OneDrive Changes | Hacker News Reader

OneDrive Changes

blog.onedrive.com

231 pointssharms141 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

[1] https://products.office.com/en-us/nonprofit/office-365-nonpr...

Microsoft is definately flexing it’s muscle on “tenants”. They are very aggressive upon renewals now, and even large early adopter tenants who got price concessions are now getting hit with big price escalations. Microsoft wants MSRP pricing.

You need to remember that any “XaaS” arrangement is a services agreement, you are a tenant. Just as you must be prepared to not have a long term affiliation with your apartment, you need to be prepared to split when the landlord gets obnoxious. You have no perpetual rights, and need to plan accordingly.

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.

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.

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

You'll notice in apps such as little snitch they are basically reselling google storage from the URLs they upload images to. That is why iCloud is probably double the price of whatever google storage is eventually.

I really don't understand the rationale. You have this product, OneDrive, and one of the purposes is backing up all your photos and video, especially from mobile phones. The marketshare of Windows Phone, the only OS that includes OneDrive tightly integrated, is irrelevant compared to Android and iOS. And these two don't include OneDrive; you have to entice Android and iOS users to download and use the OneDrive app by offering something more than the built-in apps. So what's Microsoft answer to this? Make OneDrive worse than iCloud! Imagine how OneDrive is going to look if Apple next year decides to upgrade the free-tier iCloud space.

And downgrading the space for existing users is another terrible move. Good luck telling your users to actually delete photos and documents (not all users are tech-savvy enough to move data between services).

I understand giving things for free is bad for business, but this move is the worst possible response. Killing unlimited? Ok. Downgrading existing users space to iCloud levels? Terrible.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

According to this Quora answer it seems they are now.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-OneDr...

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.

  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!

> 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.

> 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.

Indeed. I am an Office 365 subscriber that is not affected by these changes (I use far less than one terrabyte). I primarily use OneDrive for sharing photos and storing encrypted backups (Arq).

But I am not amused. Who says they are not changing the rules mid-game again? The next time they'll block applications that generate too much traffic or whatever.

Just pick some limits and stick to them (for existing users).

> I am an Office 365 subscriber that is not affected by these changes (I use far less than one terrabyte).

Same here, and my O365 sub runs out in a month, so Microsoft has just made my decision to switch for me. I was fine with paying $70/year for 1TB of storage (with a welcome, if barely used, Office install). I don't actually need 1TB as I'm barely hitting 30GB with OneDrive right now; 100GB would be plenty of headroom for my needs. But the fact that they are punishing free users as well as those who abused the "unlimited" paid option means they would have no qualms about limiting O365 accounts in the future. I don't need to stress over whether I'll have to change providers one day; I'll just deal with it right now.

I've been toying with a storage instance on Vultr, $5/month for 125GB storage and enough CPU and RAM to install and run OwnCloud, though I've also considered SparkleShare since the majority of what I store is text and images. I think I'm going to spend the rest of my off duty time today working out the better solution and start migrating my OneDrive files.

I use Bittorrent Sync with an encrypted read-only peer [1] on Scaleway [2]. In this way, there is only unencrypted data on my own machines (which use FDE) and I have a fast permanent cloud peer that only sees encrypted data.

[1] http://danieldk.eu/Posts/2015-10-18-erp.html [2] https://www.scaleway.com/

I too use OneDrive for Arq. Fortunately, I have used it as a secondary backup location for redundancy, and to test the quality of service.

I have also been skeptical of MS's commitment to OneDrive, in large part due to their marketing of OneDrives storage space as "Unlimited"

> They change names for their services continuously.

I guessed this was some sort of storage service from the name but had no idea who owned it and don't think I had heard of it before today.

It used to be SkyDrive, which was stupid, because "Sky" is a massive broadcaster and ISP in the UK and Ireland.

"Sky" is also a massive thing that is visible around the entire earth made up of kilometres-thick gases and physics stuff. It's older than satellites or broadcasting. It's silly that such a word gets protection.

Well. An apple is a thing that falls off a tree and hits you on the head.

and if its a good one you don't just take one bite of it

(I can recall only one fairy tale with seven dwarves where it was poisoned ;-D

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.

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.

The S3 price per GB is less of a problem for the people I know than the outbound bandwidth pricing.

Ah touche. That is something even I overlooked!

Woe betide anyone who uses Amazon Glacier for backup without paying close attention to the pricing.

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

Retrieval pricing...

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.

At that rate you might as well request more data and use snowball.

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-t...

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.

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".

I still have that 'loyalty bonus'.

I wonder if my 25GB will drop down to 5GB now?

that's how I read it. I'm in the same boat.

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

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-If-...

Which makes it a mirror rather than a proper backup.

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

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retaining_A...

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.

I was going to point to the ability to seed large backups to CrashPlan's cloud, but it doesn't look like this is an option anymore.

You can still seed to a private cloud of your own, friends and family, but not to CrashPlan's server.

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

http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Backing_Up_Exte...

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

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".

That is cloud backup...not cloud storage and they limit you.

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.

Many companies offer unlimited cloud storage:

Amazon: $60/year

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/unlimited

Crashplan: $60/year

https://www.code42.com/store/

BackupLizard: $36/year

http://www.backuplizard.com/

Backblaze: $50/year

https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html

Carbonine: $60/year

http://www.carbonite.com/en/cloud-backup/personal-solutions/...

AltDrive: $44.50/year

http://altdrive.com/pricing.html

NitroBackup: $39.95/year

http://www.nitrobackup.com/plans-and-pricing/

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.

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."

So? I thought it was "unlimited"...? They specifically used that exact word.

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

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

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

With that quote Microsoft basically admitted that they're browsing around in their users' files.

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.

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...

In Australia, Optus got into serious trouble from the ACCC when they advertised unlimited download and uploads on their Cable product. They didn't at all allow for unlimited downloads and uploads, so the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission fined them a bucket-load of money and forced them to reinstate unlimited plans for the duration of the contract.

What did they think would happen?

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).

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.

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?

You're confusing computer programs with Microsoft employees.

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?'

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

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

a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings

does.

Not if the users used standard file extensions:

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

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

I consider the file names on my hard drive private.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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).

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.

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

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

[1]: Others have also found the same-- http://appinstructor.com/blog/2015/apple-using-amazon-s3-sto...

> Do you have a cite for this claim?

Use Little Snitch firewall and you will see it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

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.

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

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.

"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...

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.

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.

How do you save files with a | in Windows?

I'm using OneDrive on a Mac.

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_...

Maybe time to switch to Google Drive?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every "unlimited" service goes through that phase. See OVH, for instance: 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.

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/

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.

Summary: price going up.

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

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.

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.

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)?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.)

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

Microsoft being Microsoft.

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

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.

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.

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.

...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).

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 (referral adds +5/10/500GB for you, depending on a plan selected)

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Typical Microsoft

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