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Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
- Almondsetat 3y agoInteresting, I personally use my institutional OneDrive sparingly, but I would love to see my professors and IT staff scramble to switch from 1TB of cloud storage to 20GB. I have always opposed selling everything to MS and nobody has ever cared to offer alternatives (only Moodle and it's badly configured lol)
- xattt 3y agoMicrosoft did get me with their back-up your documents feature to OneDrive. It’s preposterous. Something will come of it, particularly because of how much buy-in there is/was from academic institutions who jumped ship from Google Docs+Drive to Microsoft cloud offerings.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoProfessors don't make those decisions, I'm a professor at a university that uses the full MS suite and I hate it with all my heart.
- azalemeth 3y agoDitto. I complain about it constantly and get patronisingly managed. Everyone I know hates it. Some departments -- like physics -- manage "around" it quite well. Others, with less technological users, have flat-out stated that "it is the way it is" and, well, get on with it. Computers were originally built to serve the needs of academics. Now academics are told to serve the needs of (American) computers.
- lionkor 3y agonot sure why you'd go for the cloud for this, that seems misguided altogether. To expand on this: A few TB diskspace are dirt cheap.
- thinkingemote 3y agojust use rsync?
- NetOpWibby 3y agoIncredible. McGill really went all-in on cloud storage without ANY local backups. An institution. Wow. I bet next you’ll tell me they’re gonna open a consumer Backblaze account.
- crimbles 3y agoThis is pretty standard in corporations these days. My org did the same. The assumption is that if it’s not in confluence or GitHub then it’s not worth keeping this goes in one drive. It is quite frankly insane.
- dimask 3y agoNot at all for universities I would say, at least in EU, but maybe here there is just more care in general put into privacy issues and where the data is stored. But in general it is a trend that IT services are outsourced and that IT departments, and in general administration, in many universities suffer cuts, which is really bad. Apart from the problems this causes, imo this also pauses a security risk as if people's needs are not well covered by services provided, people will find their own solutions without knowledge or consideration to security.
- Stranger43 3y agoEnterprise backup solutions are high maintenance product even when they actually do what they claim which is not a guarantee. And the way onedrive sneaks it's way into the organisation without an structured plan means that they often don't get covered by backup policies the way you might do if IT was commissioning a fileshare or locally hosted product using traditional non-agile processes.
- crimbles 3y agoIs that the same Microsoft which is throwing money into running environmentally destructive AI workloads as their key business driver?
- staplers 3y agoHN: AI is all clean energy from the clouds. Crypto uses coal and toxic waste for power. /s
- 123yawaworht456 3y agoreddit: all technology I've been convinced to perceive as morally objectionable is ruining the environment and should be banned by the world government.
- formerly_proven 3y agoSame Microsoft that's forcing roughly 250 million perfectly fine PCs to be replaced due to new Windows 11 "requirements" and Windows 10 EOL.
- ChatGTP 3y agoLove these two comments, nail on the head there.
- croes 3y agoBut they can't blame the users for that, so that's not a problem.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoPlease stop parroting this FUD. After Windows 10 stops getting supported, Microsoft won't come in your house and throw away your PC in the dumpster or have it stop working for you to have to throw it away. You can keep using it like before. People don't throw away hardware just because the software stopped getting updates. Although not recommended, there's even people still using Windows 7.
- szundi 3y agoHow self sacrificing humble gesture /s
- Terretta 3y agoIt sounds like it's McGill asking "And this is why we [McGill] are asking you to reduce the data stored in your OneDrive and in your Outlook email." https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedrive-and-mcgill-outlook-email-storage-space-reduction-354241 https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri... But, amazingly, Microsoft did argue this nonsense: 1. security risk of storing files 2. environmental impact 3. ability for Microsoft to innovate more by deleting your stuff https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft-365-storage-options https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft... Ministry of Truth... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_in_Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Ministry_of_Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_in_Nineteen_Eighty-...
- zinekeller 3y agoYeah, literally scrambled and verified but I still have 25Terabytes of data (this is the limit since forever) with no notice of reduction. I'm not saying that this isn't true, but I'm saying that McGill admins can set data limits. Edit: our IT admins are really baffled too and will now verify with Microsoft if this is an actual thing or just poor phrasing from McGill. Update: there'll be a change apparently but not this draconian. Storage will be limited to a minimum of 100GB/user with an additional 100TB "pooled" storage for everyone. While this is a shock to me and my admin, McGill's policy is still exceptionally draconian.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Terretta 3y ago25TB would be $750 monthly if I read it right. Compare that to datacenter NAS with RAID and with replica NAS redundancy and operating overhead (space, power, people), you're looking at a 9 months to 18 months price tradeoff before factoring in how to maintain a rotating set of users/accounts' storage. Storage is an area it's not difficult to do better than cloud if you are single user just storing one user's content, but it's much harder to do better than cloud if you have user management at scale to add in.
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- tgma 3y agoApple cut the phone charger for environmental reasons too. It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
- laborcontract 3y agoHonestly I don't feel the sacrifice. My house is flooded with old chargers. They're in a bin like old legos. The e-waste related to including chargers in the box is a real thing. That change also allowed them to halve the size of the boxes, effectively doubling the shipping yield. On a billion-device level that's a non-trivial change. And yes, it's good for their bottom line. And yes, it effectively increased the price by $30. Sucks for me, yes. So what?
- tgma 3y agoIf that was the genuine intent, they would have deducted the price to buy one from the device, but that never happens, so allow me to be skeptical of the reason.
- pdpi 3y agoThe two things can go hand in hand.
- laborcontract 3y agoI totally get the sentiment of your comment. They have pricing power, and they flex it. It doesn't feel great, I agree, especially when it comes from the largest company in the world. Perhaps I was being too flippant in my original comment because I really miss the apple that cared a lot less about profitability and would give you a free new model year macbook when your old one broke (probably a lot worse for the environment too lol)
- agilob 3y ago> Honestly I don't feel the sacrifice. My house is flooded with old chargers. They're in a bin like old legos. If only any USB-C cable was compatible with iPhone or Pixel it would be fine, but I have 4 USB-C cables that don't work with them.
- metflex 3y agoDoes anyone know of any environmentally friendly cloud services as an alternative?
- crimbles 3y agoYeah. I keep a backup disk at a friend’s house.
- epups 3y agoThis looks like a change in policy for personal student accounts. If this person is doing something related to research, their own group should provide a solution for data management and backups. I really don't see the problem here, other than using "the environment" as a bullshit excuse for cost savings.
- elashri 3y agoMicrosoft is following Google decision two years ago to stop their more generous (than MS) storage plan for educational institutions. A lot of the people who had MS offering instead of google were saying that they are safe with their choice. 1TB is much more reasonable than "unlimited" and Microsoft would keep it. Now here we are. Happy to be part of CERN so I don't have to worry about my institution storage situation at all. And it is not like one drive or google drive would be suitable for me anyway.
- Lucasoato 3y agoCERN is one of the few institutions in the world to keep using Hadoop clusters, I wonder how it feels like!
- pjmlp 3y agoI guess there are more generous nowadays than they used to be, I surely didn't had such storage access during early 2000's.
- elashri 3y agoYou remind me of my professor telling me not to complain about low memory. He then will tell me about how much he was excited when he could have a machine with 1MB memory in 1980s when he was my age.
- pjmlp 3y ago48 KB on my case, in 1986, with a Timex 2068. Later on I was kind of envious of my friends with an Amiga 500 and its 512 KB, until getting a 386 SX, with 2 MB in 1992. Yeah, really understand where the professor was coming from.
- elashri 3y agoThese discussions always remind me that I was born between two eras. I am too young to have lived through seeing how little resources computers had and how limited network communication was. But also too old to be in the era where people grow up with abundance of tech (personal phones, computers...etc). So, I am still amazed by how people on the two sides spectrum grew up.
- chromanoid 3y agoWhile it seems to be a business oriented move by MS, I can vividly imagine how such institutions wastefully neglect practically free storage... Having to store data for five years seems to me to be a lame excuse.
- crimbles 3y agoYeah it’ll be O365 family next. Then O365 business.
- lnxg33k1 3y agoJust a philosophical question, that I think is on topic, I wonder how many cloud services will have to give people unpleasant experiences for those same people to stop going all in on cloud services, especially in the era of we reserve the right to change the terms and conditions without notice at our discretion At this point I’m not even mad with Microsoft
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thereisnospork 3y agoimo its more of a question of time than quality. Rarely, but not never (e.g. Unity), does the frog jump out of the pot. Popular ways of doing things[0] always come in phases as people with fonder opinions of 'the other way of doing things' come into relative power. Couple that with dogmatism-driven 'leadership'[1] and change only really occurs with the changing of the guard.[2] So to answer your question, I would guess about 4-6 more years. [0]Cloud vs on prem, monolith vs micro service, functional vs OOP, to name a few. [1]I've priced some cloud that cost more in six months than on prem hardware and still gotten push back. [2]Somewhat morosely, "[Things] advance one funeral at a time"
- lotsofpulp 3y agoAs long as homes don’t have high quality symmetric ipv6 fiber connections not hidden behind CGNAT, the cloud is here to stay. Ideally, you would be able to buy a ready to go NAS and set up your own cloud at home in a few easy steps.
- Dalewyn 3y agoCloud storage is better than local storage for the average person. * The average person does not do backups. No, he will not do backups. No! He seriously won't. Cloud storage solves this very real, very basic problem. * The average person does not understand file systems. No, he will not understand file systems. No! He seriously won't. Cloud storage solves this problem by Abstraction(tm). * The average person does not use much disk space; the biggest chunk is probably the photos on his phone. Combined with the previous, a 1TB HDD/SSD in a NAS at home is "WTF" and "WTF" for him. Note, we aren't average people.
- germandiago 3y agoIt is all about money.
- gwervc 3y agoIt always is. Now that a significant percentage of the population religiously believes in climate change, it can be used as an authority argument for whatever prince increase or service reduction from corporations, and new taxes and regulations from governments. And most people will either welcome them or won't have the balls to go against the grain by fear of being labeled a climate skeptics. Genius play.
- okokwhatever 3y agoWonderful. The reasons exposed by MS have been so naturalized that now no one even comments on them. A win for them.
- Alifatisk 3y agoWhat can they do now?
- Stranger43 3y agoChange IT provider! The reason why things gets worse is not that the cloud companies are evil monopolies(they are for profit companies who cannot put the common good ahead of their shareholders financial interests) but that people refuse to look at smaller less hyped alternatives to what gets marketed by the biggest companies in the cloud sector.
- j1elo 3y agoBut of course they won't charge less to compensate for the reduced offering, will they?
- imgabe 3y agoOn the Microsoft page[1] about this change they say > Storage of this “dark” data takes up space on servers and results in increased electricity consumption, generating 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 alone. Where "dark" data is data that is unused. However they link to this World Economic Forum Page [2] which says > In 2020, digitisation was purported to generate 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So the 4% figure is not the storage of only dark data, but the storage of ALL data. The WEF page says that half of all data is unused, but how much of the energy usage is due to the unused data? I would think the bulk of the energy would be used when the data is accessed, and data sitting on a drive not being accessed isn't really using any energy. This is really misleading. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft-365-storage-options https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft... [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/dark-data-is-killing-the-planet-we-need-digital-decarbonisation/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/dark-data-is-killing-...
- esskay 3y agoI wonder why they've not instead pushed people towards a 'real' cold storage service like AWS Glacier. IIRC that uses a mixture of DVD/Bluray automation and for deep storage uses LTO tape drives. Solves most of the energy usage issues.
- philistine 3y agoDo you have sources on that? Discussions here in the past have indicated that Glacier uses unpowered drives, not tape or disks.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- akira2501 3y ago_Purported_. By, this source[0]. Which doesn't cite the source and seems to impute "blockchain" into this total somehow, and was focused on 2020, a year in which corona virus changed a lot of digital trends temporarily. To the extent that the changes become permanent, they probably lead, working from home, to a far greater reduction in useless greenhouse emissions than the data ever could. It's not only misleading it's just detached from reality. [0] https://www.ey.com/en_ch/decarbonization/how-digitization-acts-as-a-driver-of-decarbonization https://www.ey.com/en_ch/decarbonization/how-digitization-ac...
- blackoil 3y agoI don't like large corps dumping and killing all competition but MS seems to be giving 100TB pooled + per paid user + option to buy more. So not a bad deal.
- flanked-evergl 3y agoIf Microsoft cutting cost by limiting storage capacity can be construed to be done for environmental reasons, then why can't Google lay-offs be construed similarly? This is not changing the mix of energy production, it is not changing the supply of energy, it just changes the demand. Lay-offs similarly also reduce the demand on energy since people have less money to buy things that are energy intensive to produce, and have less money to pay their electricity bills and fuel. Sure, in the long term this move by MSFT may reduce new energy producing capacity coming online, but so will lay-offs, and pay cuts, and recessions, depressions, famine and war. I don't think it's bad that MSFT is cutting cost in this way, it makes them a more efficient business, but this is being done for cost-cutting, not because MSFT cares deeply about the environment, it just so happens that money is a proxy for energy (i.e. the ability to generate entropy) and most cost-cutting will also reduce energy demand regardless of the nature of that cost-cutting.
- robertlagrant 3y agoWhat is the point you're making? MSFT don't care about the environment because they're choosing reducing storage energy usage over famine and war?
- schiffern 3y agoPoint is almost all cost saving measures can be rebranded as "environmental." It's just a PR trick.
- nh23423fefe 3y agoWhen advocates lie about climate impact, charlatans see an opportunity to lie as well.
- schiffern 3y agoLet's not shift blame. Charlatans gonna charlatan, regardless of whatever misdeeds you perceive "advocates" have done.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Culonavirus 3y agoI'm a non-violent person who loves animals (well, to a degree... not a vegan), but every time I see horse shit like "environmental reasons" within a context that is completely nonsensical (like here), or when unhinged (but given platform to) people call farming "ecocide", I makes me want to burn a forest with all the creatures in it. Actually no, it doesn't, because all of these actors have ulterior motives and they actually don't give a rat's ass.
- CaptArmchair 3y agoThis is where the emerging field of research data management and digital preservation come into play. Reproducibility and vetting research output, as well as other forms of accountability requires research data to be present and available. Hence the requirement to safeguard that data. However, a personal share hosted on institutional cloud storage isn't the best place to store research data for lack of accessibility, discoverability, etc. McGill does offer research data management services. [1] These services are meant to guide researchers as well as cooperate with them working towards long term archival solutions and policies for safeguarding research data. [1] https://www.mcgill.ca/drs/rdm https://www.mcgill.ca/drs/rdm
- ReleaseCandidat 3y agoThe linked post is exactly about McGill, so I either didn't get the irony in your post or you should read the linked post and https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedrive-and-mcgill-outlook-email-storage-space-reduction-354241 https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri...
- CaptArmchair 3y agoYou're linking to a generalized announcement that mentions research data, but omits mentioning the institution's own research data management services which exist specifically to deal with this challenge. The linked post nowhere mentions research data management, or the fact that there's awareness about the existing of services at the institution.
- Neil44 3y agoStorage of data at rest takes absolutely bugger all energy.
- znpy 3y agoAre they going to scale down the price accordingly? Isn't this fraud? The customers (institutions or others) had agreed on a certain amount of storage space for a certain price, but now Microsoft is changing the cards on the table. The "environmental reasons" smells like bs.
- pjmlp 3y ago> Microsoft says server farms are destroying the planet, Ironically, on another business unit, everyone should throw away their perfectly working computer at the expense of the environment, and buy as Windows 11 capable computer. Priorities.
- avgcorrection 3y agoMicrosoft found its Don’t Use Plastic Bags.
- srmarm 3y agoFor 'dark' storage something in the style of AWS Glacier storage would probably do the trick from an environmental point of view. Drives can be filled and then left unplugged and only spun up when data is requested which apparently isn't very often. I seem to vaguely recall that some of the glacier data was just put on Blu-ray discs and filed away. Seems like a viable solution and with the cloudesq abstraction it doesn't necessarily matter so long as it's being done properly. Of course I suspect the environment is being used as convenient excuse to people with environmental policies.
- cm2187 3y agoDoesn't the university have network drives?
- Stranger43 3y agoProbably not, not if they bought into the o365 product hook line and sinker, which you kind of have to if your a windows shop as MS is using every dark pattern known to them to make it harder for office files to exist outside of one-drive/sharepoint365/teams. It's teoretically possible if your vigilant of able to force users to use your published workflow to run windows with purely onprem resources but it's not the path of least resistance.
- cm2187 3y agoBut surely the research data isn't stored on a personal onedrive folder. I mean what happenes if the researcher resigns, the university loses the data?
- Stranger43 3y agoNope thats what sharepoint365 and teams(which does include an file store in it;s channel feature) comes into play but the back end and api's are essentially the same as for one drive. MS have done a good job of tying everything into a big entangled system where it's hard to disentangle any of the "on prem" products like windows and office offline from the cloud backend used by office365, and a lot of this is introduced gradually with standard(often security critical) updates it gets used without a lot of policy. You can backup the office365 data elsewhere(were using aws s3 buckets for office365 backups where i work) but that's not cheap nor particularly easy to do and the need to do so is often overlooked when the contract for o365 is signed.
- cm2187 3y agoI think no one in their right mind is going to use sharepoint or teams as a working folder for research data. It's barely usable for regular business users, it's a dog's breakfast for anyone using it programmatically.
- DeathArrow 3y agoSo if we use paper is bad for the nature. If we resort to digitisation is bad for the nature.
- gumballindie 3y agoDidn't Microsoft just render hundreds of milions of devices useless (for Windows) a few months ago, to push for their TPM requirements?
- jampekka 3y ago“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
- sandworm101 3y agoSo will mircosoft pledge to reduce the size of windows updates? Pledge to reduce the bloat that is a fresh windows install? Will they place any limits in the size of Xbox updates?
- Grimblewald 3y agowell, Xbox updates for example don't work automatically anymore. In fact they've disabled most things that would have encouraged a user to leave their Xbox in 'fast boot' mode, instead switching it to fully shutdown.
- Kwpolska 3y agoNote the 20 GB for OneDrive + 20 GB for Outlook limit is set by McGill University, and it is applied to students (not necessarily staff) [0]. Microsoft sets a different limit: [1] > all institutions’ tenants will receive 100TB of free pooled storage across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, with an additional 50GB or 100GB of pooled storage per paid user for A3 and A5 subscriptions, respectively (not including Student Use Benefits). With pooled storage, an institutions’ total storage limit is the maximum amount of storage all users combined can use. > In addition, effective February 1, 2024, users of Office 365 A1 (free subscription) will be limited to a maximum of 100GB of OneDrive storage within the institutional tenant’s 100TB of pooled storage. McGill seems to offer desktop apps to students, so they have paid licences. [2] This means they could offer 50 GB per student, and I imagine they could allow the student to have more OneDrive files and less Outlook data. Furthermore, if they care about research data, that should be in a common SharePoint space with well-defined access and edit permissions. [0] https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedrive-and-mcgill-outlook-email-storage-space-reduction-354241 https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft-365-storage-options https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft... [2] https://www.mcgill.ca/it/services/o365 https://www.mcgill.ca/it/services/o365
- renegat0x0 3y agoHaving a NAS drive that keeps all of your data also not entirely environment friendly. There was a trend of ripping all movies from BlueRays to Plex. If someone is environment friendly I think we should go back, huh. Storing BlueRays do not require any energy.
- salzig 3y agoI'm a bit confused. 20GB? Not TB?
- lousken 3y agoare they not hitting their PUE goals? if so, this is not the way to do it
- KomoD 3y agoCan we get a proper link to Microsoft with this information? Surely there's been an announcement
- shortsunblack 3y agoThe company that is using value-less LLM model training fud to boost its stock price virtue signals about caring about the environment by squeezing its educational, thus prone to price fluctuations, customers.
- RecycledEle 3y agoPlease learn from this. Any time something is expensive, and you do not want to pay for it, cite the environmental impact in your refusal.
- albert180 3y agoThe only reason I've used their shitty OneDrive over NextCloud was the 1TB Storage for a small sum. But thanks to that change it will be NextCloud only going forward. The Linux Support is much better
- hulitu 3y ago> Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons They shall limit data collection "for environmental reasons". /s