OneDrive Delivers Unlimited Cloud Storage To Office 365 Subscribers

First time accepted submitter FlyHelicopters writes "Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others have been competing to become your favorite place to store stuff in the cloud. Just this past June, Microsoft upgraded Office 365 users from 25GB to 1TB, now they are upping the ante with unlimited OneDrive storage. There remains a single file size limit of 10GB per file, it is not clear if that limit will be removed with this upgrade.

Comments

Who cares

[Spy Handler]

when most of your subscribers have an upstream bandwidth of 1mbps or less, does it matter whether their storage limit is 1 TB or 100000 TB?

Re:Who cares

[FlyHelicopters]

While that is a fair point... Those speeds will increase over time.

Just this month, Verizon FIOS upgraded our service with what they call "SpeedMatch":

http://campaign.verizon.com/fa...

So if you have 35 megabits down, now you have 35 megabits up. 75 down, 75 up, etc...

Granted, not everyone has FIOS, or can get it, but it may well provide pressure to others (Comcast we're looking at you) to match it.

Re:Who cares

[drew870mitchell]

The Dropbox client actually works and reliably syncs documents across devices. As somebody who has been struggling to get OneDrive to work properly for the year that I've had a ton of free storage (from the Surface Pro 2 promotion last winter), that is much more than Microsoft can offer.

Re:Who cares

[FlyHelicopters]

Where I live, yes, I get those speeds all the time.

We are fairly heavy users of the Internet. Between watching streaming shows on Amazon Instant Video, downloading games and apps on the PS3 and iPads, Steam games on the computer, Skype to video chat with family overseas, it works very well all the time.

I also use 6 different cloud services. For simple storage, iCloud, DropBox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. For backup, I use both Crashplan and Backblaze to backup all our computers in the house. I work from home, so I also VPN and remote desktop every day.

With 5 to 7 people using the Internet at the same time, both uploads and downloads, it works perfectly 99% of the time.

That is one reason why I pay extra for the 150/150 plan, gives me 18 megabytes up and down, and I really do see the full speed. It used to be 150 down, 65 up, but they just gave us a free upgrade to 150/150 this month, no complaints...

Other than perhaps the cost, but it is what it is... $105 a month for that speed...

Re:Who cares

[TubeSteak]

So if you have 35 megabits down, now you have 35 megabits up. 75 down, 75 up, etc...

Granted, not everyone has FIOS, or can get it, but it may well provide pressure to others (Comcast we're looking at you) to match it.

Cable's limitations on upstream bandwidth are architectural and not caused by their normal asshole business practices.

Even the latest and greatest DOCSIS 3.0 hardware being rolled out to consumers is limited to bonding 4 upstream channels.
Cisco's literature says it's capable of 120 Mbits upload, but that seems a little optimistic, and I don't know where they pulled 30 Mbit/channel from.

In some markets, Comcast has pulled fiber to the home and offers 505/100 Mbit service, but the rest of their markets only have a maximum 150/20 Mbits option.

The reality is that the vast majority of home users don't require significant upload bandwidth and, other than playing numbers games in markets where they have direct competition, Comcast has no compelling reason to do anything about it.

I recall reading this article in 2012. It talks about ways that cable could upgrade its DOCSIS 3.0 setup to boost upload bandwidth, but concludes nothing will happen until DOCSIS 3.1 show up. That article was written 2 years ago and 3.1 infrastructure isn't expected to be widely rolled out until 2016/2017.

TLDR: Comcast doesn't care about your upload speeds.

Wow

[roc97007]

> now they are upping the ante with unlimited OneDrive storage.

Think of the Pr0n! You could put the entire country's Pr0n in the cloud!

But seriously, it'll be "unlimited" until disk space becomes an issue. Which is to say, it's unlimited until it isn't.

Re:Wow

[FlyHelicopters]

But seriously, it'll be "unlimited" until disk space becomes an issue. Which is to say, it's unlimited until it isn't.

Fair point... Of course, with 8TB and 10TB drives starting to ship and larger tape solutions coming online, it is quite possible that the storage they can hold will continue to grow as fast, if not faster, than the demand.

Will people upload tons right away? Sure... but I don't think it will keep up from the initial surge, after all, does the average user really produce that much original content?

Home movies are probably the single largest source of "original content" and honestly the past 6 years of HD home video for us is only about half a TB. It is growing at maybe 100GB a year.

As for other "downloaded" content as you put it, don't you think that Microsoft is not just doing a "store once, mark for all" system, where they note that the same large files are being backed up by 10,000 users. They store a single copy and just put a pointer to that copy for everyone.

Re:Wow

[ShanghaiBill]

Take daily full snapshots of your 3 TB system? You'd reach a petabyte in less than a year.

Nope. If they are using any reasonable de-dup algorithm, they will only be storing the diffs.

Re:Sky drive?

[afidel]

They got sued by the UK broadcaster BSkyB and lost so they had to change the name.

It's an easy marketing stratagy

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I'm using a tiny fraction of the 5Tb they already give me even though I put all my photo's, music, home video, documents, etc up there. So it's already basically unlimited.

NSA Indexing

[labnet]

What a gift to the NSA!

Re:NSA Indexing

[Shaman]

This.

Re:Sky drive?

[FlyHelicopters]

It was SkyDrive, until they had to rename it due to a lawsuit from British broadcaster BSkyB

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

All cloud services story needs this in the headlin

[sandbagger]

OneDrive Delivers Unlimited Cloud Storage To Office 365 Subscribers...for now.

Clouds evaporate, people.

If it supports rsync I'll care.

[ron_ivi]

Anyone know of such a service that supports the rsync protocol (either over ssh or any other rsync-friendly transport). If so - bandwidth limitations don't suck so bad; since you'd be typically just streaming incremental changes.

So MS biz model = Olive Garden?

[jpellino]

It's back! Never Ending Data Bowls starting at $9.99!

Re:Sky drive?

[Noah Haders]

my work has office 365 accounts and i'll be darned if I can get sky drive sync to work. it doesn't seem like its' a replacement for dropbox or sync.com.

BTW I highly recommend sync.com. It has the same feature set as dropbox, but it's a Canadian company and doesn't have condi on the board. I'm not naïve, I know that FBI/NSA will git you wherever you are, but seriously eff dropbox they can kma.

Re:All cloud services story needs this in the head

[im_thatoneguy]

If all stories came with that disclaimer then all stories would be burdened with a load of FUD.

Computers become outdated and useless, hard drives crash, thumbdrives are lost, LTOs break, RAIDs die, etc etc. Everything is temporary, no single solution is reliable and should be solely relied on. The cloud is no better or worse.

On the other hand TODAY while the cloud is still here OneDrive gives me a really nice service to consolidate my data across multiple machines. So why would I toss a great service today because tomorrow it might go away? I got unlimited Gmail 10 years ago or so and it's a cloud service I still use every day. Maybe gmail will implode some day. And when that day comes... I'll find something better.

Can you imagine working with a 10 GB Word file?

[hackertourist]

At a file size of 100 Mb, Word is barely usable (especially if you have Autosave on [1]). I still have nightmares about a job a couple years ago that involved such files.

1: and the larger the file, the more likely you'll need it at some point.