Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Microsoft announces major cutbacks on OneDrive storage

David Curry
By

Greg Mombert/Digital Trends
Microsoft has announced major changes to OneDrive storage plans earlier today, removing unlimited storage, lowering free storage, and cutting mid-tier options.

Office 365 Home, Personal, and University subscribers will be downgraded from unlimited storage to 1TB. The changes will go into effect in early 2016, and Microsoft will give unlimited users 12 months to remove excess storage.

Recommended Videos

Microsoft claims the unlimited storage plan was being abused by a small percentage of customers. Some were using the cloud platform to store all data from their PC, while others were adding over 75TB of movies.

Related

Free users will also be downgraded from 15GB to 5GB of storage. Microsoft is retiring the 15GB camera roll as well, meaning Android and Windows Phone customers will be stripped of 25GB. That makes OneDrive a lot less interesting to free users, who will most likely move to Box or Google Drive.

100GB and 200GB storage plans will be replaced by a 50GB plan for $1.99 per month — the same price as the current 100GB storage plan. Customers currently paying for 100GB or 200GB single subscriptions will be unaffected by the changes, for now.

Microsoft hasn’t added any plans in between 50GB and 1TB, which may annoy customers that want more than 50GB of storage but don’t need more than 200GB. Several fans of OneDrive have complained on Twitter about the changes.

@onedrive Apparently productivity and collaboration = Less storage. I think I'm missing something …

— Kelly Jepsen (@krjepsen) November 3, 2015

@onedrive The reasoning is rubbish. Kill the accounts of users breaking ToS not the rest of us who enjoy and make proper use of our storage

— C:\CDNjustice.exe (@dingl_) November 3, 2015

The announcement places OneDrive firmly in the personal storage market, removing the ability of cloud junkies to use the service. Google Drive would be the optimal service for those users now, since the service offers over 40TB of storage.

Cloud storage is becoming a more competitive market for Microsoft. The company reported an 106 percent increase in commercial cloud storage sales earlier in the year, bringing in $6.3 billion in revenue. It is also seeing growth in its business cloud sector, but is far behind Amazon Web Services in that market.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
David Curry
David Curry
Former Digital Trends Contributor
David has been writing about technology for several years, following the latest trends and covering the largest events. He is…
Microsoft accidentally released 38TB of private data in a major leak
A large monitor displaying a security hacking breach warning.

It’s just been revealed that Microsoft researchers accidentally leaked 38TB of confidential information onto the company’s GitHub page, where potentially anyone could see it. Among the data trove was a backup of two former employees’ workstations, which contained keys, passwords, secrets, and more than 30,000 private Teams messages.

According to cloud security firm Wiz, the leak was published on Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) GitHub repository and was accidentally included in a tranche of open-source training data. That means visitors were encouraged to download it, meaning it could have fallen into the wrong hands again and again.

Read more
It’s no wonder Dropbox is killing off its unlimited storage plan
how to send large files for free version 1512737175 dropbox key

Dropbox is ending unlimited storage for its business-oriented Advanced plan because it’s had enough of some users abusing the offering.

In a blog post explaining its decision, the company, which has more than 18 million paying users globally, said it's noticed that a growing number of customers have been buying Advanced subscriptions “not to run a business or organization, but instead for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage.”

Read more
Microsoft ‘special event’ set for September – Surfaces and AI announcements likely
microsoft

Microsoft has announced it will be holding what it describes as a “special event” in New York City on Thursday, September 21, though at the current time, it’s giving little away on what it’s about.

The expectation is that the tech giant will unveil some new products, though at this point it’s only possible to speculate. In that case, updates to its Surface hardware could certainly be incoming, including for its flagship Surface Laptop Studio, which launched two years ago and is therefore due for a refresh.

Read more