Thanks to a "small number of users" taking up more than 75TB each by
backing up "numerous PCs" or uploading their "entire movie collections
and DVR recordings," Microsoft has reduced the amount of storage on OneDrive.
Even users who pay for a subscription only get 1TB of storage, and free
users get knocked back to 5GB instead of 15GB – Microsoft didn't even
keep the old 7GB allowance it had before.
The 'camera roll bonus'
has also been ditched, so Windows Phone, iOS and Android users
automatically uploading their photos and videos will have to make sure
they stay under the limit or buy a subscription (4k video files created
on the new Lumia 950XL are likely to use between 90-150MB for a minute of footage, depending on the codec).
Groove
Music users will likely want to stop uploading their music for easy
access from multiple devices. Free OneNote and Sway users will also need
to watch their usage, as OneDrive is their only option for storing
OneNote notebooks and Sways. What happens if they go over the limit?
If
you're using more than 5GB of free OneDrive storage when Microsoft
drops the limit in early 2016 then you'll get a one-year subscription to
Office 365 Personal free – but you have to give Microsoft your credit
card details (and presumably remember to remove your files and cancel
the OneDrive subscription before you get charged for the subsequent
year).
Marketing move?
This offer makes it obvious that
the drop in storage is far more likely a marketing deal for Office 365
than Microsoft actually having problems coping with all those backup
files (especially given how often the company talks about how hyperscale
its cloud data centres are). Even more so, when you consider that the
OneDrive team deliberately picked a figure which is less than the
average user stores as the free storage limit.
According to the
blog, the average is "14,000 times" less than 75TB – that's 5.4GB,
making 5GB look nothing short of mean, compared to 15GB free on Google
Drive, plus extra space for images. In fact, since this whole change is
blamed on the users filling up 75TB of space, it's not clear why free
users get less storage at all, unless Microsoft is giving up on the idea
of using OneDrive as a loss leader to attract users from other
platforms, with tools like automatic photo upload.
But with the
push to subscriptions, not even offering the option to pay for more than
1TB makes OneDrive far less useful for anyone working with large video
files or extensive photo collections; they'll be better off paying for
Adobe Creative Cloud or Flickr. If you want to back up to the cloud, pay
for Azure Backup – or use a non-Microsoft service like Backblaze, which
has unlimited storage for both personal and business plans. Unlimited storage for OneDrive for Business customers is still marked as under developmentThe reduced storage applies to consumer Office 365
subscriptions – Home, Personal and University. There's no word yet
whether OneDrive for Business customers will also lose the unlimited
storage they were promised last October but never actually received. The
feature is still marked as Under Development rather than Cancelled.
A
Microsoft spokesperson told TechRadar that the announcement is only
about the consumer service: "There isn't additional news about the
Office 365 Business storage plans."
Has Microsoft been looking at user files to find the 75TB OneDrive hoarders?
Reviewed by Unknown
on
13:05
Rating: 5
No comments:
Post a Comment