Microsoft is cutting free OneDrive storage from 15 to 5 GB

If you read the announcement you get an idea of just how messed up this is.<p>Quoting: &quot;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.&quot;<p>Quoting further: &quot;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.&quot;<p>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&#x27;t sustain its growth, so you get 5gb cloud drive, or about a third the size of a GMail mailbox.<p>But wait, there&#x27;s more! You thought you could rely on their cloud offering to backup your data? well, you&#x27;ll have 90 days to clear that space. Because you can&#x27;t really get any peace of mind from Microsoft.<p>I don&#x27;t understand people who can avoid Microsoft products and services yet still opt to pay to this awful company.

I wish MSFT would get their shit together on their &quot;cloud drive&quot; offering. First it was...I don&#x27;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&#x27;s your 15Gb, umm, make that 5Gb. (EDIT: just looked on wikipedia to try and find the name of the company&#x2F;product they bought. Could find it, but found the list of prior names: &quot;OneDrive (previously SkyDrive, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Windows Live Folders)&quot;. <i>Five</i> different names?)<p>Gawd, I&#x27;m supposed to trust this with family photos? I happily pay Apple for iCloud. The only change I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t use the MSFT product.

I have never made use of the 1tb space that comes with office 365 exactly because ms do these sorts of things. If you&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s sad, really (Seeing a grown company make these kinds of &#x27;mistakes&#x27;). We&#x27;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 :|<p>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 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.<p>[1] I could not find a citation for this. Sorry, you will just have to trust my memory from a decade ago.

There is a saying in my culture, which describes those, who give a present and later take it back, as &quot;dog eating what he threw up&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m migrating 40 GB of photos from OneDrive to AWS since days.

Why? I really wonder why.<p>I doubt that 15GB vs 5GB really matter from point of view of costs.<p>I&#x27;m concern that is solution to &quot;solve&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;s less than what I have on my free dropbox account...

Can&#x27;t you grandfather your 15GB by ... asking? That&#x27;s what I did.

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.

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 &quot;cloud first, mobile first&quot;. 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.onedrive.com&#x2F;onedrive_changes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.onedrive.com&#x2F;onedrive_changes&#x2F;</a>

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.

Except they aren&#x27;t: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;11&#x2F;9890966&#x2F;microsoft-onedrive-free-storage" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;11&#x2F;9890966&#x2F;microsoft-onedriv...</a>

Haven&#x27;t they recently cut back from free storage to like 15gb. But if you stored photos or something, they&#x27;d expand it to 50gb? And now it&#x27;s 5gb?<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s 2gb (I&#x27;ve got 20gb due to referrals) was not enough.<p>My wife recently reached her limit even after she deleted most of her files and was just like &quot;Wtf is going on?&quot;<p>Great, now I gotta migrate all my shit to another service. Heard Amazon&#x27;s equivalent was pretty worth it but this really sucks. I&#x27;ve always preferred OneDrive to pretty much anything else on the market.

I have a Surface Pro 2, solely purchased for it&#x27;s notetaking abilities (a la OneNote) and OneDrive is too tightly integrated into this.<p>All OneNote files are saved in OneDrive&#x27;s folders, and OneNote doesn&#x27;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.<p>I have moved all my data away from MS, but due to OneNote, I cannot move fully. I wish I could.

Yet another garbage solution from Microsoft that would be far less repulsive if they weren&#x27;t actively working to cram it down your throat.

They sure are good at this. Next, it will be moved to 500 MB.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;microsoft-reneges-on-unlimited-onedrive-storage-promise-for-office-365-subscribers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;microsoft-reneges-on-unlimited-...</a>

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 &quot;Try Microsoft Office 365&quot; every week. I wonder when I&#x27;ll get a notification about this space reduction :)<p>Thanks for posting this!

Man, now I&#x27;m really glad that I avoided OneDrive.

bait and switch?