This is what happens when someone puts 75TB data on OneDrive.
Recently, Microsoft announced tons of changes in its OneDrive service on a blog post and none of it seems to be a good news.
Microsoft is reducing the allotted storage in almost all Tires of OneDrive. These will be applicable on 2016 and users will be soon notified by Microsoft if they are affected by this.
Office 365 subscribers are now reduced to 1TB of OneDrive Storage from Unlimited storage. This is quite a downgrade as people were able to store unlimited data on their OneDrive accounts.
The bad news doesn’t stop here though, Microsoft is also reducing free storage limit to 5GB again. This seems to be rediculas keeping in mind that Google still offers 15GB of free storage on its Google Drive. Although, Apple’s iCloud is at a similar state at 5GB free storage.
Microsoft has made changes on its free plan several times since the inception of OneDrive. At the launch it was 25GB of storage, than it was changed to 5GB. After that it was again increased to 15GB.
TL;DR is that now free users have 5GB of storage. Even if you enabled Camera Roll feature in OneDrive’s Android or iOS app, it will no longer benefit in storage.
There is one more thing to hurt customers, Prices are also being increased of storage plans and some plans are removed altogether in the OneDrive service.
You will no longer be able to buy 100GB or 200GB monthly plans, instead there is only one plan -50GB for $2 per month. Users who already have one of these plans will not be affected.
Microsoft has said that if a user has stored more data than the new plans, they will be able to keep it for next 12 month.
Why Microsoft is Doing this?
Microsoft has tried to give some reasons on the blog post, the best one is that some users were storing too much data on their OneDrive Account.
A small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.
Some users stored more than 75TB of data. (Seriously? 75 TB? how many torrent movies did that guy kept in there) This may make some sense reduction of Unlimited tier but that is not making sense in the matter of reducing free storage to 5GB from 15GB.
However, Office 365 still is cost effective compared to other storage plans on the internet. These changes will be applied form 2016.
What do you think about the reduction on data storage in OneDrive? Will you be switching back to Google Drive or other services or will you stick with it? share with us in the comments below.
That’s a pity! They should have anticipated this and introduced a fair usage policy rather than cut back on the storage available to regular users