Microsoft is cutting free OneDrive storage from 15 to 5 GB | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is cutting free OneDrive storage from 15 to 5 GB

support.office.com

95 pointsrfjedwards66 comments

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.

> 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"?)

"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.

> You thought you could rely on their cloud offering to backup your data? well, you'll have 90 days to clear that space.

Your wording suggested the data backup was at risk. You can still rely on the safety of the data backup, they're doing fine there, even after 90 days. Just don't expect to be able to add additional data, which will of course break workflows trying to do that. The data is safe though.

This is some serious hyperbole. It's a free service - they have no obligation to continue offering it at all. They've decided to scale it back and are giving you plenty of time to move your files (is it going to take you 90 days to download 15GB?).

Better not move them to Dropbox though, you only get 2GB free there.

> this awful company.

Microsoft is doing a lot of good things too recently. And for that matter they've always done a lot of good things. Remember how much they've contributed to the early days of personal computing. They're a reasonable company at worst now.

Remember that Microsoft has many departments for different things. Yeah, their branding is a disaster lately, OneDrive has been really rude to their users, licensing for Windows business/enterprise is ridiculous but, for example, we use .NET at work and those teams have been great to us in helping and providing good services and tools. I really enjoy working with VS pro, and think they're heading in a lot of good directions on the developer front.

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.

> 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.

Yes live mesh was amazing. I had to switch to Dropbox which now holds a live mesh folder

"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).

Live mesh was so great, that's exactly what I wanted from a file backup solution.

Sky sued them over sky drive

Microsoft caves pretty heavily when it comes to any naming dispute. It's interesting the stark contrast between them and Apple in this regard (iPhone, iOS, etc).

Microsoft needs to grow a backbone.

I don't mean this as a bash on Microsoft in any way (I actually like a lot of their products, don't care about OneDrive either way because I've never seriously used it).... but when your most important trademarks are incredibly generic terms like "Windows" and "Office" I'm not sure you have much of a leg to stand on when getting into trademark wars.

Todo: buy any IP for "Earth" and start suing people. Heh, I guess this is more or less the patent troll business model.

Yah sky only won because I think it's tied to the govt

Are you thinking of Live Mesh? It was originally its own service, but the transition out of beta saw its storage unified with what was then SkyDrive, now OneDrive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Mesh

"Windows Live Mesh (formerly known as Windows Live FolderShare, Live Mesh, and Windows Live Sync"

Amazing.

Apple hasn't fared much better with iTools / .mac / MobileME / iCloud. They gave 5GB of free space and expected everyone to pay for more. After so many nag screens, people who don't want to pay basically just lose out on even the 5GB storage. It could have been an awesome way to just save the DATA from apps, so you wouldn't be up a creek without backups if you lost or damaged your device.

Onedrive also has a ton of other issues like not allowing various characters in filenames: # % * : < > ? / \ | "

As well as a maximum file size of 10GB and maximum total path length of 256 characters.

I was using onedrive for a while simply because it used to be by far the cheapest with 5x10TB for 60 Euro/year with the family pack which is now being reduced to 5x1TB for the same price.

But at roughly the same price as the competition and the windows integration seemingly not being very good either I can't see any reason to use onedrive apart from just getting it with Office365.

Most, if not all of those are not permitted characters on windows, which makes senese as that's their primary platform.

# % & are permitted characters on Windows, but don't work on OneDrive and SharePoint/Office365

Win32 doesn't support: \ / : * ? " < > |

Not to mention dotfiles. They aren't permitted either.

It's just odd that MS would use a Windows system to host files (or anything else) with all of the restrictions and limitations associated with Windows. Maybe that is the reason they over promised and under delivered. It should be common knowledge by now that unix based systems (Linux, BSD) are more efficient. There is a reason why 90+% of internet services are non-windows. Administrators don't just pick those systems out of a hat. I thought they figured that out and used unix based systems for under the hood for Azure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

on 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.

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.

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.

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.

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-Busine...

Dropbox clients is still better than both of MS offerings however.

>merging the Code Base and Having OneDrive for business operate on the better OneDrive for Business Client

You got that backwards. Mesh is the good client, groove is the bad one. The next gen one is the consumer client getting sharepoint support.

Currently, right now, mesh can sync OneDrive for Business but not OneDrive Groups.

The exe for syncing sharepoint libraries is groove.exe and it is called the OneDrive for Business Client.

For everything else now, you use OneDrive instead.

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.

this was announced lathered in doublespeak back early november.

https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/

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.

ISPs rent their modems to most of their customers.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

They sure are good at this. Next, it will be moved to 500 MB.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-reneges-on-unlimited-...

What you posted is a recap of all of the announcements in the Original Article.

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

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!

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

bait and switch?

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.

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