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There was abuse of the "unlimited storage", by the data hoarder subreddit. This gives yopu an idea of how much they stretch the definition of "unlimited":https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...

> stretch the definition of "unlimited"

You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.

I blame them just like most of the other data hoarders are blaming them. One or two guys shit in the pool and got the whole thing canned. You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.

You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.

No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of organizations outside of Microsoft that have a non-laughable chance of estimating A) cost of online storage to microsoft B) number of users C) distribution of storage used by their userbase D) cost of bandwidth E) typical bandwidth profile of users F) how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on storage as a loss leader.

And then there is the un-estimateable wildcard: G) what number will "sound too big" to sysadmins and/or PMs once they see it on their metrics dashboard.

"Unlimited" is a scam to avoid vocalizing the secret maximum and hoping that users have more conservative estimates of the secret maximum than it's actual value.

And there is a huge incentive for users to guess conservativly at the maximum, because as soon as one person doesn't everyone else will blame them for "shitting in the pool and getting the whole thing canned"

> No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target.

I don't think that matters.

> "Unlimited" is a scam

Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.

Why should we accept imprecise nonsense just to provide companies with a marketing opportunity.

Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well.

However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.

This strikes me as a utilitarian vs. deontological argument.

The former: if everyone just played along and used things reasonably we would still be benefiting from cheap storage.

The latter: stop playing games, "unlimited" is an unacceptable lie and we will push you into admitting it.

There is a strongly utilitarian argument to not allowing such false statements.

It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity.

Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims.

Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

You don't have to go to unlimited. For example, I had 25GB space. I used 10. They reduced it to 7.

Here's what a sane person would do: retain the 10GB. Disallow any further upload while usage is above 100% (Dropbox doed this).

No, this isn't what Microsoft is doing. I used to think one drive was unaffected by all the bs surrounding one drive for business but no. This is a dysfunctional company.

Now that I think about it, it gives me pause about why I should even consider Microsoft technology like dot net core. They'll find some way to screw you over even if it doesn't benefit them to do so.

Edit: sane

Most of us left ms years ago. Whats the hold up?

Ubuntu is a fine OS.

Yup and maybe I had incredibly low expectations but fedora 26 isn't bad either. Still wish I had a desktop or a business class laptop though.

Oh and I've given up on anything named one drive forever. The time am can't be trusted with anything worth anything.

> Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month

That's actually just nonsense. Well, of course you can't get a million dollars worth of anything for 5 dollars. But the question is not how many dollars worth of whatever you can get per dollar (that's one dollar, duh), but how much of whatever you can get. And how do you find out how much that is? You look at market prices. You look at what offers there are in the market. Now, if the offers in the market only specify a price, but not what you get for it, you can't actually find out what a unit of whatever is worth.

> just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of.

That's a bullshit comparison. Buffets don't offer unlimited food, they offer as much as you can eat, which is very well constrained by basic human physiology and metabolism. "Storage for your data" has no such inherent limit, but completely depends on what you happen to use it for. "Unlimited" is not the same thing as "limit not specified as an explicit number".

You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.

There was some UK court case where the ruling agrees with what you said. However, both then and now I disagree with it.

The reason is it is absolutely wrong in terms of language:

  unlimited - without limits
  reasonable use - use limited to a reasonable amount

The other problem is that reasonable is not a number. Everybody has a different reasonable. This is the same as saying a service has a secret limit which you won't be told about.

Why not just say there is a 5GB limit? That would be clear, fair and not at all misleading.

UK: What 'reasonable' means is decided by a court when there is a case. They do take circumstances into account (e.g. domestic user or business &c)

I do think that there should be segmented contracts with numerical ranges in to avoid idiots.

It is unlimited if they can add capacity faster than you can upload data (which is true in this instance).

It can also be unlimited if the host limits the upload rate, such that the more data uploaded the slower the rate. Reasonable usage won't be affected, just the outliers.

Doesn't sound very 'unlimited'

It would be. It's unlimited space, not unlimited bandwidth to put things in that space.

I feel that's what CrashPlan does, over the last few years I've rarely gotten over 500 KB/s upstream, although with my LTE router I regularly get 4-5 MB/s.

As long as the integral of rate limiter tends to infinity, rather than something less, the storage is unlimited. It is not relevant how long it takes to get there.

But how literal to the definition do you go before you cease to be reasonably practical? "Unlimited" is an abstract absolute concept. Nothing in existence can ever be unlimited, looking out to, say, the heat death of the universe.

In the end, it's a marketing term meaning "we don't arbitrarily set a numeric limit like 50GB", not that it can never possibly under any circumstances run into any kind of physical or practical limit.

> Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it.

Where do you live, and how was OneDrive advertised there? Just curious.

Canada. You could sue but I'm not sure you'd win since IANAL.

They did at one time offer UNLIMITED! Nothing but “Bait~n~Switch”. Any business that offers “UNLIMITED” anything that incurs costs has: 1. planned an exit excuse: “It was being “ABUSED”, or 2. does not mind going out of business. They said people were abusing the "UNLIMITED" to justify lowering the allowed storage limit in order to start charging. So for Outlook.com they lowered it to 15 GB, why not say 500 GB? Because it would not generate the revenue stream they could have at lower storage limits. Then they prompted you to either signup to keep it at 15 GB, or if you missed the deadline, it will go back to 5 GB. What is in the future? Be prepared when using their apps, it won't be long, and it is already happening, that the only place you can store your files that you create is on their cloud space. So be prepared if you need your data when say you are on vacation out in the boondocks! It happened! Remember their corporate motto, “cloud first, mobile first,…………. Consumer last (ad lib)”! “Your Data Belongs to U$!”

1. Offer an unlimited server

2. Work median usage per customer

3. Set new limit below median

4. Profit

*Set new limit at median

Now you don't have to deal with r/datahorder users.

I highly recommend dropping it. Switching to a reliable cloud storage from OneDrive is an amazing experience until you reflect on time wasted trying to make 1drv work or waiting for it to start working properly.

OneDrive and Dropbox have been totally opposite experiences to me, heaven and hell. Also after more than a year with OneDrive I passionately despise it. It truly is Internet Explorer of cloud storages.

The underlying reason is that it keeps getting reorg'd into different divisions with different business models

>I can't upgrade operating systems or even update the app without fear of losing critical features.

I don't use Windows a lot myself but you're not the first person I hear voicing this concern and postponing updates to avoid risking breaking something critical. This is a very bad precedent for Microsoft to set. At least it'll keep the ransomware and antivirus devs busy.

> This is a very bad precedent for Microsoft to set.

Such a surprise they started just forcing upgrades..

I remember livemesh 8yrs ago?, it was going to be the future with its own ecosystem and all these other glorious promises, unfortunately its sync often deleted files and sometimes sync would hang for days. Everyone I know moved to dropbox at this point and most* havent looked back (*Im not a dropbox user).

Same thing with Streamload.. but they actually lost user's data.. then renamed the company.. and then it went bankrupt. I can say the say thing about moving to CrashPlan (also offering unlimited) and not having looked back. 8TB accumulated over the last 4 years and counting.

Well, Google is winning in a lot of areas that Microsoft used to dominate... so they are just trying to imitate their rival. However, a better imitation might be to suddenly discontinue the product without warning.

I'm a big fan of Spideroak Hive.I mostly use it to sync my work files (everything except source code) between my desktop and laptop. I really like the fact that the files are encrypted and according to them can't be retrieved without my password. Sync.net is a similiar service that has a better UX but sadly doesn't have a way to ignore specific patterns, which I need to certain directories.

> Then it went to unlimited storage for Office users, but then they stopped that for no good reason.

That was brief and sadly disappeared. However OD is still cheaper than DropBox for 1TB of storage and comes with Office. I'd still mark that as a pretty good deal since most people are required to have Office around.