Microsoft is going to implement these changes in early 2016. If you don’t want to provide a credit card, your data will be kept for at least 12 months as well.
If you are using the free tier, and are over the 5 GB limit that will be imposed, you will receive a free year of Office 365 personal and the 1 TB allotment that comes with it, assuming you provide a credit card. If you are currently subscribing to the 100 GB and 200 GB plans, there are no changes, and any changes will only affect new subscribers. If OneDrive is no longer what you want to use, you can apply for a pro-rated refund of your subscription. As I already mentioned, if you are over 1 TB of OneDrive, you will be notified and your data will be kept for at least 12 months before it is cleared out. So there are a lot of use cases to be addressed. Microsoft says that the 75 TB user was using “14,000 times the average” which means that the average allotment of OneDrive use is just 5 GB of storage, despite paying for unlimited. There is more information in the blog post which I would guess was posted accidentally.
They could easily have dealt with these users on an individual basis without the massive reductions in service, and paid users abusing the paid system should not affect the free system. Microsoft is trying to lay the blame on several users with excessive amounts of cloud storage use, but that is likely not the motivating factor. This makes the new OneDrive look like this: Microsoft OneDriveĬlearly, this is a massive reduction in service for most users.
This is a massive reduction, and to add more salt to the wound, anyone who had been using the extra 15 GB free for using the camera roll feature of OneDrive will also have that removed. They are now in-line with what Apple offers with iCloud, but Google Drive is still 15 GB for free. The free tier, which originally started at 25 GB, and was then reduced to 5 GB, and increased again to 15 GB, is once again reduced to 5 GB. This seriously reduces the number of tiers, and you now go from free, to 50 GB, to 1 TB, with no other options anywhere else.Īnd, they may as well sweeten the pot with even more reductions. Previously the 100 GB plan was $2 per month and the 200 GB option was $4 per month. So you get half the storage now for the same price. The paid 100 GB and 200 GB tiers are now gone, and have been replaced with a single 50 GB offering for $1.99 per month. Microsoft will not be offering tiers higher than 1 TB even at an increased cost. If you are over the 1 TB limit though, tough luck. The reduction will mean that Office 365 Personal will be 1 TB, and Office 365 Home will be 1 TB for up to five people, or 5 TB total. Microsoft is attributing this to some users gobbling up excessive storage, with an example given of a single user having 75 TB of cloud storage used up. This is clearly a significant downgrade, and any users who are using more than 1 TB will be notified, and their data will be kept for “over 12 months” before it is reduced. Here are the changes.įirst, subscribers to Office 365 consumer will have their storage allotment reduced from unlimited to 1 TB. Just barely a year after announcing that OneDrive would offer unlimited storage for subscribers to Office 365 consumer and business, the Redmond company has decided to back out on that commitment. Microsoft’s OneDrive team put up a blog post today outlining some changes coming to OneDrive, and the news is not good for pretty much anyone using the service.