7 ms·

Microsoft is cutting free OneDrive storage from 15 to 5 GB

95 points by rfjedwards 10y ago

aleyan 10y ago
I never used OneDrive, but I was a hotmail user back in the day. Sometime in late 2003 early 2004 Microsoft decreased the max inbox size from 6 MB to 2 MB [1]. A few months later gmail came out with a 1 GB inbox. It was clear to me Microsoft was standing on the wrong side of internet history then and it looks that way to me now. [1] I could not find a citation for this. Sorry, you will just have to trust my memory from a decade ago.
- ninv 10y ago
  For 3 Months, i did not log on to my Hotmail account and they deleted all my emails & contacts and locked my account. Gmail was savior in those time. I had perfect email id on Hotmail but even that couldn't stop me from switching to Gmail.
l0c0b0x 10y ago
It's sad, really (Seeing a grown company make these kinds of 'mistakes'). We're using OneDrive for business, and it is a PAINFUL solution to even deploy it in a windows-only environment without some major hacks that you need to keep maintaining (due to the fact that Microsoft keeps making arbitrary changes to that environment)--not to mention user data synching, even on Windows 10 hosts. Not to mention the amount of issues you get when you hear from uses who used to have Microsoft accounts with their corporate email addresses, and now are having issues connecting because Microsoft is confused about who you really are--and no, there is not corporate way to fix this proactively :| Frustrated? YES!
yborg 10y ago
Can't you grandfather your 15GB by ... asking? That's what I did.
- vmarsy 10y ago
  Yes they let you the option to grandfather the old plan, like they did when they reduced from the original SkyDrive with 25GB. I currently have 140GB free (15 original + 15 camera roll + 10GB loyalty (+ 100GB bing bonus you would get with Bing rewards, this one expires at some point)) I find it nice that they let you keep the old free plans
  - chadgeidel 10y ago
    I got the "info" email a few days back. I thought I had some storage because I'm paying for my Hotmail account (I use it daily as it's my oldest remaining email account, and it's my "Microsoft Single Sign On" account), but apparently that offer has been rescinded. I, too wonder how long the Bing "award" data is good for. If that were to go away I'd have to move a bunch of data. maybe I should just pony up for Office 365.
    - vmarsy 10y ago
      on https://onedrive.live.com/?v=managestorage https://onedrive.live.com/?v=managestorage My 100GB bing bonus says it's valid through February 2017 (I thought the bonus was valid one year, I got it sometime in 2014 or 2015, so I'm fine with that) I'm not a big user of Onedrive, I'm currently using only 8GB, so I don't really care about it, even when I go down to 40GB, I will still have space.
reustle 10y ago
They sure are good at this. Next, it will be moved to 500 MB. http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-reneges-on-unlimited-onedrive-storage-promise-for-office-365-subscribers/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-reneges-on-unlimited-...
- niij 10y ago
  What you posted is a recap of all of the announcements in the Original Article.
pmx 10y ago
I have never made use of the 1tb space that comes with office 365 exactly because ms do these sorts of things. If you're storing 1000gb and later they suddenly decide to reduce you to 500gb, what do you do? Any course of action is going to be painful.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kyriakos 10y ago
  To be fair they didn't just suddenly change this. I am not sure exactly how long its been but it was at least 3 months ago that they announced it.
- elahd 10y ago
  Went through this with Dropbox when I lost space provided under a time-boxed promotion. I could keep data that was already in my Dropbox, but I couldn't add anything more until I dipped below the new limit.
  - orbitingpluto 10y ago
    Well I tried out Symantec's/Norton's Cloud Storage (25GB freebie) They lock you out. I expect what Amazon does: Amazon just let me keep the files, but won't let me change aanything when they removed their free ofering. Dreamhost had 50GB of backup which they no longer offer, their file permissions were so mangled you could traverse and download stuff from a good portion of their clients.
- 010a 10y ago
  They literally already did that in the same press release which announced this 15->5gb change. Office 365 subscribers used to have unlimited, but it was dropped to 1TB.
chinhodado 10y ago
I wonder how much MS is saving by cutting the free storage from 15 to 5 GB. I assume most people using the service are using less than 5 GB anyway. Is it worth it considering the huge amount of PR backlash that this caused?
- sghi 10y ago
  I was wondering if they're not actually using it as a cost saving exercise, but one to encourage people to pay up for the paid version. I imagine there's a few people using between 5 and 15GB that before were on the free version but now would have to pay to carry on using it.
- kyriakos 10y ago
  Indeed, i understand them cutting the "unlimited" version even though it was their mistake to offer it to start with but 10gb of space is not that much considering that probably only a few users actually use up all the space.
- ben174 10y ago
  The only time I've seen people use OneDrive is when they needed to transfer a large amount of data for free. I'd imagine they just attracted the wrong type of customers by making the biggest offering. And this is them trying to cut out the fat.
zekevermillion 10y ago
I tried to use onedrive for business and it was so bad, I faced an internal user revolt! I now pay extra for another service with identical specs on paper but far better performance.
- basch 10y ago
  once mesh replaces groove stuff like this might not happen. microsoft seems to think they can take their time though, and doesnt have it scheduled till the end of the year. they are going to lose a lot of people to dropbox/googledrive/box by the end of the year, because groove.exe is so terrible.
  - alsocasey 10y ago
    Any chance you might be able to expand on this? I don't dislike OneDrive, but I've started to run into more and more issues with various machines falling out of sync unless I restart the OneDrive service to force changes to be detected... Dropbox has the same issue on those machines, so I'm not really sure what 'causes it.
    - the_ancient 10y ago
      OneDrive and OneDrive for Business used different client, the "Current" OneDrive for Business is the "groove" client, it basically a simply file scanner and sync to a Sharepoint Document Libary, it is terrible (This is the same Client that is Integrated into Office 2016/2013 as well... awful) the OneDrive "Consumer" client was/is based on the orginal Live Mesh product that MS bought Last year MS announced they were merging the Code Base and Having OneDrive for business operate on the better OneDrive for Business Client, this is the Code name "Next Generation" Client for OneDrive for Business. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/OneDrive-for-Business-Next-Generation-Sync-Client-release-notes-845dcf18-f921-435e-bf28-4e24b95e5fc0 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/OneDrive-for-Busine... Dropbox clients is still better than both of MS offerings however.
      - basch 10y ago
excalibur 10y ago
Yet another garbage solution from Microsoft that would be far less repulsive if they weren't actively working to cram it down your throat.
0x0 10y ago
That's less than what I have on my free dropbox account...
basch 10y ago
this was announced lathered in doublespeak back early november. https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/ https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/
mikestew 10y ago
I wish MSFT would get their shit together on their "cloud drive" offering. First it was...I don't recall, what was the product they bought? Anyway, that turned into Live Drive or something, which was in parallel for a short bit with Sky Drive. So which one do I use? Which one will win the internal power squabble? Oh, okay, OneDrive won out (what?), here's your 15Gb, umm, make that 5Gb. (EDIT: just looked on wikipedia to try and find the name of the company/product they bought. Could find it, but found the list of prior names: "OneDrive (previously SkyDrive, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Windows Live Folders)". Five different names?) Gawd, I'm supposed to trust this with family photos? I happily pay Apple for iCloud. The only change I've seen them make is to increase storage for the same amount of money. I pay you, you give me the product we originally agreed to. So far Apple has held up their end of the bargain. Pick your own provider if you don't like Apple. Dropbox works just fine, host your own with OwnCloud, hell, put it on your Synology NAS with DS Cloud (which I highly recommend). Just don't use the MSFT product.
- insulanian 10y ago
  > First it was...I don't recall, what was the product they bought? It was called "Live Mesh", and it was good until they started "improving" it.
  - homero 10y ago
    Yes live mesh was amazing. I had to switch to Dropbox which now holds a live mesh folder
  - mikestew 10y ago
    "Live Mesh", thank you. That was driving me nuts. And yes, it worked well enough that I used it for a while. Then, as you point out, came the "improvements" and the name changes (six, by my count).
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    Live mesh was so great, that's exactly what I wanted from a file backup solution.
- 10y ago
7952 10y ago
I wonder if it would make more sense with this kind of product to offer longer term contracts (say 4 year) and avoid the monthly billing. No one would ever buy a USB hard drive on a monthly rental, that would be ridiculous! Regular billing for something so mundane just invites people to cancel and lets MS meddle with pricing.
- copperx 10y ago
  ISPs rent their modems to most of their customers.
tlogan 10y ago
Why? I really wonder why. I doubt that 15GB vs 5GB really matter from point of view of costs. I'm concern that is solution to "solve" some scalability problems with their design or infrastructure. This reminds me when Evernote issued ridiculous API throttling - that point of time was beginning of the end of Evernote. This could be also that they are hoping that people will upgrade OneDrive storage - but I doubt that 15GB matters: 15GB today is 5GB in one year.
insulanian 10y ago
There is a saying in my culture, which describes those, who give a present and later take it back, as "dog eating what he threw up". I'm migrating 40 GB of photos from OneDrive to AWS since days.
deprave 10y ago
If you read the announcement you get an idea of just how messed up this is. Quoting: "We overcommitted with our free storage limits and we want to focus on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of our users. If we continued with the current offerings, we wouldn’t be able to sustain our growth and deliver the reliable service that you count on." Quoting further: "We will be actively communicating with our users as these changes start rolling out via email and in-product notifications. These notifications will start at least 90 days before the changes take effect to ensure that you have enough time to act or make changes." In other words, Microsoft, a $400 billion company with $100 billion of cash in the bank, misled consumers when it said it could provide a service better than Dropbox, a measly startup. It can't sustain its growth, so you get 5gb cloud drive, or about a third the size of a GMail mailbox. But wait, there's more! You thought you could rely on their cloud offering to backup your data? well, you'll have 90 days to clear that space. Because you can't really get any peace of mind from Microsoft. I don't understand people who can avoid Microsoft products and services yet still opt to pay to this awful company.
- ars 10y ago
  > well, you'll have 90 days to clear that space. Actually 18 months. Did you actually read the announcement? Say what you will about what they are doing, but at least they are giving people plenty of time to get their data. (Or did you mean something else with "clear that space"?)
  - deprave 10y ago
    "If you do not claim this offer, you will need to purchase additional storage or remove some of your files. Otherwise, 90 days after you receive your first notice, your account will become read-only." Examples for things that will break once your account is read-only: * Any program that modifies files on open (Word, Excel, others) * Any program or device that would sync to a cloud folder on OneDrive * Any existing workflow that relied on OneDrive files for easy access and/or sharing Have you ever mounted a filesystem read-only? You should try it and then come back and tell us that people have plenty of time. They might not lose their data immediately, but virtually anything that touches OneDrive will break once it becomes read-only.
itsrob 10y ago
Except they aren't: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890966/microsoft-onedrive-free-storage http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890966/microsoft-onedriv...
- GauntletWizard 10y ago
  An opt-in system for existing users? That's mean-spirited and insulting.
jbandela1 10y ago
This makes me think that Microsoft is having trouble with the Azure storage back end. Maybe it is not as scalable as they would like everybody to believe. Microsoft wants to be "cloud first, mobile first". An key area of that strategy is to get your users to store their information with you. The fact that they are making it less likely for users to store their information with them, is very suggestive that there are deeper underlying issues.
lurkinggrue 10y ago
Man, now I'm really glad that I avoided OneDrive.
michaelrhansen 10y ago
bait and switch?
- santoshalper 10y ago
  On a free service? It has now gone from 7.5x larger than Dropbox's free tier to only 2.5x as larger. Oh well.
antjanus 10y ago
Haven't they recently cut back from free storage to like 15gb. But if you stored photos or something, they'd expand it to 50gb? And now it's 5gb? I've been seriously using OneDrive for years now (under all of its names). Even got family members signed up so I could share photos with them because Dropbox's 2gb (I've got 20gb due to referrals) was not enough. My wife recently reached her limit even after she deleted most of her files and was just like "Wtf is going on?" Great, now I gotta migrate all my shit to another service. Heard Amazon's equivalent was pretty worth it but this really sucks. I've always preferred OneDrive to pretty much anything else on the market.
grawlinson 10y ago
I have a Surface Pro 2, solely purchased for it's notetaking abilities (a la OneNote) and OneDrive is too tightly integrated into this. All OneNote files are saved in OneDrive's folders, and OneNote doesn't make it easy to switch to another location. Every time I save a new file (in any Microsoft product, not just OneNote!), it will default to OneDrive even though I have changed the default save locations. I have moved all my data away from MS, but due to OneNote, I cannot move fully. I wish I could.
- lstamour 10y ago
  Looks to me like it's possible, it's just not the default, as you say. I remember when OneNote first introduced syncing -- you'd basically put the OneNote notebook on a shared drive and I believe it would warn you if others were making edits at the same time. I don't see why that's not still possible today. That said... OneNote on other platforms does not have this feature, apparently, which now suddenly seems strange. Do they think their competition is Evernote?
feduzi 10y ago
Microsoft sends emails with "Try Microsoft Office 365" every week. I wonder when I'll get a notification about this space reduction :) Thanks for posting this!
otempomores 10y ago
I always wondered if two users upload the same catpicture and the only difference is metadata.. Does theire cloud hash that..merge that and create a ref to that file. So twice the pr disaster not only does there offer not scale.. The same thing goes for there tech

95 points by rfjedwards 10y ago

I never used OneDrive, but I was a hotmail user back in the day. Sometime in late 2003 early 2004 Microsoft decreased the max inbox size from 6 MB to 2 MB [1]. A few months later gmail came out with a 1 GB inbox. It was clear to me Microsoft was standing on the wrong side of internet history then and it looks that way to me now. [1] I could not find a citation for this. Sorry, you will just have to trust my memory from a decade ago.

ninv 10y ago
For 3 Months, i did not log on to my Hotmail account and they deleted all my emails & contacts and locked my account. Gmail was savior in those time. I had perfect email id on Hotmail but even that couldn't stop me from switching to Gmail.

l0c0b0x 10y ago

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

yborg 10y ago

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

vmarsy 10y ago
Yes they let you the option to grandfather the old plan, like they did when they reduced from the original SkyDrive with 25GB. I currently have 140GB free (15 original + 15 camera roll + 10GB loyalty (+ 100GB bing bonus you would get with Bing rewards, this one expires at some point)) I find it nice that they let you keep the old free plans
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  I got the "info" email a few days back. I thought I had some storage because I'm paying for my Hotmail account (I use it daily as it's my oldest remaining email account, and it's my "Microsoft Single Sign On" account), but apparently that offer has been rescinded. I, too wonder how long the Bing "award" data is good for. If that were to go away I'd have to move a bunch of data. maybe I should just pony up for Office 365.
  - vmarsy 10y ago
    on https://onedrive.live.com/?v=managestorage https://onedrive.live.com/?v=managestorage My 100GB bing bonus says it's valid through February 2017 (I thought the bonus was valid one year, I got it sometime in 2014 or 2015, so I'm fine with that) I'm not a big user of Onedrive, I'm currently using only 8GB, so I don't really care about it, even when I go down to 40GB, I will still have space.

reustle 10y ago

They sure are good at this. Next, it will be moved to 500 MB. http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-reneges-on-unlimited-onedrive-storage-promise-for-office-365-subscribers/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-reneges-on-unlimited-...

niij 10y ago
What you posted is a recap of all of the announcements in the Original Article.

pmx 10y ago

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

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kyriakos 10y ago
To be fair they didn't just suddenly change this. I am not sure exactly how long its been but it was at least 3 months ago that they announced it.
elahd 10y ago
Went through this with Dropbox when I lost space provided under a time-boxed promotion. I could keep data that was already in my Dropbox, but I couldn't add anything more until I dipped below the new limit.
- orbitingpluto 10y ago
  Well I tried out Symantec's/Norton's Cloud Storage (25GB freebie) They lock you out. I expect what Amazon does: Amazon just let me keep the files, but won't let me change aanything when they removed their free ofering. Dreamhost had 50GB of backup which they no longer offer, their file permissions were so mangled you could traverse and download stuff from a good portion of their clients.
010a 10y ago
They literally already did that in the same press release which announced this 15->5gb change. Office 365 subscribers used to have unlimited, but it was dropped to 1TB.

chinhodado 10y ago

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

sghi 10y ago
I was wondering if they're not actually using it as a cost saving exercise, but one to encourage people to pay up for the paid version. I imagine there's a few people using between 5 and 15GB that before were on the free version but now would have to pay to carry on using it.
kyriakos 10y ago
Indeed, i understand them cutting the "unlimited" version even though it was their mistake to offer it to start with but 10gb of space is not that much considering that probably only a few users actually use up all the space.
ben174 10y ago
The only time I've seen people use OneDrive is when they needed to transfer a large amount of data for free. I'd imagine they just attracted the wrong type of customers by making the biggest offering. And this is them trying to cut out the fat.

zekevermillion 10y ago

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

basch 10y ago
once mesh replaces groove stuff like this might not happen. microsoft seems to think they can take their time though, and doesnt have it scheduled till the end of the year. they are going to lose a lot of people to dropbox/googledrive/box by the end of the year, because groove.exe is so terrible.
- alsocasey 10y ago
  Any chance you might be able to expand on this? I don't dislike OneDrive, but I've started to run into more and more issues with various machines falling out of sync unless I restart the OneDrive service to force changes to be detected... Dropbox has the same issue on those machines, so I'm not really sure what 'causes it.
  - the_ancient 10y ago
    OneDrive and OneDrive for Business used different client, the "Current" OneDrive for Business is the "groove" client, it basically a simply file scanner and sync to a Sharepoint Document Libary, it is terrible (This is the same Client that is Integrated into Office 2016/2013 as well... awful) the OneDrive "Consumer" client was/is based on the orginal Live Mesh product that MS bought Last year MS announced they were merging the Code Base and Having OneDrive for business operate on the better OneDrive for Business Client, this is the Code name "Next Generation" Client for OneDrive for Business. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/OneDrive-for-Business-Next-Generation-Sync-Client-release-notes-845dcf18-f921-435e-bf28-4e24b95e5fc0 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/OneDrive-for-Busine... Dropbox clients is still better than both of MS offerings however.
    - basch 10y ago

excalibur 10y ago

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

0x0 10y ago

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

basch 10y ago

this was announced lathered in doublespeak back early november. https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/ https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/

mikestew 10y ago

I wish MSFT would get their shit together on their "cloud drive" offering. First it was...I don't recall, what was the product they bought? Anyway, that turned into Live Drive or something, which was in parallel for a short bit with Sky Drive. So which one do I use? Which one will win the internal power squabble? Oh, okay, OneDrive won out (what?), here's your 15Gb, umm, make that 5Gb. (EDIT: just looked on wikipedia to try and find the name of the company/product they bought. Could find it, but found the list of prior names: "OneDrive (previously SkyDrive, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Windows Live Folders)". Five different names?) Gawd, I'm supposed to trust this with family photos? I happily pay Apple for iCloud. The only change I've seen them make is to increase storage for the same amount of money. I pay you, you give me the product we originally agreed to. So far Apple has held up their end of the bargain. Pick your own provider if you don't like Apple. Dropbox works just fine, host your own with OwnCloud, hell, put it on your Synology NAS with DS Cloud (which I highly recommend). Just don't use the MSFT product.

insulanian 10y ago
> First it was...I don't recall, what was the product they bought? It was called "Live Mesh", and it was good until they started "improving" it.
- homero 10y ago
  Yes live mesh was amazing. I had to switch to Dropbox which now holds a live mesh folder
- mikestew 10y ago
  "Live Mesh", thank you. That was driving me nuts. And yes, it worked well enough that I used it for a while. Then, as you point out, came the "improvements" and the name changes (six, by my count).
- spriggan3 10y ago
  Live mesh was so great, that's exactly what I wanted from a file backup solution.
10y ago

7952 10y ago

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

copperx 10y ago
ISPs rent their modems to most of their customers.

tlogan 10y ago

Why? I really wonder why. I doubt that 15GB vs 5GB really matter from point of view of costs. I'm concern that is solution to "solve" some scalability problems with their design or infrastructure. This reminds me when Evernote issued ridiculous API throttling - that point of time was beginning of the end of Evernote. This could be also that they are hoping that people will upgrade OneDrive storage - but I doubt that 15GB matters: 15GB today is 5GB in one year.

insulanian 10y ago

There is a saying in my culture, which describes those, who give a present and later take it back, as "dog eating what he threw up". I'm migrating 40 GB of photos from OneDrive to AWS since days.

deprave 10y ago

If you read the announcement you get an idea of just how messed up this is. Quoting: "We overcommitted with our free storage limits and we want to focus on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of our users. If we continued with the current offerings, we wouldn’t be able to sustain our growth and deliver the reliable service that you count on." Quoting further: "We will be actively communicating with our users as these changes start rolling out via email and in-product notifications. These notifications will start at least 90 days before the changes take effect to ensure that you have enough time to act or make changes." In other words, Microsoft, a $400 billion company with $100 billion of cash in the bank, misled consumers when it said it could provide a service better than Dropbox, a measly startup. It can't sustain its growth, so you get 5gb cloud drive, or about a third the size of a GMail mailbox. But wait, there's more! You thought you could rely on their cloud offering to backup your data? well, you'll have 90 days to clear that space. Because you can't really get any peace of mind from Microsoft. I don't understand people who can avoid Microsoft products and services yet still opt to pay to this awful company.

ars 10y ago
> well, you'll have 90 days to clear that space. Actually 18 months. Did you actually read the announcement? Say what you will about what they are doing, but at least they are giving people plenty of time to get their data. (Or did you mean something else with "clear that space"?)
- deprave 10y ago
  "If you do not claim this offer, you will need to purchase additional storage or remove some of your files. Otherwise, 90 days after you receive your first notice, your account will become read-only." Examples for things that will break once your account is read-only: * Any program that modifies files on open (Word, Excel, others) * Any program or device that would sync to a cloud folder on OneDrive * Any existing workflow that relied on OneDrive files for easy access and/or sharing Have you ever mounted a filesystem read-only? You should try it and then come back and tell us that people have plenty of time. They might not lose their data immediately, but virtually anything that touches OneDrive will break once it becomes read-only.

itsrob 10y ago

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

GauntletWizard 10y ago
An opt-in system for existing users? That's mean-spirited and insulting.

jbandela1 10y ago

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

lurkinggrue 10y ago

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

michaelrhansen 10y ago

bait and switch?

santoshalper 10y ago
On a free service? It has now gone from 7.5x larger than Dropbox's free tier to only 2.5x as larger. Oh well.

antjanus 10y ago

Haven't they recently cut back from free storage to like 15gb. But if you stored photos or something, they'd expand it to 50gb? And now it's 5gb? I've been seriously using OneDrive for years now (under all of its names). Even got family members signed up so I could share photos with them because Dropbox's 2gb (I've got 20gb due to referrals) was not enough. My wife recently reached her limit even after she deleted most of her files and was just like "Wtf is going on?" Great, now I gotta migrate all my shit to another service. Heard Amazon's equivalent was pretty worth it but this really sucks. I've always preferred OneDrive to pretty much anything else on the market.

grawlinson 10y ago

I have a Surface Pro 2, solely purchased for it's notetaking abilities (a la OneNote) and OneDrive is too tightly integrated into this. All OneNote files are saved in OneDrive's folders, and OneNote doesn't make it easy to switch to another location. Every time I save a new file (in any Microsoft product, not just OneNote!), it will default to OneDrive even though I have changed the default save locations. I have moved all my data away from MS, but due to OneNote, I cannot move fully. I wish I could.

lstamour 10y ago
Looks to me like it's possible, it's just not the default, as you say. I remember when OneNote first introduced syncing -- you'd basically put the OneNote notebook on a shared drive and I believe it would warn you if others were making edits at the same time. I don't see why that's not still possible today. That said... OneNote on other platforms does not have this feature, apparently, which now suddenly seems strange. Do they think their competition is Evernote?

feduzi 10y ago

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

otempomores 10y ago

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