Slashdot Mirror

Why following that link to keep your 15+15GB of free storage is asking to allow a bunch of private information, contacts and such, to be made accesible, even if they put a link that says that you can "opt out later"? Prffft.

I am fine with Microsoft's terms of service allowing changes as long as they offer a full refund of any unused portion of the subscription.

Good, because they do. From https://blog.onedrive.com/oned...

If you are an Office 365 consumer subscriber and find that Office 365 no longer meets your needs, a pro-rated refund will be given.,/i>

If the number of people "abusing" the system (with only 75TB of data) then why couldn't Microsoft have just absorbed those users? That's only 75x the current limit, are the number of users of the system in the mere thousands?

They probably could have, but the FAQ linked from TFA indicates that they're making these changes because they're not in the backup business, they want people to use OneDrive for collaboration and such.

From the FAQ (emphasis mine)

Why are we making changes?

Since starting to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, 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. Instead of focusing on extreme backup scenarios, we want to remain focused on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of OneDrive users.

So, the service was being used in ways that they didn't anticipate and that they don't want to support, so they're changing it, and giving you a year to make other arrangements. There are a lot of reasons to hate Microsoft, but that seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Amazon's unlimited storage is only available in the US it seems. For the rest of us there is Glacier, but Google's Nearline is better. Same price ($0.01/gigabyte/month) but instant access (Glacier can take hours to get your files for you).

I'm using Microsoft's OneDrive for backup at the moment. $6.99/month (sign up via the US site and it's cheaper than the UK site, don't know about the Euro price) for 1TB and a subscription copy of MS Office. If you got here you can sign up for a free upgrade to unlimited storage.

OneDrive is currently the cheapest option. I use CloudBacko to back up to it regularly. That software is really cheap, and there is a free version. Seems to be reliable, it's based on a more mature server backup app with a more user friendly front end.

The best option is to use a normal, un-encrypted storage provider and do your encryption client side. Don't rely on their security or resistance to NSLs etc.

My current preferred combo is OneDrive and CloudBacko. OneDrive is cheap and if you go here you can get unlimited storage, otherwise it's 1TB. CloudBacko is cheap and based on established server backup software. It's configurable enough to do what I want and seems to implement encryption properly (including file names, files added to encrypted archives to prevent file size analysis etc.) Of course, simply using TrueCrypt containers is a good plan too.

Don't rely on any one provider (I can switch any time easily) and don't rely on the provider to keep your data safe.

This wouldn't be the first time Microsoft co-incidentally named something confusingly similar to a rival service - OneDrive not to be confused with Ubuntu One or Office Open XML not to be confused with Open Office XML, or Palm PC not to be confused with Palm Pilot ..