Windows 10: MS Downgrades free Onedrive storage, ends unlimited for Office 365

Well, this is pretty bad news. I was using my free OneDrive for system backups, but a paltry 5GB will be useless for that. Yet another MS service I lose or am forced to drop, it seems. Their justification is clearly a load of BS too, if people uploading massive amounts of data was really the problem they'd surely just discontinue the unlimited plans, not also drop the regular free plans down to this level.

Just penny pinching, or does MS have serious concerns about it's long-term viability maybe?

 

Here you all go: Give us back our storage – Feature Suggestions for Microsoft OneDrive

 

Ultimately, I don't trust any "free" cloud storage solution. It can be taken away at any time, as shown here. An external 1-TB sata drive connected through USB 3.0 is less than $50. That's my backup solution.

 

HOW can Microsoft start charging people who are over the ridiculously low 5GB limit? Did the company take your bank or credit card information when you started to use One-Sky-Drive, or whatever it's now called? My only experience is with Google Drive.

Edit to ask: How does a few people illegally using 15TB of storage, warrant punishing everyone, by reducing free storage from 15GB down to 5GB? There must be more to this story than what meets the eye.

 

I'm not happy about this news. I have an 0365 account, so I get the 1tb of storage with the now gone promise of unlimited. The taking back of this benefit is not good, but lowering the free storage to such a low amount is a bad move on MS's part, and I think they may change that again, as they will hear about it.

 

This is why I never rely on "free" as things can change and now you're stuck with either paying for the service, or having to go through the inconvenience of finding an alternate solution. This why I don't use cloud as my base storage for any large amount of data.

As the business motto goes - TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) *Wink

 

It bodes ill for those who think that there will be free perpetual upgrades for Windows 10 with Redstone and beyond, without tie-ins to paid services such as Office 365.

 

C'mon folks, buy a subscription to Microsoft office 2020 and get Windows thrown in free with it. And 5 GB Cloud Storage!

 

My take on this is that MS probably has pentabytes on server farms that remain unused (as most snapped up the free stuff without really having an intention of using it) - the maintenance cost of that could be offset by using it for other purposes (like repositories etc)

 

The Government has possibly been looking around for places to store all the stuff they've gleaned online, but haven't gotten around to processing yet, and offered a nice deal to MS that they couldn't refuse.

Exactly!

 

We have OneDrive for Business at work, and it's totally different to personal OneDrive.

It's built on a different technology (Sharepoint) and it's not very good!

It's forever losing sync for files, and also space-hogging (as well as the local copy of the file itself, its working folder seems to hold each file again).

Plus there are all sorts of arbitrary restrictions; for instance certain characters allowed elsewhere aren't allowed in Sharepoint filenames, and a person's Onedrive for Business can only hold 20,000 files at present.

Also it disables features in Office, so for instance if you accidentally close a file without remembering to save, Excel 2013 will normally keep a copy for you so you can get it back... but if the file was stored on a OneDrive, you've lost your changes.

So unless they change the technology fundamentally (and it's possible they might), I wouldn't recommend it.

Edit: Also, it messes up 'Last modified' dates on both the local and server copies. Sometimes I save a file and the last modified date doesn't change. Other times when it has a sync failure and you try to repair it, all the last modified dates change to the time and date when it tried to repair.

And it relies on an Access Database which can get corrupted (which means you can't even access local versions of files on your local disk), but apparently it doesn't have the wit to run a Repair and Compact itself every so often (which I seem to remember was recommended from years ago when I used Access databases more often).

 

The problem with using Groove for your music is that it only supports Onedrive for streaming your content (someone correct me if I am wrong on that)
With 30GB you could get a fair amount of your music online for streaming on all your MS devices, now the space is down to 5GB I imagine it will affect a lot of people who use this feature (which has been very popular from what I have read)

I can see this backfiring on MS, now they are going to tell people to take out a subscription to continue using this feature (If you want more than 5GB of your music available to stream on all devices)

 

I agree 100% as I have even turned off cloud on my computer, I just never liked the idea of keeping any of my files on any type of cloud storage on the internet. I don't care what type of internet storage system is offered. I don't see any need for using it in my case. Internal and external drive prices are very cheap these days, just like Antilope has stated.

 

External drives are fine if all you want is to do backups

For sharing data they are not as easy
Put files in the cloud and you can access them on any other device you have

 

Well then I guess I am lucky then, as I have no use for any cloud feature on my computers or my cell phone. Only thing that is like a cloud feature that I can think of, that I do use, is my email. That is stored on the internet just like everyone else.