and conditions,
but is certainly not reasonable) I wonder why it should be users like me,
using the service in a responsible manner, that are punished. Reducing the
space to 1/6th is certainly not reasonable.

Two issues: My phone photos are not really that important. But it seems time
to download them locally and delete them in the cloud. My "real" photos are
anyway stored locally on multiple hard disks.

Next: I may regret having said this, but: _FUCK YOU, MICROSOFT!_

~~~
rogeryu
> While I can appreciate that the unlimited service is not provided so that
> users can store dozens of TB (which may be within the terms and conditions,
> but is certainly not reasonable)

If it's within the terms and conditions, it's reasonable.

If Microsoft promotes unlimited upload, then it should have no limit. If it is
not reasonable, then do not promote it.

This is pure marketing. Only a tiny percentage of users does this, and the
rest uses less than 1TB. Still you can market that unlimited upload. If that
would be unreasonable, then do not promote it.

But then maybe too many users start to upload many terabytes, and then it
starts to costs money, and then the promotion budget gets cut, and suddenly
they realize it's not going to get better. A new manager steps in, cuts out
the stupid idea and there you are, another stupid marketing failure.

------
nullrouted
You cannot offer unlimited storage when you offer a cloud storage product.
Bitcasa found out the hard way and now OneDrive is taking the same lesson,
people will abuse it.

I think any company has the right to change their business model and/or
product offerings. The one thing I'm a bit confused about is why are they
decreasing their free storage tier and taking away the camera roll bonus? To
me that just seems like a really bad PR move. In a similar fashion Box did the
same type of thing way back in the day and while that was their right I still
won't use them to this day.

~~~
rasz_pl
>You cannot offer unlimited storage when you offer a cloud storage product

[https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-
backup.html)

~~~
olavgg
[https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-
If-...](https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-If-I-Delete-
A-File-From-My-Computer-)

~~~
hrnnnnnn
Which makes it a mirror rather than a proper backup.

~~~
Grue3
CrashPlan has unlimited backup and never deletes files. And keeps all the old
versions of the files. I don't know how they stay in business, given that
somebody probably uses it to backup petabytes of constantly changing data.
They have pretty slow upload/download speeds though so perhaps something like
Amazon Glacier is involved.

[https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retaining_A...](https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retaining_And_Downloading_Deleted_Files)

~~~
SyneRyder
I was just about to say that CrashPlan is restricted to the internal drive of
a computer & is therefore limited to the maximum size of hard drives (e.g. 1-2
Terabytes for laptops), but apparently CrashPlan lets you backup external
drives now too:

[http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Backing_Up_Exte...](http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Backing_Up_External_Hard_Drives)

~~~
leejoramo
Having used CrashPlan's personal offerings for many years, I recall that they
have always allowed the backup of attached storage either from hard drives or
network mounts.

------
starik36
Love this quote: "Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to
Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous
PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances,
this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."

~~~
yoavm
Good to know they can see what I'm storing in my OneDrive account, and that
they'll do so whenever they want to.

~~~
howeyc
This is true for almost[1] all cloud storage providers.

\--- [1] Except maybe SpiderOak, or anything you encrypt yourself before
upload.

------
tdkl
Classic MS bait and switch move. If you advertise something as unlimited,
don't cry if someone uses it as is.

Also they just admitted they know exactly what people store in their cloud
(type, content).

~~~
sz4kerto
How would they not know? I mean, OneDrive has a built-in video player, it is
integrated with Office Online, etc. Obviously Google or Apple knows this as
well.

[ from the sibling post ] > they just said they can and do check exactly what
is uploaded to each account in complete detail

They have to check because at least they show the proper file type on the
online interface :) How would you implement photo and video sharing without
looking at the actual files?

~~~
dchest
You're confusing computer programs with Microsoft employees.

~~~
sz4kerto
I'm not sure. You can easily get anonymized statistics about your whole
userbase without any employee looking at a particular account directly.
Getting max(size) of all the storage accounts does not require employees to
look at files directly. Figuring out that someone stores 75 TB of video files
does not require at all that an employee looks at a specific account.

Really, I don't want to be too snarky but this has nothing to do with privacy
at all. At least try to imagine how could you do this without breaching the
privacy of individual users if you were running a service like Google Drive or
OneDrive -- I'm sure you will find an easy way. :) Do you really think someone
actually looked at the account and added up the sizes of the video files in
Excel, then wrote to his manager that 'x@hotmail.com has uploaded the whole
Game of Thrones in 4K?'

~~~
danieldk
_Figuring out that someone stores 75 TB of video files does not require at all
that an employee looks at a specific account._

Figuring out that someone stores 75TB of video files does not. Figuring out
that

 _a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie
collections and DVR recordings_

does.

~~~
tehmaco
Not if the users used standard file extensions:

Run a report that selects the top 0.01% of users by total storage used, return
% of space per file extension.

~~~
MichaelGG
Not to mention simply searching for common file names would do the trick, too.
It is not too hard to come up with an algorithm that can return a boolean (or
float) indicating if a file collection looks like TV series. "Game of Thrones
- S??E??" is a good start.

~~~
ant6n
I consider the file names on my hard drive private.

~~~
MichaelGG
Then you should explicitly use a product that encrypts before upload. Again,
it's not clear that a human at MS looked at anything. They could simply have
run a query "does any customer have files looking like TV series".

------
batiudrami
An Office 365 subscription is still good value I think - $99 a year lets you
share your subscription with up to 4 other people, each of whom get 1TB of
cloud storage. Each person having a genuine version of Office is just a bonus.

The OneDrive client isn't as good as Dropbox unfortunately - for some reason
it eats my entire downstream bandwidth when uploading files.

~~~
ucho
How are you connected to Internet? It was quite common issue with some ASDLs.
Whole upload bandwitch is used for, well, file upload and there is nothing
left to send ACKs to maintain download speed.

~~~
mahouse
That is a problem with all kinds of connections, not only ADSLs, unless you
use any QoS solution.

A router of a good quality will prioritise ACKs. Obviously, most routers
provided by ISPs are awful.

------
dingo_bat
I was about to purchase the 100GB plan, choosing them over Dropbox. But I
don't know anymore. If they are concerned about people abusing unlimited
backup, why are they reducing paid tier storage? How does that make sense?
Were 100GB users storing 200GB somehow?

~~~
dchest
They hoped you'd buy 100 GB plan and use only 50 GB of it.

------
boulos
I was going to say: "Ahh, they're just copying Apple's bizarre iCloud storage
prices" except at $1.99/month for the 50 GB plan they're actually charging
_double_ Apple's. Given that Apple is just reselling various cloud storage
services, this really is a combination of disabling the unlimited (fine) and a
profit grab at the low end (sigh).

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_Given that Apple is just reselling various cloud storage services_

Do you have a cite for this claim?

Apple has built a number of giant data centers. They shouldn't need to resell
cloud storage.

~~~
andrewmunsell
Though there are a couple articles on this, Apple's own security whitepaper
actually acknowledges the use of Amazon S3 and Azure (page 41 as of 11/2/15):

[http://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf](http://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf)

Also, if you have a Mac (or I believe the PC iCloud app now supports iCloud
Photo Library uploads), you can watch your network traffic, and last time I
checked it also was connecting to some Amazon/AWS domains[1].

[1]: Others have also found the same--
[http://appinstructor.com/blog/2015/apple-using-
amazon-s3-sto...](http://appinstructor.com/blog/2015/apple-using-
amazon-s3-storage-for-icloud-photo-library-storage)

------
planetjones
Same old Microsoft unfortunately. While I understand that some people storing
ridiculous amounts of data could be called out under a fair use / reasonable
data policy - it seems a very poor excuse to state that as the reason for
penalising everyone. I think this is a simple statement that Microsoft aren't
able to economically compete in the consumer cloud storage space. Rather than
being honest Microsoft have to spin it. Glad I stayed with Amazon.

------
threatofrain
While I understand the changes to the free tier and the backpedaling on
unlimited, I am quite surprised that they decided to reduce the benefits for
paying OneDrive customers to a level where they are totally inferior to Google
Drive's prices.

------
FussyZeus
Fundamental problem with "the Cloud": You're entirely at the mercy and whims
of an organization (Microsoft, Google, Apple, whatever) that doesn't give a
single solitary fuck about you.

If I don't build it, I don't trust it, period.

------
BinaryIdiot
I'm not sure why anyone would have expected a different outcome; of course
people are going to try and push that "unlimited" to the limit. Lower the free
storage and the photo stuff though? That makes OneDrive a rough deal. I had
most of our photos backed up there but now it might be cheaper to move
elsewhere.

------
IanDrake
With this decision OneDrive might become usable for the rest of us. While
flip-flopping is bad, I think they did the right thing here for their target
consumers.

OneDrive is no longer a backup and storage cloud service. It's now a document
syncing and sharing service. Hopefully it will be more usable soon as such.

On another note, now it makes perfect sense why they removed virtual file
system support on Windows 10. The intention isn't to add capacity to your
system, but to mirror files to the cloud.

~~~
signal11
One can share documents just fine on Google Drive and Dropbox. Doesn't need
Microsoft Office, but works with it as well.

Removing placeholder files on Windows 10 was a kneecap to users with small
SSDs. You may think it makes perfect sense, but again, Microsoft took a unique
differentiating feature and threw it down the train. Now there's no upside to
using OneDrive over Dropbox/Google Drive.

Post-hoc justify it all you like, OneDrive's management has been a mess this
past year. They've seen high-level execs leave, and the confused thinking
shows up in their product and service plans.

~~~
IanDrake
I wouldn't argue with anything you said there. I'm in favor of them improving
the service and if that means not being all things to all people, I'm okay
with that.

------
lowlevel
Sounds like a death knell to me... Certainly not interested now. I can see
cracking down on abuse, but changing the deal for everyone involved is
probably the wrong move.

------
joering2
_" Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer
subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire
movie collections and DVR recordings."_

Wow. This actually is a direct quote from Microsoft. Unbelievable! I'm not
sure what's more incredible: the tone of this message, or the fact that noone
at MS has thought about this before...

~~~
MichaelGG
Yeah, and how, instead of cutting off a small number of users, they are gonna
cut the limit to right around the average use, guaranteeing customer pain.
Bizarre, terrible management.

------
tjl
I wish they would fix their support for special characters (e.g., |) in file
names. I routinely save bookmarks to a directory stored on a OneDrive volume
and I have to go and clean up the names in order for them to sync. I'm not
motivated to pay for it until they bother to add proper support.

~~~
MichaelGG
How do you save files with a | in Windows?

~~~
tjl
I'm using OneDrive on a Mac.

------
chris_wot
So is now a good time to point out that LibreOffice 5.1 has integrated an
"Open remote files" menu for opening files on Google Drive, OneDrive and
SharePoint, and a "Save to remote server" menu to save directly to Google
Drive, OneDrive and Sharepoint?

[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.1#Remote_...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.1#Remote_Files_Dialog)

Maybe time to switch to Google Drive?

~~~
ewzimm
Also, Fedora 23 was just released today with native Google Drive support in
Files (from Gnome 3.18.)

~~~
chris_wot
All this talk of Office 365... But entirely sure what the real benefit us
apart from hosted Exchange.

Yammer? Meh. Besides, they constantly change their UI and confuse their users.

Office itself? LibreOffice is almost able to do everything it can do, and
more.

Lync (sorry, "Skype for Business"): There are thousands of chat clients out
there.

~~~
ewzimm
For business, it's a pretty nice package. Hosted Exchange is the big one but,
having full Office compatibility in the browser with integrated cloud storage
for when LibreOffice doesn't work is really convenient and a step beyond what
you can do with Gmail/Google Docs. We used to have a mix of different
incompatible Office versions that were a headache to manage, and things are
much simpler now. It would be great if everyone just used LO, but we all know
that's not going to happen.

------
insulanian
This will start a deserved exodus to other cloud storage providers. In regards
to space for photos and videos, Google Drive is anyway a better option. In
regards to reliable synchronization, Dropbox rules.

------
drglitch
This is an interesting about-face because just about a year ago Microsoft was
boasting about eventual 'unlimited for everyone'. I guess that's why people
can't have nice things [eg
[http://forums.windowscentral.com/onedrive/335647-anybody-
suc...](http://forums.windowscentral.com/onedrive/335647-anybody-successfully-
get-unlimited-onedrive-storage-yet.html)]

Having been a (paying, ~250gb) user of sky drive for as long as service has
existed, I am upset - I'll still use it, but my recommendation for it as
defacto cloud storage for someone needing to send a file is gone.

Most crucial is recent screw ups with office having its own sync engine with
one drive-stored files (even if opened locally from onedrive folder) that
often creates conflicting upload with default win10 onedrive app.

------
jffry
Right now the server is down, so here's a mirror:
[https://archive.is/ekGpj](https://archive.is/ekGpj)

------
mark_l_watson
I totally support this - they admit that they made a mistake offering an
unlimited plan, announce the changes, give a one year warning, and offer a
pro-rated refund if you don't want to use the service anymore.

My family belongs to the Office 365 family plan and I think that we get a good
deal for $100/year: 1 terrabyte OndeDrive per user, web versions of office
apps, and installable apps if anyone wants those.

Except for content on the web that people and organizations want to share for
free (fortunately most of the web!), I believe in a pay for what you use plan.
Pay Microsoft and Google for cloud services, pay Netflix/Hulu/HBO-Go for
entertainment content, etc.

~~~
hcurtiss
Totally agreed (we also have a family O365 plan). I'm willing to pay for
quality services without all the BS inevitably attached to free models.
Because I want the model to succeed, I hate seeing Microsoft take this kind of
heat. It's sad that they made the mistake as I fear reversing course will cost
them a great deal of good will. I would have preferred they left the free and
mid-level tiers alone, or at least grandfathered them.

------
uean
I know of at least one organisation who has made it their business model to
sign up free OneDrive accounts and redirect all user profiles into the
accounts after linking Win8 to the MS Account.

This is going to be a whole lot of hurt.

------
munchy22
I used onedrive, I have 30 gigs and I was just saying last week to friends
that I will probably buy the 5.99 1t fromonedrive. now that they are steeling
25g of the 30g and leaving me a terrible 5gig they can f off. Its that simple.
I bought and payed for my Lumia 930 and part of that deal was the extra 15gig
storage. I accepted windows 10 90 pounds because I got a free 15gig for
desktop. As onderive is built into windows I find it important to offer a
medium amount of free storage and for my 2 devices I found 30gig acceptable,
though I really need 45-55 gig but I wanted to test one drive first. I'm glad
microsoft came out and screwed over every windows user using onedrive cause
now I know I cant trust them even with the basic requiorement of space. Also
the fact they find 5g space acceptable fopr most people is completely worlds
away from what myself and friends think. With microsoft being thiefs and with
them being so backwards in their thoughs of what space is accepotable I don't
think its gona be long till we see the reall effects of what they have done
here. I cant wait to see the negative impact this will have on OneDrive,
windows 10 desktop and mobile, on tablet sales on book sales and well the
terrible sales they are about to endure, or at least deserve to endure on
their 950 and 950xl and yes I'm a huge windows 10 desktop and mobile phone
fan, I justy think microsoft suck. Thks for all the fish SN.

------
bad_user
People in this thread focus on Microsoft and their history of "bait and
switch", however the writing has been on the wall ever since the beginning
with OneDrive. OneDrive is a complementary service to Office, much like
everything else that Microsoft does, which is why it will never be their
focus. OneDrive is not the product being sold, but rather the candy that users
receive to entice them into an Office365 subscription. This simple fact of
microeconomics has also been visible in the feature set provided. For example
out of the solutions I tried, OneDrive is the only one that does not offer
features for auditing what happened with your files, as in a log of what
happened lately, or versioning of changes - those being features probably
reserved for OneDrive for Business, because you know, only businesses care
about their data.

And OneDrive is not alone in this. Google Drive and iCloud are also
complementary services. I mean, for now you can clearly see who is treating
cloud storage seriously by the support they give to their Linux customers. And
if you want to vote with your wallets for complementaries, that's fine, but it
reduces choice in the marketplace and I think that personal data (think
photos, videos, personal projects) is too important to treat with a shitty,
complementary free tier whose purpose is to lock you into something.

------
Viper007Bond
This is a shame. I have my phone backup to OneDrive and just through normal
usage I'm using 20GB of photos and videos. Thankfully I have that offer for a
100GB free bonus as a part of installing the app a long while back so I'm good
through 2/2017, but it's nice having all of my photos magically on all of my
computers. The 50GB upgrade won't be enough for me and I need literally none
of the other stuff that's a part of the Office 365 subscription.

------
Aissen
Every "unlimited" service goes through that phase. See OVH, for instance:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269990)

Google and Amazon had the intelligence of limiting their "unlimited" offers to
unencrypted non-raw photos. Google is even using the data to feed their
machine learning skynet, so it brings them (and you) value.

~~~
SyneRyder
Bitcasa did this too almost exactly a year ago, and it killed their product.
OneDrive announced their unlimited plans 3 days afterwards on Oct 27, so
OneDrive's unlimited plans have barely lasted a year:

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/24/bitcasa-no-
unlimited/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/24/bitcasa-no-unlimited/)

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zmmmmm
I'm really curious how they are going to reduce accounts with 15GB of data
down to 5GB. We get to keep our data for "1 year" apparently - so what after
that? Are they going to physically delete half of my files? Or will they be
held ransom like a crypto-locker scam? I don't quite understand how they plan
to pull this off without hugely pissing of a very, very large number of
people.

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Animats
Summary: price going up.

Could be worse. They could offer "unlimited" storage, but as the usage
increases, the upload rate decreases.

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misternation
While Google lives off of your personal data and what it can gather from it,
Apple and Microsoft seem to not use/sell your data to a 3rd party. This means
Google will "always" offer the cheaper option, but it has a hidden cost - it
sells your personal data to a 3rd party; so its a question about what you are
comfortable with.

I was a huge fan of Google's products while in College, but once entering the
professional life, Microsofts offerings spoke to me in a whole new way.

But this is an incredibly silly move by Microsoft!

But to say Microsoft hasn't had a direction, that might be true. But there was
also a me.com and Google Docs / Drive / Google Photos; so they are more
interesting in being in the space that the consumer are looking for, rather
than making their own way in to the woods by themselves.

~~~
danieldk
_While Google lives off of your personal data and what it can gather from it,
Apple and Microsoft seem to not use /sell your data to a 3rd party. This means
Google will "always" offer the cheaper option, but it has a hidden cost - it
sells your personal data to a 3rd party; so its a question about what you are
comfortable with._

No, they don't sell your personal data to a 3rd party, that would be as
terrible for them as it is for you. They sell ad placements.

If scanning your data for ad placement is not acceptable, you use can use
Google Apps, which is covered by a different agreement. The base price is 4
Euro per month, from there you can get 1TB per month for 8 Euro per month or
100GB for 1.99.

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kenrick95
I've been using OneDrive to backup my notes (OneNote) and documents. Recently
I started to use OneDrive as my primary storage for photo + music + video by
purchasing the 100GB plan. This was because of the convenience of auto-upload
from my Lumia to OneDrive, and also because I'm using Lumia 1020, with the
very high resolution camera, a single photo takes around 10MB space. I'm
disappointed with this move by Microsoft, without those little extras, I'll be
exceeding the quota very soon (since my storage consumption will always be
increasing). I'm thinking to cancel my 100GB subscription (when this rolls
out) and turn away to other services, hmm maybe hosting my own cloud storage
(OwnCloud)?

------
Nickersf
My only concern here is that 5 GB of storage will not be enough even though
I've only been using it for school related documents in the last 4 months. I'm
already using ~ 3 GB. I used to hate OneDrive because I couldn't remove from
my system completely. I lost the urge to control my Windows environment when I
started dual booting Linux, and relegated Windows to making documents for
school work. I found that OneDrive actually boosted productivity within
Windows. As a poor student who can't add any extra expenses to my budget I
will have to transfer back to Google Drive when my 5 GB is up. Is 15 GB really
too much for to give for free these days?

~~~
sepposeppo
www.copy.com offers 15GB also. And with referrals you can boost it close to
50GB. Love the app and it's supported very well in my opinion (Win, OSX,
Linux, iOS, Android, Windows Phone). I really don't have idea why people don't
mention Copy when talking about cloud storages.

~~~
cerberusss
Seconded. It's pretty good. It has a good Linux client to boot.

------
xjay
OneDrive for Business permits 20 000 items, which can be files or folders.

There's a maximum file size. (What is it now? 10 GB?)

20 000 * 10 GB = Microsoft ∞

Maybe there are limits to how many items you can store in a folder as well.

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ableal
_" Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users,
current and new. The 15 GB camera roll storage bonus will also be
discontinued. These changes will start rolling out in early 2016."_

They should secure these pages better, crackers get in and write absurdly
suicidal stuff.

(The 'unlimited storage' did not exist either, AFAIK.)

------
amq
And I am storing all my family photos there. My mistake was thinking that
space on cloud services can only increase.

------
hippo8
Microsoft being Microsoft.

I have 20GB worth files in there, all I have to start moving because Microsoft
loves their customers.

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ehmuidifici
This remembers me the SugarSync case. At the beginning, hey offered a very
good storage amount for free, which was replaced for a paid - expensive -
plan. Now their plans are fair enough, but the damage was made.

------
pjc50
So, where's the best cloud comparison website? What does HN suggest for "just
store these bits and don't do anything funny"? It's going to be AWS isn't it.

~~~
drdaeman
Hubic and git-annex do the trick for me. 10TB for 5EUR/mo, from which I
currently use just one. And unlike some providers, they have OpenStack API,
albeit with a weird auth scheme.

Shameless referral link:
[https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=WVOVSY](https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=WVOVSY)
(referral adds +5/10/500GB for you, depending on a plan selected)

~~~
pjc50
Hubic seems too good to be true at that price. Is there a catch to it? Other
than the T&Cs being in French.

~~~
drdaeman
None I know about, or I'd warn or not advertise them in the first place. So,
far I've read of them here on HN, about an year ago or so, signed up and
everything is good so far.

I don't know how they manage to offer storage at this price point, but I was
quite surprised they had even lowered prices some months ago (10TB offer used
to be ~10EUR and now the price's half of that).

Either way, git-annex has redundancy. The stuff that's important to me is
replicated across multiple storages, so even if one goes down it won't hurt
much. And, sure, I advise everyone, whatever technology and storage
provider(s) they use to have backup strategy and consider for failures.

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frade33
It's not 1995 when your windows was shinning everywhere. psst!!! they don't
get cloud and and trends, too bad they didn't learn it from Gmail either.

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jhawk28
If you like something and want it to stay around. The best thing you can do is
pay for it.

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xamdam
yes this is lame (but I understand 75TB is not ok). go tell @onedrive on
twitter

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mamby
very bad move that can affect all products and services ...

------
0xFFC
Typical Microsoft

