13 ms·

OneDrive Changes

231 points by sharms 11y ago

nullrouted 11y ago
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.
- squiguy7 11y ago
  I think the unlimited storage is very appealing to the consumer. For example, Amazon has S3 priced per GB. For the average user, they do not want to sit down and calculate how much their cloud storage is going to cost them. Instead, knowing that they can just keep uploading and not worry about it is best. But at the end of the day, there needs to be some limit as you alluded to.
  - zerotolerance 11y ago
    The S3 price per GB is less of a problem for the people I know than the outbound bandwidth pricing.
    - squiguy7 11y ago
      Ah touche. That is something even I overlooked!
      - Nexxxeh 11y ago
        Woe betide anyone who uses Amazon Glacier for backup without paying close attention to the pricing. https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ Retrieval pricing...
        BuildTheRobots 11y ago
        I got bitten really badly by this a while ago when trying to migrate some servers about. 3TB of storage would cost £21/month just to have it sat in Glacier. This isn't too bad, I suppose, but when you then need retrieve it, you're looking at an additional £270.
        zerotolerance 11y ago
        At that rate you might as well request more data and use snowball.
        BuildTheRobots 11y ago
        Never seen the snowball before -it's shiny looking hardware. No idea what the actual cost works out like, though. 1 petabyte per week they claim... At the moment I'd be interested in backing up my NAS boxes, which is only about 36tb raw or 23tb usable space. It's a lot, but nowhere near snowball sizes :) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...
        Nexxxeh 11y ago
        That depends, because you can actually recover it for free over a long enough time period. It's easy if you plan your file sizes in advance based on your allowance, and don't need it in a hurry. Your bill is based on your peak retrieval rate multiplied by the number of hours in the month. But you can retrieve a calculable amount an hour, for free, all month, for however long it takes to get your files back. You could also pay a little bit more, and get them back much after. You certainly wouldn't want to request all 3TB at once though.(It would be billed spread over four hours, and it'd still be thousands.) You can request ranges of files, so even if you have massive files, you can still throttle the requests to below a given threshold if you're careful.
- batiudrami 11y ago
  They've actually done it before - SkyDrive (back when it was called that) used to offer 25GB. They reduced it to 15GB, but gave everyone already using it a 10GB "loyalty bonus".
  - koyote 11y ago
    I still have that 'loyalty bonus'. I wonder if my 25GB will drop down to 5GB now?
    - yakk0 11y ago
      that's how I read it. I'm in the same boat.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  >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
  - pjc50 11y ago
    And what do they do if someone stores 75TB of stuff? "Unlimited" nearly always means "we will fire you as a customer if you use way more than anyone else".
  - olavgg 11y ago
    https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-If-I-Delete-A-File-From-My-Computer- https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-If-...
    - hrnnnnnn 11y ago
      Which makes it a mirror rather than a proper backup.
      - Grue3 11y ago
        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_And_Downloading_Deleted_Files https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retaining_A...
        miahi 11y ago
        The slow upload is also a way to limit the backup size. I currently back up >4TB on CrashPlan and it took a few months of 24/7 upload.
        11y ago
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  It's not abusing a service when you're using it exactly as advertised. If you have a service that says "we'll store as much data as you can throw at us" you'd be foolish to not use it as much as possible to backup every last thing. There's nothing wrong with that to constitute using the term "abuse." Microsoft could've just as easily sold Office 365 with 1 or 2 TB of space, but they wanted to put that Unlimited text on the box. Frankly I think they should be made to honor it.
- imaginenore 11y ago
  Many companies offer unlimited cloud storage: Amazon: $60/year https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/unlimited https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/unlimited Crashplan: $60/year https://www.code42.com/store/ https://www.code42.com/store/ BackupLizard: $36/year http://www.backuplizard.com/ http://www.backuplizard.com/ Backblaze: $50/year https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html Carbonine: $60/year http://www.carbonite.com/en/cloud-backup/personal-solutions/personal-plans/buy/ http://www.carbonite.com/en/cloud-backup/personal-solutions/... AltDrive: $44.50/year http://altdrive.com/pricing.html http://altdrive.com/pricing.html NitroBackup: $39.95/year http://www.nitrobackup.com/plans-and-pricing/ http://www.nitrobackup.com/plans-and-pricing/
  - nullrouted 11y ago
    Those are cloud backup....not cloud storage and usually allow you to backup a single computer. It's not like you can upload 50 TB to them.
tjl 11y ago
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 11y ago
  How do you save files with a | in Windows?
  - tjl 11y ago
    I'm using OneDrive on a Mac.
MichaelGG 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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
  - mahyarm 11y ago
9935c101ab17a66 11y ago
Hahaha I actually can't believe this. Microsoft offer unlimited storage when the pitfalls of such a move are well-documented because other companies have tried it many, many times. It fails. Microsoft not only discontinue the unlimited storage, but they also cripple their free offerings as well. What a disaster. I bought an Office 365 License for 4 years predicated on the unlimited storage, I hope I get a full refund. EDIT: To be honest, if I hadn't spent the last month uploading 800 gigs of photos, I would be happy about this. The OneDrive apps suck, regardless of platform, and routinely report false-positive sync errors. My biggest issue is that (1) it took 2-3 months on a residential internet connection to upload my photos and (2) it consumed almost my entire bandwidth allotment.
Nickersf 11y ago
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?
- nullrouted 11y ago
  I think your last statement says it all "for free" being the keywords. They aren't making money off of you and you are actually a cost center. So someone decided it is better to reduce that cost. I think it is a horrible PR move but I always get a little chuckle when "free" users complain and say they are switching to another "free" service where they will pay them no money as well. The purpose of the free service is to hook you in an upsell you and it sounds like Microsoft is betting that they can turn some free customers into paid ones with this move without hurting their service/brand too much.
- sepposeppo 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Seconded. It's pretty good. It has a good Linux client to boot.
batiudrami 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
  - batiudrami 11y ago
    Yeah I have ADSL and it's 14/1Mbit down/up. Which means that uploading files to OneDrive is super slow and it takes out the download speed for the whole house while it's doing it. It's not something that Dropbox has an issue with - not sure if it is coded specifically to avoid that.
- Already__Taken 11y ago
  re bandwidth: If you max out your upload it can impact the download due to the way TCP works I think. My guess is it impact the speed confirmation of packets received is sent back. What if you try to lower the priority of OneDrive either by network traffic or processor time to let more important things jump in?
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
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.
boulos 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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-storage-for-icloud-photo-library-storage http://appinstructor.com/blog/2015/apple-using-amazon-s3-sto...
  - micro-ram 11y ago
    > Do you have a cite for this claim? Use Little Snitch firewall and you will see it.
Animats 11y ago
Summary: price going up. Could be worse. They could offer "unlimited" storage, but as the usage increases, the upload rate decreases.
starik36 11y ago
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."
- slowmotiony 11y ago
  So? I thought it was "unlimited"...? They specifically used that exact word.
- yoavm 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    This is true for almost[1] all cloud storage providers. --- [1] Except maybe SpiderOak, or anything you encrypt yourself before upload.
- skrause 11y ago
  With that quote Microsoft basically admitted that they're browsing around in their users' files.
- aymenim 11y ago
  what MS missed on the whole blog is Unlimited was a bad idea to begin with, especially on storage no matter what!, ppl would start hoarding.
  - joering2 11y ago
    I would love to know how this will continue for someone that hoarded so much data. I bet there is lawsuit somewhere here, as "unlimited" does not mean 100GB or 100TB. It's pretty clear what this word means...
lowlevel 11y ago
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.
uean 11y ago
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.
jitix 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
tdkl 11y ago
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).
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Thanks, you're right. I missed that from the announcement - but yes, they just said they can and do check exactly what is uploaded to each account in complete detail. Ouch. I wouldn't touch this for free.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sz4kerto 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    You're confusing computer programs with Microsoft employees.
    - sz4kerto 11y ago
      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?'
mrmondo 11y ago
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.
- dmourati 11y ago
  bait-and-switch
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cdubzzz 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
planetjones 11y ago
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.
insulanian 11y ago
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.
dingo_bat 11y ago
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 11y ago
  They hoped you'd buy 100 GB plan and use only 50 GB of it.
threatofrain 11y ago
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.
Viper007Bond 11y ago
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.
rogeryu 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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!
  - skrause 11y ago
    > Actually 30GB if you automatically upload your pictures taken on a Lumia. You actually got the 30 GB if you activated photo upload anywhere just once. I once installed the OneDrive app on my iPhone, activated photo upload while not having any photos on the device, uninstalled OneDrive immediately and had been enjoying 30 GB of free backup space for Arq ever since without ever uploading a photo.
  - rogeryu 11y ago
    > 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.
mamby 11y ago
very bad move that can affect all products and services ...
frade33 11y ago
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.
ableal 11y ago
"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.)
Aissen 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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/
joering2 11y ago
"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 11y ago
  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.
misternation 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
amq 11y ago
And I am storing all my family photos there. My mistake was thinking that space on cloud services can only increase.
hippo8 11y ago
Microsoft being Microsoft. I have 20GB worth files in there, all I have to start moving because Microsoft loves their customers.
chris_wot 11y ago
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_Files_Dialog https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.1#Remote_... Maybe time to switch to Google Drive?
- ewzimm 11y ago
  Also, Fedora 23 was just released today with native Google Drive support in Files (from Gnome 3.18.)
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
kenrick95 11y ago
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)?
bad_user 11y ago
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.
ehmuidifici 11y ago
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 11y ago
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.
- ant6n 11y ago
  I did some comparisons just a couple of days ago. I want a reasonable amount of free storage+linux support, and found a service called 'copy'. They give 15GB + (5GB if you use a referral link) + (5GB for every user you refer up to 25GB). I'm gonna do a shameless plug and give my referral link, which should start anybody off with 20GB: https://copy.com?r=fTnUcM https://copy.com?r=fTnUcM.
  - ant6n 11y ago
    ...Another thing I was considering is just getting a NAS, because the thing I'm interested in is largely to keep data synced across multiple devices, and have it not go away when I get rid of devices. I was looking at QNAP, but unfortunately their only fanless case only allows 2 drives, and their syncing tool only works for mac+win (https://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/model.php?II=147&event=5 https://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/model.php?II=147&event=5).
- drdaeman 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
zmmmmm 11y ago
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.
drglitch 11y ago
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-successfully-get-unlimited-onedrive-storage-yet.html http://forums.windowscentral.com/onedrive/335647-anybody-suc...] 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.
jbandela1 11y ago
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?
- quaffapint 11y ago
  Azure has generally been lowering their fees across the board through the years though. I guess that could be purely to bring in customers vs actual cost savings they've made. Onedrive is now included on their OS by default, and they make no money on the free users, so given the sheer numbers, it makes financial sense to reduce it. A momentary PR blip, but long term financial savings.
  - VOYD 11y ago
    There is no such thing as "free". MS has less than 15% OS share these days, they are trying to monetize every aspect of each product with a subscription business model. That said, free 100GB (with Bing incentives) was nice and very usable with Win10/WinPhone, but now....not so much.
- 11y ago
IanDrake 11y ago
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.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  So why in the world would I pay more money for less storage vs. Google or Dropbox? Microsoft is already hurting for market share, I don't understand why they would kneecap their cloud services when the competition is so thick with companies offering tons of storage for so little money. The Office integration isn't THAT good anyway, and both the PC and Mac apps have a LOT of issues on top of it, and all that to address the issues presented by a minority of abusers who won't be affected by a lot of what's pissing people off.
  - IanDrake 11y ago
    "So why in the world would I pay more money for less storage vs. Google or Dropbox?" If that's the premise you're starting with, then you're already wrong. DropBox 1TB = $9.99/m GoogleDrive 1TB = $9.99/m OneDrive 1TB + Office365 = $6.99/m
- signal11 11y ago
  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.
xjay 11y ago
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.
jffry 11y ago
Right now the server is down, so here's a mirror: https://archive.is/ekGpj https://archive.is/ekGpj
FussyZeus 11y ago
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.
xamdam 11y ago
yes this is lame (but I understand 75TB is not ok). go tell @onedrive on twitter
0xFFC 11y ago
Typical Microsoft
jhawk28 11y ago
If you like something and want it to stay around. The best thing you can do is pay for it.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
munchy22 11y ago
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.
munchy22 11y ago
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.

231 points by sharms 11y ago

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.

squiguy7 11y ago
I think the unlimited storage is very appealing to the consumer. For example, Amazon has S3 priced per GB. For the average user, they do not want to sit down and calculate how much their cloud storage is going to cost them. Instead, knowing that they can just keep uploading and not worry about it is best. But at the end of the day, there needs to be some limit as you alluded to.
- zerotolerance 11y ago
  The S3 price per GB is less of a problem for the people I know than the outbound bandwidth pricing.
  - squiguy7 11y ago
    Ah touche. That is something even I overlooked!
    - Nexxxeh 11y ago
      Woe betide anyone who uses Amazon Glacier for backup without paying close attention to the pricing. https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ Retrieval pricing...
      - BuildTheRobots 11y ago
        I got bitten really badly by this a while ago when trying to migrate some servers about. 3TB of storage would cost £21/month just to have it sat in Glacier. This isn't too bad, I suppose, but when you then need retrieve it, you're looking at an additional £270.
        zerotolerance 11y ago
        At that rate you might as well request more data and use snowball.
        BuildTheRobots 11y ago
        Never seen the snowball before -it's shiny looking hardware. No idea what the actual cost works out like, though. 1 petabyte per week they claim... At the moment I'd be interested in backing up my NAS boxes, which is only about 36tb raw or 23tb usable space. It's a lot, but nowhere near snowball sizes :) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...
        Nexxxeh 11y ago
        That depends, because you can actually recover it for free over a long enough time period. It's easy if you plan your file sizes in advance based on your allowance, and don't need it in a hurry. Your bill is based on your peak retrieval rate multiplied by the number of hours in the month. But you can retrieve a calculable amount an hour, for free, all month, for however long it takes to get your files back. You could also pay a little bit more, and get them back much after. You certainly wouldn't want to request all 3TB at once though.(It would be billed spread over four hours, and it'd still be thousands.) You can request ranges of files, so even if you have massive files, you can still throttle the requests to below a given threshold if you're careful.
batiudrami 11y ago
They've actually done it before - SkyDrive (back when it was called that) used to offer 25GB. They reduced it to 15GB, but gave everyone already using it a 10GB "loyalty bonus".
- koyote 11y ago
  I still have that 'loyalty bonus'. I wonder if my 25GB will drop down to 5GB now?
  - yakk0 11y ago
    that's how I read it. I'm in the same boat.
rasz_pl 11y ago
>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
- pjc50 11y ago
  And what do they do if someone stores 75TB of stuff? "Unlimited" nearly always means "we will fire you as a customer if you use way more than anyone else".
- olavgg 11y ago
  https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-If-I-Delete-A-File-From-My-Computer- https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-If-...
  - hrnnnnnn 11y ago
    Which makes it a mirror rather than a proper backup.
    - Grue3 11y ago
      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_And_Downloading_Deleted_Files https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retaining_A...
      - miahi 11y ago
        The slow upload is also a way to limit the backup size. I currently back up >4TB on CrashPlan and it took a few months of 24/7 upload.
        11y ago
FussyZeus 11y ago
It's not abusing a service when you're using it exactly as advertised. If you have a service that says "we'll store as much data as you can throw at us" you'd be foolish to not use it as much as possible to backup every last thing. There's nothing wrong with that to constitute using the term "abuse." Microsoft could've just as easily sold Office 365 with 1 or 2 TB of space, but they wanted to put that Unlimited text on the box. Frankly I think they should be made to honor it.
imaginenore 11y ago
Many companies offer unlimited cloud storage: Amazon: $60/year https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/unlimited https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/unlimited Crashplan: $60/year https://www.code42.com/store/ https://www.code42.com/store/ BackupLizard: $36/year http://www.backuplizard.com/ http://www.backuplizard.com/ Backblaze: $50/year https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html Carbonine: $60/year http://www.carbonite.com/en/cloud-backup/personal-solutions/personal-plans/buy/ http://www.carbonite.com/en/cloud-backup/personal-solutions/... AltDrive: $44.50/year http://altdrive.com/pricing.html http://altdrive.com/pricing.html NitroBackup: $39.95/year http://www.nitrobackup.com/plans-and-pricing/ http://www.nitrobackup.com/plans-and-pricing/
- nullrouted 11y ago
  Those are cloud backup....not cloud storage and usually allow you to backup a single computer. It's not like you can upload 50 TB to them.

tjl 11y ago

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 11y ago
How do you save files with a | in Windows?
- tjl 11y ago
  I'm using OneDrive on a Mac.

MichaelGG 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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
- mahyarm 11y ago

9935c101ab17a66 11y ago

Hahaha I actually can't believe this. Microsoft offer unlimited storage when the pitfalls of such a move are well-documented because other companies have tried it many, many times. It fails. Microsoft not only discontinue the unlimited storage, but they also cripple their free offerings as well. What a disaster. I bought an Office 365 License for 4 years predicated on the unlimited storage, I hope I get a full refund. EDIT: To be honest, if I hadn't spent the last month uploading 800 gigs of photos, I would be happy about this. The OneDrive apps suck, regardless of platform, and routinely report false-positive sync errors. My biggest issue is that (1) it took 2-3 months on a residential internet connection to upload my photos and (2) it consumed almost my entire bandwidth allotment.

Nickersf 11y ago

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?

nullrouted 11y ago
I think your last statement says it all "for free" being the keywords. They aren't making money off of you and you are actually a cost center. So someone decided it is better to reduce that cost. I think it is a horrible PR move but I always get a little chuckle when "free" users complain and say they are switching to another "free" service where they will pay them no money as well. The purpose of the free service is to hook you in an upsell you and it sounds like Microsoft is betting that they can turn some free customers into paid ones with this move without hurting their service/brand too much.
sepposeppo 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Seconded. It's pretty good. It has a good Linux client to boot.

batiudrami 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- batiudrami 11y ago
  Yeah I have ADSL and it's 14/1Mbit down/up. Which means that uploading files to OneDrive is super slow and it takes out the download speed for the whole house while it's doing it. It's not something that Dropbox has an issue with - not sure if it is coded specifically to avoid that.
Already__Taken 11y ago
re bandwidth: If you max out your upload it can impact the download due to the way TCP works I think. My guess is it impact the speed confirmation of packets received is sent back. What if you try to lower the priority of OneDrive either by network traffic or processor time to let more important things jump in?

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

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.

boulos 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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-storage-for-icloud-photo-library-storage http://appinstructor.com/blog/2015/apple-using-amazon-s3-sto...
- micro-ram 11y ago
  > Do you have a cite for this claim? Use Little Snitch firewall and you will see it.

Animats 11y ago

Summary: price going up. Could be worse. They could offer "unlimited" storage, but as the usage increases, the upload rate decreases.

starik36 11y ago

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."

slowmotiony 11y ago
So? I thought it was "unlimited"...? They specifically used that exact word.
yoavm 11y ago
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 11y ago
  This is true for almost[1] all cloud storage providers. --- [1] Except maybe SpiderOak, or anything you encrypt yourself before upload.
skrause 11y ago
With that quote Microsoft basically admitted that they're browsing around in their users' files.
aymenim 11y ago
what MS missed on the whole blog is Unlimited was a bad idea to begin with, especially on storage no matter what!, ppl would start hoarding.
- joering2 11y ago
  I would love to know how this will continue for someone that hoarded so much data. I bet there is lawsuit somewhere here, as "unlimited" does not mean 100GB or 100TB. It's pretty clear what this word means...

lowlevel 11y ago

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.

uean 11y ago

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.

jitix 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

tdkl 11y ago

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).

RyanZAG 11y ago
Thanks, you're right. I missed that from the announcement - but yes, they just said they can and do check exactly what is uploaded to each account in complete detail. Ouch. I wouldn't touch this for free.
deleted 11y ago
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sz4kerto 11y ago
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 11y ago
  You're confusing computer programs with Microsoft employees.
  - sz4kerto 11y ago
    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?'

mrmondo 11y ago

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.

dmourati 11y ago
bait-and-switch
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cdubzzz 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

planetjones 11y ago

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.

insulanian 11y ago

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.

dingo_bat 11y ago

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 11y ago
They hoped you'd buy 100 GB plan and use only 50 GB of it.

threatofrain 11y ago

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.

Viper007Bond 11y ago

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.

rogeryu 11y ago

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 11y ago
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!
- skrause 11y ago
  > Actually 30GB if you automatically upload your pictures taken on a Lumia. You actually got the 30 GB if you activated photo upload anywhere just once. I once installed the OneDrive app on my iPhone, activated photo upload while not having any photos on the device, uninstalled OneDrive immediately and had been enjoying 30 GB of free backup space for Arq ever since without ever uploading a photo.
- rogeryu 11y ago
  > 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.

mamby 11y ago

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

frade33 11y ago

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.

ableal 11y ago

"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.)

Aissen 11y ago

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 11y ago
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/

joering2 11y ago

"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 11y ago
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.

misternation 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

amq 11y ago

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

hippo8 11y ago

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

chris_wot 11y ago

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_Files_Dialog https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.1#Remote_... Maybe time to switch to Google Drive?

ewzimm 11y ago
Also, Fedora 23 was just released today with native Google Drive support in Files (from Gnome 3.18.)
- chris_wot 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.

kenrick95 11y ago

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)?

bad_user 11y ago

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.

ehmuidifici 11y ago

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 11y ago

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.

ant6n 11y ago
I did some comparisons just a couple of days ago. I want a reasonable amount of free storage+linux support, and found a service called 'copy'. They give 15GB + (5GB if you use a referral link) + (5GB for every user you refer up to 25GB). I'm gonna do a shameless plug and give my referral link, which should start anybody off with 20GB: https://copy.com?r=fTnUcM https://copy.com?r=fTnUcM.
- ant6n 11y ago
  ...Another thing I was considering is just getting a NAS, because the thing I'm interested in is largely to keep data synced across multiple devices, and have it not go away when I get rid of devices. I was looking at QNAP, but unfortunately their only fanless case only allows 2 drives, and their syncing tool only works for mac+win (https://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/model.php?II=147&event=5 https://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/model.php?II=147&event=5).
drdaeman 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago

zmmmmm 11y ago

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.

drglitch 11y ago

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-successfully-get-unlimited-onedrive-storage-yet.html http://forums.windowscentral.com/onedrive/335647-anybody-suc...] 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.

jbandela1 11y ago

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?

quaffapint 11y ago
Azure has generally been lowering their fees across the board through the years though. I guess that could be purely to bring in customers vs actual cost savings they've made. Onedrive is now included on their OS by default, and they make no money on the free users, so given the sheer numbers, it makes financial sense to reduce it. A momentary PR blip, but long term financial savings.
- VOYD 11y ago
  There is no such thing as "free". MS has less than 15% OS share these days, they are trying to monetize every aspect of each product with a subscription business model. That said, free 100GB (with Bing incentives) was nice and very usable with Win10/WinPhone, but now....not so much.
11y ago

IanDrake 11y ago

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.

FussyZeus 11y ago
So why in the world would I pay more money for less storage vs. Google or Dropbox? Microsoft is already hurting for market share, I don't understand why they would kneecap their cloud services when the competition is so thick with companies offering tons of storage for so little money. The Office integration isn't THAT good anyway, and both the PC and Mac apps have a LOT of issues on top of it, and all that to address the issues presented by a minority of abusers who won't be affected by a lot of what's pissing people off.
- IanDrake 11y ago
  "So why in the world would I pay more money for less storage vs. Google or Dropbox?" If that's the premise you're starting with, then you're already wrong. DropBox 1TB = $9.99/m GoogleDrive 1TB = $9.99/m OneDrive 1TB + Office365 = $6.99/m
signal11 11y ago
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.

xjay 11y ago

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.

jffry 11y ago

Right now the server is down, so here's a mirror: https://archive.is/ekGpj https://archive.is/ekGpj

FussyZeus 11y ago

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.

xamdam 11y ago

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

0xFFC 11y ago

Typical Microsoft

jhawk28 11y ago

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

mark_l_watson 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

munchy22 11y ago

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.

munchy22 11y ago