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Comment by rogeryu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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  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

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