Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Cloud Storage Service OneDrive Now Offers 15GB For Free
DroidJason1 writes Microsoft revealed today that they will be offering 15GB of free OneDrive storage, up from 7GB. Office 365 users will now get 1TB of storage, up from 20GB. This announcement comes after Amazon revealed unlimited photo storage for those who buy the new Fire phone. Dropbox, a competitor to OneDrive, currently has 2GB for free but offers more space if you refer people to the service. Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage, while Amazon Cloud Drive offers 5GB.
They decided to make a virtue of necessity and classify the NSA's copy of your data as the 'offsite backup', thus freeing up enough space to expand their offering.
And when you gaze long into a cloud the cloud also gazes into you.
Just in! [Major hard drive manufacturer] is now offering [large amount of space] for [small amount of money]. This is amazing because, just [a short period of time] ago, they used to charge [small amount of money] for [almost as large of an amount of space].
No, I will not work for your startup
With MEGA giving 50G for free with client side encryption, I don't understand why you would use any other service.
The reason why companies can offer such large sizes for free is because most people will not come close. They probably looked at the statics and saw each user was using an average of 3gigs and not even using the 20gigs. However other companies are advertising more, so they just reconfigured the quota system to 1TB and they are competitive again. No major upgrade to their systems, just changing a few bits around.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
But they still have a 20,000 item limit for the 1TB OneDrive for Business user so you tend to end up hitting the item limit well before the data size limit...
I have a "server" machine on my home network, with some big hard drives (inexpensive today). It is set up so on local network I can simply access the drives as though they were in my work machine, other than network latency of course. When away from home, I can use SSH and SFTP. (In fact I use SSH forwarding so I can access both the server and my regular work machine.)
Very simple. Easy to set up. Probably more secure than Microsoft anything. And no third parties involved.
I don't need "streaming" anything. I don't need DLNA or other kinds of streaming services. If I am away from home, I just download the file and view or play it locally. Disadvantage: that can take a while. Advantage: no blips or burps or freezes in my media, because IT'S LOCAL, not streaming.
I can also sync folders, if I want, via BitTorrent Sync. Again, no third party involved.
So, really: I don't need "cloud services". They offer me nothing I don't already do myself, and they add unreliability, privacy risks, and so many other things I really don't need to dick around with.
I would also like to find an NAS that doesn't have all those fancy bells and whistles, and doesn't make me pay for them. I just want it to "look like" a local drive on my home network. That is all. I will take care of the rest.
I wonder if they are at risk of the same "problem" residential internet providers have.
Marketing and competition with DSL providers drove them to aggressively raise their base throughput from 5 Mbps to 10 to 20 or whatever they advertise. Engineering assured them "nobody actually uses this much bandwidth".
Then came torrent users and other heavy users who got not-so-hidden bandwidth caps, then the caps became sort-of policy for everyone, then streaming video took off and now 7-10 Mbps is basically an evening's entertainment in a household with two TVs and a laptop.
They still advertise cable as a 10-20 Mbps service, but now there's a public conflict over bandwidth, caps, etc.
I wonder if storage providers will have the same problem once people start finding some practical use for stashing 1 TB online.
With MEGA giving 50G for free with client side encryption, I don't understand why you would use any other service.
Set for a July launch.
When a Fort Knox file is stored in Azure, it is split in several fragments. Each fragment is encrypted (using AES 256 bits encryption) with its own key. Each of these fragments are stored in separate Azure containers that are generated on demand.
This shredding architecture allows for massive scalability of storage and more importantly, very strong security at the file level. Imagine the challenge of having to reconstruct a set of fragments spread across dozens of containers, each encrypted with its own key.
These keys are also regenerated every day, making it even more difficult to gain access to the raw storage.
A master key is used to encrypt keys used to encrypted each of the fragments. These encrypted keys are stored in the content database, and the master key is stored in a separate key store.
With a master key stored online in Microsoft's key store, this still allows someone with access to this master key to decrypt all the fragment keys and then use these keys to decrypt the underlying storage. This is less of an issue for a hacker scenario (although possible, given the level of fragmentation between tiers tougher to accomplish) but more of an issue of an NSA style ''request'' for your data. Assuming Microsoft were to comply with the request, they could ultimately still provide them access to your master key and decrypt the information.
The only real solution is to have master keys generated off the grid so that they could not be requested at all and not be in your cloud providers hands to hand over on request.... however this would be difficult to implement and still have a useable business productivity portal because you would still need the master key to decrypt the files.
Technical Details on Office 365 Fort Knox Encrypted Storage