Unlimited Storage with Office 365 Subscription | Hacker News Reader

Unlimited Storage with Office 365 Subscription

blog.onedrive.com

51 pointskirinan43 comments

Shameless plug for my product, ExpanDrive

http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive

Mount OneDrive (and OneDrive business, soon) as a network drive in Mac/Windows (soon Linux!). Smart local cache. Access the data on demand without syncing the repo in first. Also supports gdrive, s3, sftp, Dropbox, box and more. Makes an unlimited account make a lot more sense if you only have a 128GB SSD. Use selective sync with the primary client to only sync a portion of your account. Then use ExpanDrive to offload the rest and access it as needed.

Google Drive broke on the last update. It is very slow.

You're the first to report that, ping support@expandrive.com if you haven't already. I've got gdrive mounted on my desktop now!

I just updated my Google Drive to the "new" web interface and I've noticed it is absurdly slow in general.

There seems to be an issue with the Notification Center too (on menu bar). It disappears randomly while Expandrive is open.

Quite buggy, it reminds me why I stopped using it. Shameless plug, sorry!

Your product is great! As soon as it works with OneDrive for business I'll be picking up a copy.

> Linux version coming mid-2014

Late 2014:) It's in beta, ping linux@expandrive.com

The problem I have with putting my data in online drives is that they have an open copy to my data, which is something I don't like

Does expand drive has the ability to:

- set the a file password (system level/folder level/file level)

- every file uploaded gets encrypted first with the appropriate password

- files downloaded get decrypted on arrival

In this way the space provider does not have access to my unencrypted files, and the password never left my machine

Encryption and Offline access are the two major features planned for V5 coming next year [All purchases get 1 year [or unlimited] of updates]

This dramaticly increases costs as most cloud storage pricing is based around the assumption that most people upload lot's of duplicate files. Even if it's just you and your grandparents having copy's of the same holiday photos.

I understand... Should I trade my privacy to save pretty pennies in somebody else's wallet?

Ehh, just pointing out why it's not hoping to become a standard feature for entry level cloud storage. You can do it yourself, or pay ~3x as much for an integrated solution.

I understand that if economics is the driving concern, then yes, and I started my little project too.

But in a post Snowden era, encryption should be a basic requirement

I bought a license a little while back to mount SFTP servers (for dev work on a VPS rather than in trying to work in a local VM), S3, and Google Drive-- it's a great product that works well.

I couldn't find any HTML with legalese in your page.

Basically I'm interested in reading the privacy policy because I didn't like that the software asked for my name/email to start the trial, and the license only had reverse engineering restrictions and a warranty waiver.

I suppose we should put that up, or at least clarify.

We never capture/store any credentials. Everything stays on your client machine.

But what about the personal information you require to begin the trial?

Are you going to use it for validation purposes?

Are you going to send introductory emails to the user to help them discover the features of your application?

Sorry to be the devil's advocate, but you need to explain clearly in the privacy policy why are you asking for personal information, and how are you planning to use it.

Yep, this would be useful. As allergic as I am to legalese, I know some businesses that could really use Expandrive, but they'd need to know privacy policy on how files are transferred. (When connecting to OneDrive, OneDrive permissions say that Expandrive needs access to files even when Expandrive isn't running, which sounds a bit scary & nonsensical.)

Aside from that, Expandrive looks amazing and like it will solve a great many problems.

Fair.

This is so we can use the API. It makes it sound scarier than it is.

On your Linux support, you list it as 'coming mid-2014' on the site. I think mid-2014 has passed. Might be worth updating the copy :)

That said, I just bought a copy with lifetime upgrades for use with OneDrive now that Bitcasa has screwed me over.

P.S. a post in the Bitcasa forums with a discount code or something might give you some good advertising.

Have they fixed the other problems with this service?

We did a pilot of Office 365 with an eye on using the OneDrive stuff (in addition to migrating to the cloud Exchange service) and found:

- There's no mac client for the business one drive. Only windows. - Documents are silently modified by adding a "signature" to them. In some cases this wouldn't matter, but in others it definitely would. - There was a 20,000 item limit. (files or directories) There's ways to get around this by creating additional collections, but that's hard and has its own limitations and issues. - Individual files had a 2GB size limit. - Those combined to mean that the "1TB" space limit was meaningless.

Note: "One Drive" and "One Drive for Business" are totally different. The stuff connected to "Office 365" is the business stuff and it's really some friendlier front-ends on some kind of Cloud SharePoint thing...

>Note: "One Drive" and "One Drive for Business" are totally different. The stuff connected to "Office 365" is the business stuff and it's really some friendlier front-ends on some kind of Cloud SharePoint thing...

From the link: "We’ve started rolling this out today to Office 365 Home, Personal, and University customers." I'm using Office 365 University and it definitely is the normal "One Drive" (just offers more space for it). The branding here seems a bit confused.

OneDrive for Business is part of Office 365 which is run on Sharepoint online cloud service by Microsoft.

In this OneDrive has two different services, you can use both as a Office 365 user. What you are using is the personal service for OneDrive which is on the onedrive website, the other is the sharepoint online for teams which is used for collaborating files in different projects, teams etc...

- The Mac Client for OneDrive Pro ( SkyDrive Pro ) seems to be 'In Development'[1] (OneDrive For Business Sync for Mac). But the OneDrive App works for OneDrive for Business too.

- OneDrive now supports 10GB files.[2]

- I am not certain but from what I know. The 20,000 limit is a suggested limit which isn't imposed. One can upload more than 20,000 files but above 20,000 files there is some sync issue with the present sync tool.

[1]https://office.com/roadmap

[2]https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive-now-supports-10-gb-files/

The limitations you're describing (especially 20,000 file limit, collections, lack of a Mac client etc) sound like OneDrive For Business limitations, not OneDrive limitations. Best to think of the two as completely separate unrelated products because they behave so differently. Apparently OneDrive For Business won't get the increase until later 2015.

The OneDrive 2GB filesize limit has apparently been lifted & increased to 10GB per file: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2605912/onedrive-now-allows-f...

And an unlimited amount in PRISM.

"Beginning March 7 2013, PRISM now collects Microsoft (One)Drive data..."

http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl... (27)

They should remove/increase the file size and count limit first. Technically, that's also probably the bigger challenge.

OneDrive recently increased its maximum supported file size from 2 GB to 10 GB,[+]. To echo other comments in this thread, it's likely that "Unlimited" storage is a rebranding and publicity move because most paid users were not using anywhere near the 1+ TB they had access to anyways. To me, it seems likely that the file size limit could be lifted for similar purposes soon.

[+] https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive-now-supports-10-gb-files/

As much as it's a pain in the ass, you can always a multipart RAR to get around this.

Again, I know, pain in the ass, but it's a work around.

Then you'll run into the 20,000 item limit faster...

I'm currently paying $10/month for GDrive, mostly because of the auto-awesome photo suite that automatically incorporates my full-size GDrive photos and lets me share easily on G+. While I love that perk, it just doesn't compare to backing up my entire family's data for $20/year each... and that's before including the free Office suite for each of us!

If anyone at Google is reading this, you can win me back by incorporating photo deduplication. I have well over a terabyte of duplicate photos that I don't dare delete, but could easily be deduplicated down to maybe 100-200GB. I'm sure deduplication already happens server-side, but the consumer is still stuck with endless copies in disorganized folders.

Sadly, this is almost certainly checkmate for Dropbox. I imagine they'll be acquired by Amazon, which has yet to offer a decent consumer-facing cloud brand and needs the economies of scale to compete with Microsoft and Google. Even then, I'm not sure how anyone can compete with the price of OneDrive alone... much less when coupled with the best-of-class Office suite.

OneDrive is currently a pale imitation of Google Apps. It's close but there are lots of rough edges and subtle usability bugs.

Also, this promotion doesn't work with business accounts.

In case anyone on the OneDrive team is reading this, the link on "here" in the words "go here to put yourself at the front of the line" links to a URL [+] that seems to have a placeholder tracking id.

[+] https://preview.onedrive.com/?wt.mc_id=oo_blog_onedrive_inse...

The 20000 item sync limitation is still there though.

Does that 20000 item limit apply with all types of accounts? I've seen comments about how onedrive business doesn't have a mac client for example?

They were already offering 1TB of storage for free, realistically they are probably rebranding 1TB to Unlimited because I highly doubt most of their users were getting near a TB of storage. (It was also 1 TB per user, so 5TB free for a Home account)

Had this exact same thought. Upload rates being what they are, I doubt many people are uploading that much. This plan could come back to bite them down the line if Google Fiber (or other similarly fast services) ever gets a wide rollout, though.

It's kinda hard to get to 1TB with a 20,000 item limit...

Finally, somebody being smart enough to give unlimited storage. One of the primary reasons gmail took off was unlimited storage, at a time when people were very space conscious and had to keep deleting emails.

Bitcasa already did this, but they revoked the offer last week after offering it for two years, due to abuse:

- http://blog.bitcasa.com/2014/10/23/important-we-are-upgradin...

Gmail didn't have unlimited storage at launch; it gave 1GB of storage, which back then felt like unlimited (relative to Yahoo's 50MB limit, anyways).

OneDrive had a 1TB limit before this announcement, which isn't as dramatic of a comparison.

But when it was released the marketing message was that the storage on Gmail was "infinity +1" since you get 1GB to start and the storage would grow slowly forever, thus infinity.

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