Microsoft Cuts OneDrive Storage Limits, Citing Abuse (onedrive.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft previously offered Office 365 subscribers unlimited space on their OneDrive cloud storage platform. Now, the company has announced that it's reducing the limit to 1 TB, citing abuse from a small number of users, some of whom dropped 75 TB worth of data in Microsoft's cloud. In addition, Microsoft is cutting the size of their limited storage plans. They used to offer 100 GB for $2/month and 200 GB for 4$/month. Those plans are being replaced with 50 GB for $2/month (existing subscribers will get to keep their plans, for now). Microsoft is also decreasing the amount of space users get for free from 15 GB to 5 GB, and discontinuing the 15 GB camera roll bonus. These changes will roll out in "early 2016," and users will have up to a year to get down under the new caps.

Comments

Pron

[Anonymous Coward]

Better start finding a new home for your porno collection!

Re:Pron

[PopeRatzo]

Better start finding a new home for your porno collection!

All my porn is in ASCII format, so it doesn't take much room.

Re:Pron

[hawguy]

Better start finding a new home for your porno collection!

All my porn is in ASCII format, so it doesn't take much room.

So is mine, but those ASCII movies still take up space and I have over 100TB in my collection -- especially the new 4K movies. You should see how many monitors I had to put up to display a 4096 x 2160 xterm.

Re:Pron

[Trailer Trash]

Dude, take a picture of your monitors - you could be the next big youtube star!

Re:Pron

[Big Hairy Ian]

Funny I signed up to Office 365 a month ago and they were already limiting it to 1 Tb of storage so how is this news?

Using your advertised space != Abuse

[guruevi]

Don't advertise as unlimited if uploading 70TB of data is too much. It's called false advertising and is against the law in European countries. Sadly, the US doesn't have good consumer protection laws.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought all the Microsoft data was stored in Ireland. Wasn't that their previous excuse?

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Sowelu]

I dunno, it's hardly false advertising to say "this policy isn't working for us, we're changing it going forward, but you can keep that extra storage for 12 months as compensation". Because that's what they're doing. Is it false advertising to ever change what plans you choose to offer?

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

It is if you're Micro$oft.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Europeans whine about free stuff, news at 11.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[canajin56]

Slashdot is the one calling it abuse. Microsoft said that a small number of users using 75+TB have been impacting their ability to offer service to the vast majority of customers, so they are imposing a limit after a 1 year grace period, and offering a prorated refund to anybody who feels that 1TB is not enough to justify an Office 365 subscription.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[arth1]

I thought all the Microsoft data was stored in Ireland. Wasn't that their previous excuse?

No, it's just their money that is stored in Ireland.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, it's hardly false advertising to say "this policy isn't working for us, we're changing it going forward, but you can keep that extra storage for 12 months as compensation". Because that's what they're doing. Is it false advertising to ever change what plans you choose to offer?

70 gig is not equal to unlimited. That is false advertising.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Xenx]

First, it was 75TB, not 75GB. Very big difference. Second, they aren't saying 75TB is >= unlimited. They're saying they've decided unlimited isn't feasible and are discontinuing it as an option. Completely different.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[guruevi]

It is false advertising to say it's unlimited and then institute limits on the existing contracts (accounts).

You can't one sided make changes to agreed to terms and services.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[hawguy]

I dunno, it's hardly false advertising to say "this policy isn't working for us, we're changing it going forward, but you can keep that extra storage for 12 months as compensation". Because that's what they're doing. Is it false advertising to ever change what plans you choose to offer?

If they advertised unlimited storage with no restrictions or time limit, and someone spent considerable time (and internet bandwidth) to upload 75TB of data, then does indeed seem like false advertising to some back later and say "Oh, hey, you know when we said unlimited? Well, we meant "with limits", so you have to move your data somewhere else".

Surely someone at Microsoft marketing has a dictionary and could have looked up the word "unlimited" before advertising that storage was "unlimited", and I'm certain that their infrastructure team warned marketing that they can't really support unlimited storage for the world. By advertising their product as "unlimited", they gained a competitive advantage over providers who truthfully advertised the limits of their product - why use a competitor that offers "only" 1GB or 1TB or whatever of free storage when you can use Microsoft for unlimited storage?

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Etherwalk]

I thought all the Microsoft data was stored in Ireland. Wasn't that their previous excuse?

Of course not. *Some* of their data is stored in Ireland, but they're a global company with a lot of smart engineers who know that things like latency matter. They have more than one data center.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

It is false advertising to say it's unlimited and then institute limits on the existing contracts (accounts).

You can't one sided make changes to agreed to terms and services.

No, it's clearly in the terms and conditions "we can change anything we want anytime."....

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[kelemvor4]

Don't advertise as unlimited if uploading 70TB of data is too much.

Exactly. The whole incident did give me a good laugh. They offered a service, then complain and call it "abuse" when a customer uses the service as it was advertised.

Hopefully the "offenders" go to the trouble to get a refund from Microsoft.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[kelemvor4]

I dunno, it's hardly false advertising to say "this policy isn't working for us, we're changing it going forward, but you can keep that extra storage for 12 months as compensation". Because that's what they're doing. Is it false advertising to ever change what plans you choose to offer?

Changing the offering is fine, of course you've got to offer your customers a refund. I guess it's not really false advertising to call the 70TB upload abuse, but it might be slanderous?

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[radiumsoup]

It is false advertising to say it's unlimited and then institute limits on the existing contracts (accounts).

Yes, but that's NOT what Microsoft is doing. They are letting people know, well in advance, that their terms are changing, and customers are given a year to either accept these new terms or find another service.

You can't one sided make changes to agreed to terms and services.

Of course you can, if the original agreed upon terms say that you can:

"7. Updates to the Services or Software, and Changes to These Terms.
a. We may change these Terms at any time, and we’ll tell you when we do. Using the Services after the changes become effective means you agree to the new terms. If you don’t agree to the new terms, you must stop using the Services, close your Microsoft account and/or Skype account and, if you are a parent or guardian, help your minor child close his or her Microsoft account or Skype account."

And...

"c. Additionally, there may be times when we need to remove or change features or functionality of the Service or stop providing a Service or access to Third-Party Apps and Services altogether. Except to the extent required by applicable law, we have no obligation to provide a re-download or replacement of any material, Digital Goods (defined in section 14(b)(v)), or applications previously purchased. We may release the Services or their features in a beta version, which may not work correctly or in the same way the final version may work."

source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[blue9steel]

I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Don't advertise as unlimited if uploading 70TB of data is too much. It's called false advertising and is against the law in European countries. Sadly, the US doesn't have good consumer protection laws.

Actually the US generally does have good consumer protection laws, but it's not that simple here. First, someone would have sue and it would have to be someone who actually got impacted by the change. US courts don't like it at all when you sue and you're not someone who's been victimized, so you can't sue just because you don't like the changes if you weren't a user who "abused" the old lack of limits. Then literally anything at all can happen when it goes to court. If you get a jury trial all bets are off. Juries typically don't understand technical lawsuits very well so what they will use to decide the case may not really make a lot of sense. Judges aren't necessarily any better. Judges have their own set of prejudices that influence their rulings. Then if you actually beat Microsoft, they'd just appeal and you'd be facing higher costs to fight that appeal where, again, you'll go before judges and anything can happen. You can bet that Microsoft will keep appealing until they win. We don't have a "loser pays" system here and it's almost impossible for a variety of reasons to get your legal costs paid by the loser, so you can get destroyed financially by having a deep pockets loser who just keeps footing the bill for appeal after appeal. Maybe all that stuff doesn't apply in the EU, but it's the reality we face here.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called false advertising and is against the law in European countries. Sadly, the US doesn't have good consumer protection laws.

We do have an incredibly large military though. Perhaps if you weren't such a bunch of useless pansies you could have one too and you wouldn't have to suck Putin & Assad's cocks.
--
roman_mir, blocked by the Hillariots again.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[jeffmflanagan]

Of course you can. Businesses change their terms of service all the time. You're not entitled to endlessly exploit any business that has set unprofitable terms, so needs to change policies.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Holi]

And looking ate what files your storing. Did you miss that part?

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[kelemvor4]

First, it was 75TB, not 75GB. Very big difference. Second, they aren't saying 75TB is >= unlimited. They're saying they've decided unlimited isn't feasible and are discontinuing it as an option. Completely different.

They're also calling the upload of 75TB abuse, which it isn't.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[lgw]

They advertised unlimited and provided unlimited, now they're warning everyone it's not unlimited, and in a year will stop providing unlimited. There's no way you can twist that to be false advertising.

It's always annoying what a company changes a product in a way you don't like, or raises prices for the same thing, but that has nothing to do with false advertising. Companies that do that excessively are good to avoid, of course, but products do evolve over time.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[xaxa]

That's quite a long paragraph for a good system of consumer protection laws! Although the problem sounds like enforcement.

EU countries tend to have an official regulator (either an industry group or the government). The regulator can handle complaints made to them, or perhaps act without a complaint.

I know the UK best, so I'll give two examples.

"Trading Standards" (local government) will challenge businesses with false measurements, inaccurate ingredients on food etc. This can end in court or jail for a wilful or repeat offender. I think they also ensure the minimum "fit for use" periods are upheld -- a TV should last several years, no matter what the manufacturer's warranty said.

The Advertising Standards Authority (industry body) will decide whether a magazine advert is misleading. The result is the advert won't be printed again, and the company responsible will probably get some bad press.

https://www.westminster.gov.uk...

https://www.asa.org.uk/About-A...

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[gstoddart]

You can't one sided make changes to agreed to terms and services.

Well, don't forget, in the US the EULA is magical.

It basically says "we can change damned near anything, you can't, we can do anything with your data, if you don't like it piss off and stop using the service -- and if you really don't like it and won't piss off, you agree to an arbitration procedure of our own choosing which you definitely won't like".

Except for things which couldn't possibly be enforceable in a contract, corporations can do almost anything they choose.

Surprise!!

I'd be surprised if Europeans aren't subject to damned near the same EULA, because it comes down to "it's our service not yours, and if you don't like the terms that's tough".

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[suutar]

actually, they're not. TFA does not use the word abuse; that was injected by the submitter or editor. MS described the use of 75TB as an "extreme backup scenario"

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[guruevi]

In the US you probably can. In the EU EULA's like that haven't been upheld. In the EU you can't one-sided change any contracts even if the contract says you can. If you want to change contracts, both parties have to agree and you can't discontinue a contract outside it's terms by forcing someone to agree to new terms before continuing service. Hence most EULA's have to be accepted again when terms change however some won't allow you to continue if you don't accept them which is illegal on both sides of the pond.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[guruevi]

It's definitely anti-competitive which MS is restricted of doing in the EU. You can't just offer unlimited until you get the market share or force competition out and then change terms.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Quit trying to store Death Stars in your unlimited vehicle rental unit!

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[fuzznutz]

Of course you can. Businesses change their terms of service all the time. You're not entitled to endlessly exploit any business that has set unprofitable terms, so needs to change policies.

That is not in question. The question is should companies that knowingly advertise a product or service be obligated to pay a penalty for changing said product or service after the customer has paid for it. As I recall, Office 365 was a subscription up for up to four years. 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. Offering to allow the customer to disagree with the changes and only giving them the option of cancelling the service, forfeiting any payment, is pure bullshit.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[The-Ixian]

Luckily for MS it is no longer a monopoly thanks to Google and Apple.

Also there is no way that MS is anywhere close to being the market leader in the cloud storage market...

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[fuzznutz]

Europeans whine about free stuff, news at 11.

Since when is an Office365 subscription free? I'd like in on that deal too.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you get it. Your contract to use the service isn't perpetual. Your contract is for a specific term, e.x. one month. Each month you are entering a new contract, typically with the same or similar terms. The point is, once your month is up, you have no contract to use the service unless you "sign" a new one. Microsoft has decided to not keep the terms the same but they are not "forcing" anyone to do anything. You can decide to not sign the new contract and use a different service.

This has nothing to do with EULAs. People are not entitled to renew whatever contracts they have signed on the same terms forever, just because they like the terms.

If you wanted a service contract that lasted for X years then you should have signed a contract with a term of X years. Otherwise the terms of the contract can be "renegotiated" at each renewal.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[jedidiah]

The sad thing is that this aspect of the situation is the only part of it that could even potentially lead to punishment. Us peasants don't have any power to sue over Microsoft's fraud. Large corporations that were put at a disadvantage by Microsoft's lies still have standing to sue.

Basically, suing for fraud and false advertising is reserved for "corporate competitors only".

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[JeffAtl]

Microsoft never called the 70TB upload "abuse".

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[njnnja]

Although I can imagine a case where this would be a problem. What if Microsoft did tie together some sort of timeline with the EULA? For example, they might have offered free unlimited storage only if you agreed to use OneDrive unencrypted and as your only backup solution for 2 years (maybe so they could see all your stuff), or if you agree to take automatic updates for 2 years (so when they add the bing toolbar you have to take it). In that case, they shouldn't be able to unilaterally say, "we don't want to give unlimited storage anymore, so we are stopping that, and you don't need to do what you agreed to do (even if you still want to fulfill your side)."

But AFAIK, the actual agreement doesn't have anything like that, and is more like a month-to-month rental agreement with the option for either side to stop using or providing the service whenever they want.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[JeffAtl]

EU countries tend to have an official regulator (either an industry group or the government). The regulator can handle complaints made to them, or perhaps act without a complaint.

So does the US, so it's not clear what your point is. For example, false advertisements are handled by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). A complaint is not required.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[sexconker]

Such terms and changes do not constitute a legal contract.

Contracts REQUIRE understanding, agreement, and negotiation (even if it's a "yes" or "no").
If you remove one party's ABILITY to negotiate, you don't have a contract.

Of course, the courts are retarded from the top down, and the Supreme Shits allowed corporations to remove your legal right to sue with binding arbitration clauses, so let's not pretend anything matters.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Europeans whine about free stuff, news at 11.

Since when is an Office365 subscription free? I'd like in on that deal too.

From the blog post by Microsoft, if you're using more than 5GB of free OneDrive, you can get a FREE one year Office 365 Personal - you do have to provide a credit card and remember to cancel it if you don't want to renew but free Office 365 (with the associated 1TB OneDrive limit) for a year is a huge deal...Wonder if its a sign of Office licensing changes to come?

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[sims 2]

I was thrilled when Yahoo mail was upgraded to unlimited storage from 4MB. I was also rather annoyed when they rolled back to just 1TB of email storage.

According to the new usage meter I am using 0.05% of my 1TB.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Form a non-product and then bam.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[david_thornley]

What sort of bandwidth would you need to make a 75TB cloud backup feasible? At a quick estimation, it would take months to move 75TB on my 40Mb fiber.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[david_thornley]

Without knowing the legal context, I can only speculate. Is there an agreement? If so, what does it say about ending the contract? Was it for a limited time, but would normally be renewed?

Microsoft is giving a years' notice of the change. In the EU, if you find you've given people too good a deal, how much notice do you have to give? Three months? A year? End the service when you bankrupt?

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Such terms and changes do not constitute a legal contract.

Contracts REQUIRE understanding, agreement, and negotiation (even if it's a "yes" or "no").
If you remove one party's ABILITY to negotiate, you don't have a contract.

That's all true, but not relevant. The free accounts have no specific Contract term defined, other than "Can change any time", which means you don't actually HAVE a contract in the sense that you are thinking.... the Contract in this case ends at any arbitrary point in time when either party wishes it to.
For paid accounts, the Contract expires and renews at the end of each term. So for example if you pay per month, it renews each month, if you pay each year, it renews each year, and at each renewal both parties have the option of setting forth new Terms and refusing to honor the old ones.

You also seemed to be confused about the difference between Establishing a Contract, and Breaking one. At best, you could argue that MS is Breaking a Contract, and you could then start talking about filing a Suit over Damages. Good Luck with That.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[david_thornley]

In what sense is it fraud? They're changing what they offer, and letting their current customers keep their existing contracts for a year. Are they currently advertising a product they won't supply?

I like a good Microsoft bashing as much as the average Slashdotter, but this is nothing like a good Microsoft bashing.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[ITRambo]

US consumer protection laws aren't much more than suggestions, unless the feds want to get to a particular company for whatever reason.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[rahvin112]

Ireland doesn't store the money, just launders it. The bulk of the money ends up in the Bahamas, primarily the banks on Grand Cayman.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[thewolfkin]

I dunno, it's hardly false advertising to say "this policy isn't working for us, we're changing it going forward, but you can keep that extra storage for 12 months as compensation". Because that's what they're doing. Is it false advertising to ever change what plans you choose to offer?

I kinda think it is unfair to advertise this platform as a backup and they severely limit it's abilities to be that backup. People will switch to one drive for that amount of space. that's some switchable space and then to reduce unlimited back up to 1TB with 12 months to find an alternative solution.. that's almost cruel. With the era of home videos getting bigger and bigger. More and more legitimate people are using that large amount of space. This isn't just a crew of nerds storing their DC++ porn on OneDrive but people who are photographers and videographers both of both professional and amateur status. These limits are deciding factors for them. It can save you a bunch of money on storage and then suddenly it's gone.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the UK best, so I'll give two examples.

How about this one...
Let's say you open an "All You Can Eat Buffet" in the UK for anyone who buys a 3 year membership. After a few months, it becomes obvious that a few very, very fat people are literally eating several large trucks worth of food every couple of hours. They are taking up space in the line (queue, I should say), and you're having trouble getting enough food trucked in so everyone else can eat.
So you decide to cut your losses, and tell everyone that in 1 year, you will start limiting people to only eating enough food to feed several large horses. Anyone who wishes, can choose to get a partial refund on their membership fee, prorated based on how much time will be left on their membership term when the changes are made.
Most of your Members won't eat any less than they normally do, and many of them won't have to wait around as long for the Buffet to restock.

How would your UK agencies approach regulation in such a situation?

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

The US has plenty of good consumer protection laws. The problem is the courts refusing to enforce the law because they would rather schmooze big business than rule against them.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[StormReaver]

This is following the obvious and predicted trajectory of "cloud" computing: get people dependent on the service, then slowly and inexorably raise prices. Anyone who was foolish enough to think this wouldn't happen should see this as the painfully obvious clue it is.

When, not if, you get bitten by this again and again and again (which is going to happen), you will have no one to blame but yourself.

Obligatory: I expect to be modded into oblivion by clueless moderators.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

There is a cost associated with selecting a vendor. Reimbursing the customer for remaining time does not account for that cost. They should honor the contract until it expires. If they want to move you sooner they should offer a plan that encourages users to switch.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

One station wagon on the Interstate...

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[AmiMoJo]

It's still a dick move. I had a lot of encrypted data on OneDrive until today when I cancelled and started migration away. It represents a large investment of time uploading a few terabytes.

Microsoft seems to have been incredibly naÃve. Many other services offer unlimited storage for similar prices. They must have done the maths but thought no one would really use their product, even though services like BackBlaze have said publicly that some users have many tens of terabytes backed up.

OneDrive was better than all the other backup services because it allowed you to use your own client software and was cheap. The next best option looks like Google Nearline. Anyone know any other unlimited services with FTP/WebDAV?

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Pray they do not alter it further.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Cederic]

Much the same as I expect them to react to Microsoft's change in policy : Adequate warning given, reasonable change, treating consumers fairly, carry on.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Tyrannosaur]

Don't advertise as unlimited if uploading 70TB of data is too much..

That's why they are changing it. Duh.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[ajzimm3rman]

Whiney European. Fussing over words. There is no such thing as unlimited, so if an idiot actually thinks it's unlimited, they're mentally handicapped. For the average user, a limit of 75TB would be several lifetime's worth of data at the current 2015 data usage.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[david_thornley]

Why the refund? Microsoft is letting people keep their plan for twelve months.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Except fossil fuel, that's unlimited uh? You piece of shit republicunt

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[HiThere]

Someone earlier said that the original contracts were for up to four years. If changing terms like that within the span of the contract *isn't* illegal, then it should be.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[mattack2]

You do have a negotiation, exactly as you state. Yes or no.

Yes means you continue using it, no means you stop using it.

I'm not being sarcastic, either.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[rahvin112]

Actually I have a ~75 TB array at home and it fits in the front portion of a 24disk 4U server. So you need a box that is about 20 inches x 8 inches x 8 inches (the extra is to allow for a little padding) filled with 4 TB hard drives. And if you want to pay the extra for 8TB shingled drives you can basically halve the size but you will probably take a performance penalty for the shingling

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[BoogieChile]

The place I work at has a pair of 500Mbit connections, which would easily allow for 5 or 6 terabytes a day (10 terabytes if you were to saturate both pipes with it, but that's not exactly realistic).

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

i am sure that their terms of service and acceptable use policy prohibited excessive or abusive use of so-called "unlimited" resources. if not, their corporate lawyers should be shitcanned, because that's pretty much a 'standard' clause in anything these days.. even if not 'unlimited'.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[ThatsMyNick]

Office 365 subscription is yearly. The next time you renew your subscription you will clearly told of this change. Are they not allowed to stop offering plans? I think microsoft is being more than fair here.

And no they have not taken out the competition. No one really uses Office 365 subscriptions. They have a tiny portion of the backup market. Backblaze and people are much much bigger. This is not them being anticompetitive.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[lokedhs]

Then you should get a better connection. It would take less than 10 days with my connection.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

>but that has nothing to do with false advertising.

Sure it has. It's called 'bait-and-switch' . Which is a form of false advertising.

If you promise 'unlimited storage' and change it the moment everybody has it's backups uploaded that's false advertising.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

With a three year contract it could be different, they might have to allow the contract to finish. That seems to be what has happened when phone networks have ended unlimited tethered data -- users were allowed to continue "downloading Linux ISOs" until the end of the initial 12-month term, but not offered a renewal under the same terms.

Phone contract T&Cs include the chance for the network to cancel the contract, with notice, during the term. Or the user can cancel with no fee if any change is made to the T&Cs.

Microsoft presumably has monthly-rolling contracts, so giving 12 months notice is plenty generous enough.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[MadKeithV]

Glad to see several people here remember their Tanenbaum :)

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[N1AK]

You can't just offer unlimited until you get the market share or force competition out and then change terms.

You're right! Now that Google Drive, Dropbox, and the fucking billions of alternative options, are all out of business and MS completely dominates cloud storage... What the hell are you smoking if you think MS has anything close to a monopoly on cloud storage!?

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[bingoUV]

First sentence contradicts rest of the post.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[GNU(slash)Nickname]

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>

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[jdavidb]

People shouldn't throw in the word "abuse," then. Not sure if that's Microsoft, or the story, or the submitter, or the editors, but if the advertisement was for "unlimited," it's not "abuse" to expect to be able to use an unlimited amount, or even just 75G. I agree, nothing wrong saying "this isn't working for us" and changing it going forward, but it's on a whole other plane if you say some people were taking advantage of the situation or abusing it or whatever.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[swillden]

Someone earlier said that the original contracts were for up to four years. If changing terms like that within the span of the contract *isn't* illegal, then it should be.

Unilaterally changing the terms of a contract is illegal, unless the contract contains language allowing the change, and maybe not even then. The more likely case is that the "someone" who said the contracts were for four years was wrong, or that only some contracts were that long, in which case MS will undoubtedly honor the terms of the long contracts until they expires.

Really, the odds that MS is trying to illegally modify a contract are vanishingly small. They aren't that dumb.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[AmiMoJo]

OneDrive is extremely slow. I only have 10Mb up but can't get more than about 0.6Mb to OneDrive. It used to be faster... I wonder if maybe they tried throttling to discourage people from backing up 75TB, and it didn't work.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[david_thornley]

Isn't it a SUV full of micro-SD cards nowadays?

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

It's not false advertising - they have, up until now, allowed people to use unlimited space. Now they've decided to change what they're advertising, and telling people about it. That's perfectly fine. I guarantee you in the ToS, they added a clause about how they can change the amount of storage, and as long as they're telling people ahead of time - which they are - that's fine too. Calling it "abuse" is incorrect, I agree, but it's not false advertising, and I don't think the EU would be able to make a compelling prosecution case here.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

You can if there was a clause in the ToS that says you can, and I'm pretty sure Microsoft put one in. Furthermore, unless the contract has rules for a timeline of termination ("you have to give x months notice before cancelling", etc) then either party can opt out.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[swalve]

Just stop.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[swalve]

There is an agreement. The user agrees to the terms when they begin using the service. If they want something different, they can call Microsoft. Or use some different service.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[swalve]

They aren't changing the terms of the current deal, they are changing the terms of any future business you might do with them. Is General Motors required to offer the same engine choices in a car model in perpetuity? No, of course not. MS is saying "next time you renew, these will be the new terms. Take them or leave them. You have a full year to decide." There is nothing at all unfair about that. They (presumably) stopped advertising unlimited space before they announced the policy change.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[swalve]

I'll say this, and everyone thinks I'm nuts. I love my office 365 subscription. For $10 a month, I can install Office on 5 computers and 5 other tablets, and each of those gets a 1 tb OneDrive. It takes me less time to earn that money than it does to pirate Office.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[swalve]

Exactly. Especially for something as trivial as hard drive space.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[swalve]

When they start selling 75 tb hard drives, maybe you could say they advertised improperly. If every user stuck to backing up their devices, this wouldn't have happened. Instead, a few eggheads decided to shit in the bed and ruin it for everyone. "Backing up" 75 tb is not reasonable. No normal, or even power, user could possibly generate 75tb of data. No, this data had to either be enterprises being cheap, or nerds storing their blueray collections. All 1500 of them, or $30,000 worth.

Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, this is just "unlimited internet" part 2.

Cloud vendors, and even "Free hosting" websites should realize by now that they can offer unlimited space so long as only a single person has access to it. Once more than one person has access to it, it becomes a warez dump site.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[jbengt]

Such terms and changes do not constitute a legal contract.

Well, if there's no contract, then Microsoft is free to change the service at any time.

Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse

[Whiteox]

It is an issue when you buy hardware with the sweetener of 15GB of cloud storage (as an example). So I have accrued 30GB of OneDrive storage. By this time next year, 25GB of that is gone. So yeah, MS have gone back on their word for the mug punters out there.

Stick to your core business, Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

Should have never been playing around in this space anyway.

The real definition of "abuse"

[SuperKendall]

Claiming you are offering some very large resource, then pulling that away in short order is REAL abuse.

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?

I almost signed up with them to upload a few TB of photos/video I've taken over the years as an online backup. Good thing I didn't go with Microsoft!

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[MightyMartian]

I ended up popping down some money to get 100gb of storage with Google. I'm at about 25gb at the moment, and it only costs me about $1 a month.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[PopeRatzo]

with only 75TB of data

Only 75TB? That seems like an awful lot for a home user. A stack of 75 1TB hard drives would be taller than you.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

And you trust them?

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahah. Mickey$oft! Hilarious! Good thing the other corporations aren't about separating you from your money! Google is there to be your friend!

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Lisandro]

Why not? Google has some of the most reliable datacenters available worldwide.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

A stack of 75 1TB hard drives would be taller than you.

I fail to see the relevance of this to anything. $100 worth of pennies stacked on top of each other is taller than me, but that doesn't mean that I'm not capable of having that much money.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, ONLY 75TB of data. I mean who doesn't have that much data?

I am a digital packrat and I have no where close to that much data.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

I see that Google Drive advertises as US$2/month for the 100 GB plan. How do you get it to the value you've quoted? (Not being snooty, but seriously inquiring. I've been using OneDrive for online backups, but they're starting to make me nervous.)

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[threephaseboy]

This is likely managed storage, but in terms of raw storage, a stack of 38 9.5mm tall 2.5" 2TB drives would only be 361mm, or barely over a foot. Even if they used 1TB drives that'd be 722mm, or about 2 feet 5 inches.
Are you a midget?

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[fahrbot-bot]

with only 75TB of data

Only 75TB? That seems like an awful lot for a home user. A stack of 75 1TB hard drives would be taller than you.

Yes, but a stack of 75TB Libraries of Congress would be shorter - since we're stating useless observations.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bait and switch. They lured people into a false sense of security with their brand so now they can up sell what they originally promised and blame it on the alleged bad actors. This is exactly what Comcast is doing.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[hawguy]

I ended up popping down some money to get 100gb of storage with Google. I'm at about 25gb at the moment, and it only costs me about $1 a month.

I feel a little bait-and-switched by Google. They used to advertise unlimited email storage. Now I'm bumping up against the 15GB limit for email+photos+drive storage and the only way out without paying is to delete old photos, which have been shared with countless family and friends so I don't know who still looks at which albums. They offer "unlimited" storage of reduced quality photos uploaded from phones, but there's no way to retroactively downgrade existing photos.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

And you trust them?

Why not? Google has some of the most reliable datacenters available worldwide.

That's not what he meant.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[arth1]

$100 worth of pennies stacked on top of each other is taller than me, but that doesn't mean that I'm not capable of having that much money.

No, but it does imply that you're less than 15.2 m tall.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anon-Admin]

75Tb is a $4,000 array for the house.

I know, because we have 10Tb filled and I am looking at putting one together.

It's not really as much as you think, a few dozen good TV series in HD, a few hundred HD movies, add in music and storage for 4 people. I can easily see us using 30Tb. If we were using Micro$oft cloud for storage of backups we could easily exceed 75Tb of backup data.

Personally, I dont trust there OS or there cloud.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's free, so just create a second account for new stuff going forward.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[arth1]

I know, ONLY 75TB of data. I mean who doesn't have that much data?

I am a digital packrat and I have no where close to that much data.

Daily backups can quickly eat that kind of storage. Say you want to be able to go back and recover a file that only existed for a day a year ago.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[vux984]

but in terms of raw storage, a stack of 38 9.5mm tall 2.5" 2TB drives would only be 361mm

You think Microsoft is using "2.5" notebook hard drives" in its storage cloud?

Even if they used 1TB drives

Well, that WAS the size he specifically mentioned.

Are you a midget?

Pretty obvious to everyone but you that he'd have been referring to standard 3.5" drives.

You know... something like...

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-...

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using the Google Cloud storage (Not Drive) then you can get it far far cheaper. However the GUI is less than stellar. https://cloud.google.com/storage/

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

When did they ever advertise unlimited email storage?

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they are making the limit clear. It's still better than companies who continue to make unlimited claims which arbitrarily banning users.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[blue9steel]

You think Microsoft is using "2.5" notebook hard drives" in its storage cloud?

It's Microsoft so I assume they're using those giant reel to reel things from the 1960s.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[hawguy]

When did they ever advertise unlimited email storage?

http://www.internetnews.com/xS...

Georges Harik, product management director for Gmail, said that, on the first anniversary of the service's launch, some very active users had begun to worry that the 1 gigabyte of storage that had seemed immense a year ago would soon be used up.

"We've had anxiety attacks as a few of the people who have been heavy Gmail users have been coming close to the limit," Harik said. "They've been asking us, 'what are you going to do?'"

The company determined, Harik said, that the right thing to do would be "to keep giving people more space forever."

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[PopeRatzo]

Are you a midget?

The modern term is "little person".

Re: The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

Where OS and where cloud?

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[mjm1231]

It's not really as much as you think, a few dozen good TV series in HD...

Sure, but at the rate they are produced, it will be decades before you have to worry about that.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[RatBastard]

Who the hell has 75TB of data, anyway? What are these people doing, torrenting every movie they see?

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the same thing as unlimited.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Raistlin77]

Of course, you left out the most important part of that article:

A Google spokesman said it was important not to characterize the ever-increasing storage as endless, because that is a mathematical impossibility.

If Google just kept adding 1 byte of space once every 5 years, that still satisfies "keep giving people more space forever." They never once claimed that the storage would be unlimited.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[lgw]

Mod up AC - very informative.

It also points out the technical flaw in MS's decision. If the "abusers" are filling up that space with multiple backups, just handle that case. Backups are almost never read again. Facebook deals with very-infrequently accessed data by storing it in drives that are powered off. When the data is needed the drive is spun up (access to photos that no one has accessed in quite some time will simply fail to display them, but try again in 5 minutes and they're there). MS could just offer "unlimited, but a long response time if you have more than 1 TB" and likely make people happy.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

You think Microsoft is using "2.5" notebook hard drives" in its storage cloud?

No. They are (or were) using 4TB 3.5" drives, so 19*25.4mm=482mm.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

Irrelevant. For $2499.90 you could have 80TB of space on just 10 drives plus 2TB of cloud storage.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[PhunkySchtuff]

but in terms of raw storage, a stack of 38 9.5mm tall 2.5" 2TB drives would only be 361mm

You think Microsoft is using "2.5" notebook hard drives" in its storage cloud?

A lot of enterprise storage actually uses small form factor (aka 2.5") hard drives because you can fit more drives in a chassis. Even in a lot of high-speed (10k and 15k rpm) 3.5" drives, the platters are not the full 3.5" size, they're more like a 2.5" platter in a 3.5" case.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[jedidiah]

Fortunately, available consumer storage devices aren't merely limited to 1TB.

75TB of modern hard drives wouldn't make it to my knee.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[vux984]

Your not wrong.. but...

The OP clearly was referring to a stack of 1TB 3.5" drives when he said it would be a tall stack. And he was right.

Sure In an actual modern large scale cloud storage system (like what would be underneath Office 365) they aren't going to be using 1TB 3.5" drives. The cost / density / etc ratios aren't at the sweet spot. But that's really entirely beside the point.

He adequately made the point that 75TB is FAR more data than most normal people would even have, several times over.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[PopeRatzo]

Irrelevant. For $2499.90 [amazon.com] you could have 80TB of space on just 10 drives plus 2TB of cloud storage.

And people are expecting M$ to give it to you for $7.95/month?

At that rate, you'd have to subscribe to Live365 for 27 years before they started to show a profit. When did nerds get the entitlement mentality?

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Coren22]

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier...

Amazon Glacier comes out pretty cheap for backups too.

I'm running 600GB+ for $4.50 a month.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[FunkSoulBrother]

Blu-ray .iso backups? Still that would be like 1,500 discs (assuming like 50GB per disc) so it would be a pretty hardcore movie collection, but it seems on the borderline of possibility. I know people who had 1,500 audio CDs in their heyday.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[PopeRatzo]

75TB of modern hard drives wouldn't make it to my knee.

And your blue ox, Babe would step on them, anyway, right?

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[swb]

I'm curious about the person who has 75 TB of storage AND access to a pipe that would make it realistic to actually upload it.

In the scheme of enterprise storage, 75 TB isn't very much. In the scheme of home storage it becomes more complicated and would involve using a SAS cabinet and at least 16, 6TB drives in RAID-5.

Maybe somebody's just crazy enough to have that much data with not even minimal redundancy (and using 6TB drives with RAID-5 doesn't really count as redundancy, other than the loss of a drive won't immediately kill it), so you could get your drive count down to about 13.

But now the pipe -- 8 days at 1 Gbit, but I'm guessing that unless you were in a well-connected data center, and maybe even if you were in a well-connected data center, you'll not get 1 Gbit of usable throughput end to end. If sustained was only 100 Mbit (which is still crazy fast by US standards for home and a lot of office connectivity), you're looking at 86 days to upload the data. My guess is that if they had all of this in one place and tried to upload it, the actual timeline would be closer to 4 months.

Why do I suspect that this isn't real data, but some kind of programatically generated garbage (generated in Azure, for maximum speed to storage) designed to see how big of an account they could create?

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[ITRambo]

Reel to reel does sound better than hard drives I hear.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[SuperKendall]

That's probably what I'm going with now (it's what I was thinking of originally) now that they have the Data Suitcase to load it up. Wasn't relishing the thought of transmitting several terabytes over my cable connection.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

Claiming you are offering some very large resource, then pulling that away in short order is REAL abuse.

Getting modded up to +5 Insightful for posting a rant based on false information is an abuse of the Moderation system. (Hint- MS never called it abuse... follow the trail and see who added those words if you want actual Insight).

I almost signed up with them to upload a few TB of photos/video I've taken over the years as an online backup. Good thing I didn't go with Microsoft!

Why the hell would you go out and buy Office 365 with a 3 year contract just to upload some stuff? If all you wanted was the backup, then you could have, and still can, pay for just the backup... but they don't and never have offered it for free by itself.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[unrtst]

Only 75TB? That seems like an awful lot for a home user. A stack of 75 1TB hard drives would be taller than you.

Unlike others, I'll assume you mean 3.5" drives with a 25.4mm height.
75 x 25.4 = 1905mm = 6'3", which is tall, but not taller than all by any means.

Regardless, even if someone used 4tb drives, or 2tb 2.5" drives, it's still an awful lot to manage for a home user, and it should also take into account extras for replacements as you will have failures, and extras for RAID redundancy, and drive cages and cooling and array controllers etc etc etc.

It's very likely the user is uploading full disk images, rather than a de-duplicated per-file backup solution, but that'd just be my guess.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[KGIII]

What would they be using, likely? I'd have thought they'd be using spinning platters because they scale for cheap and we've got redundancy these days. Maybe a higher density, say 8TB, if they've migrated to them already? Genuinely curious, I've no clue.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft never said "abuse", they just said they need to change how things are done in order to continue. The "abuse" statement came from some 3rd party looking to stir the pot (my, my, how Slashdot has fallen)

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

Daily backups can quickly eat that kind of storage.

Only if you're an idiot and still using a backup system that doesn't do differentials, incrementals, or better, de-duplication with variable block sizes. Or maybe if you have a data set that has a very high rate of turnover.

Most data sets being backed up don't change that much from day to day. Some change as little as a fraction of a percent per week.

Re: The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have 75TB, but I do have a 24TB array in my apartment - and I think it's pretty ridiculous that anyone would expect a service provider to continue to store that much data for peanuts.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

I do wonder though, if that was all un-encrypted content, at some point de-duplication should take care of all unique data that is in existance... ...I wonder how much unique - un-encrypted content data there really is in the world...

Ok, maybe aside from pictures :D

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[arth1]

Differentials are out of the question for high latency remote backups like cloud.
And if you can afford realtime dedup, you can also afford to use a dedicated backup provider.

So we're back to incrementals. With a reasonable tower-of-hanoi approach as a compromise between storage space and restore times, my experience is that each completed set needs in the order of 1.5-4 times as much space as the initial full backup, depending on how many levels you use.
With a monthly (five-level) approach, and 4TB compressed data to back up, my experience is that it needs roughly 8TB per month, or 96TB per year for daily backups. YMMV.
For a yearly (nine-level) approach, you can get away with less total storage, but then you also have a much higher worst case restore time.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[MightyYar]

I don't know about "far, far cheaper". The "nearline" storage is $1/month for 100 GB, but that does not include the bandwidth out, which is an additional $0.01/GB. The reduced availability "DRA" storage is the same $2/month for 100 GB as Google Drive. Obviously, if you only need 50GB and not 100GB you can save - but not at the 100GB level.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on how quick the access time and repair time from drive failure should be, actually 2.5" drives are a much more viable option than 3.5" ones, as it drastically limits the RAID rebuild time and risk window, as well as being more robust in some cases as the 2.5" drives are engineered with shock and vibration in mind versus 3.5" drives which often are not.

Side-effects of intended use, if you will, a laptop drive can handle more jostling than a desktop drive in theory and practice. And only having ~2TB maximum drive size does reduce the time for a RAID rebuild by quite a bit. Sure you end up with more drives as a whole, but again it's all trade-offs. I've seen two different major Cloud Infrastructure providers, and both of them use 2.5" drives for the reason of rebuild times versus peak storage cost.

BackBlaze uses 3.5" drives for backup-tier storage that's not constantly read/write, their setup is great for a movie archive or the like, but a denser package of 2.5" drives is better for interactive/server disk use by comparison.

- WolfWings, too lazy to login to /.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[bingoUV]

In the scheme of enterprise storage, 75 TB isn't very much. In the scheme of home storage it becomes more complicated and would involve using a SAS cabinet and at least 16, 6TB drives in RAID-5.

No, it means a small mobile phone capturing pictures, recording videos and uploading to Microsoft OneDrive via a good internet connection. Probably shared between multiple people, but not necessarily.

If they DIDN'T use Microsoft OneDrive, it might mean all that SAS cabinet, RAID-whatever etc. But the whole point of OneDrive is that you don't have to do all that, just store it on the "cloud".

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[swb]

No, it means a small mobile phone capturing pictures, recording videos and uploading to Microsoft OneDrive via a good internet connection. Probably shared between multiple people, but not necessarily.

Not likely. 75 Terabytes is the complete contents of 1,172 smartphones with 64 GB of storage, with all 64 GB uploaded. If only 2/3 of that storage is really available for photos and videos, now it's 1,750 smarphones uploading that content.

I suppose it's not *impossible* that some club or organization opened the account, shared it with its members and encouraged them to share every picture they took, but that would likely multiply the number of photos they shared by some factor like 10 or 100. I'm thinking we would have heard about 17,000 or 170,000 people all sharing photos with a single OneDrive account.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[bingoUV]

75 Terabytes is the complete contents of 1,172 smartphones with 64 GB of storage

Or one tiny smartphone which doesn't retain it after uploading to OneDrive.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[swb]

Do the math!

My iPhone 6 on ATT LTE gets 1.06 Mbit/sec upload speed. 75 TB would take 22 years running continuously to upload that data, and of course, not counting data caps or throttling.

Wifi would improve this, but on average not more than an order of magnitude unless you make the unrealistic assumptions of a continuous 802.11ac connection tied to an uplink of 100Mbit or better.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[bingoUV]

2.5 MB/s for a year is too much? Even Microsoft is saying it's an outlier.

Re:The real definition of "abuse"

[vux984]

Another poster indicated elsewhere MS was (at least recently) using 4TB 3.5" drives; and that sounds pretty reasonable to me; for an extant system with that kind of scale.

But yeah wouldn't be surprised if new deployments are looking at 8TB spinning platters for this sort of application.

I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

If a service offers something, and use make use of that feature... how is that abuse?

Re:I'm confused

[h33t l4x0r]

Nobody at OneDrive is calling it abuse. That's only coming from OP.

They admit user data snooping!

[Anonymous Coward]

How would they know about "entire movie collections" being stored?
So very comforting!

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[Anonymous Coward]

What else would it be? Linux ISOs?

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[Anonymous Coward]

How would they know about "entire movie collections" being stored?

Good question. They must have checked the content with something else than Windows 10 video app to gain such knowledge.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[BradleyUffner]

How would they know about "entire movie collections" being stored?
So very comforting!

When you upload a file to a server the file name and the actual data bits gets saved to this thing called a "database". This is required if you actually expect to get your file back down to your computer at some point. A simple query of the extension on the file name would give you fairly reliable numbers.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[Higaran]

What else would add up to 75TB? That is a shit load of personal data.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[gweilo8888]

Your own 4K content you've filmed yourself, perhaps? Or maybe high-res photos in raw format? Plenty of things that consumers can create these days occupy vast amounts of storage.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[Anonymous Coward]

To all who found this insightful, wow, you are naive. Any data I don't want a big company to analyze is data I don't upload to their servers.

Read the terms and conditions and find me a cloud provider who claims they aren't going to do that.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[RatBastard]

If you're generating 75TB of movies/pictures/etc... you are not a "consumer", you are a content provider and should be using professional data storage systems anyway.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[Anonymous Coward]

"A simple query of the extension on the file name" should be considered 100% prohibited for any data which is allegedly private.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[Anonymous Coward]

Consumer cameras generate 700 mb/minute of 4K video. That's 1 Tb per day.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[thegarbz]

Or maybe high-res photos in raw format?

Show me any consumer that has a reason to store 1.5 million RAW files. While you're at it show me consumers that generate 75TB of 4K video for themselves.

I know some people go crazy when they pop out a baby, but filling 75TB out of your own generated content does not sound like anything a consumer would do. A commercial enterprise such as a professional photographer / videographer maybe, but even then that's a lot of data to fill.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the same way any other sysadmin would find out. They see some flagged accounts showing up on storage reports, then someone looks to see what's there. I doubt they literally browse the data for fun, but it shouldn't be too difficult to get a report that shows how many files are there, including sizes and extensions.

Re:They admit user data snooping!

[im_thatoneguy]

Professional like who? I have probably around 20-30TB of footage that I've filmed. I mostly use Backblaze who doesn't complain. Still I use OneDrive as a professional. Professionals use Backblaze, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, Amazon, Azure, everything. OneDrive is as professional as Dropbox and Dropbox is advertised as first and foremost a business tool.

If anything using something like Glacier is less professional than OneDrive since it has no sync client. Also as a professional I use the service with the best cost/benefit. For me that's Backblaze and OneDrive.

Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they get away with calling it "abuse"? I'm fine with them saying that "hey, guys, we didn't think you'd use that much, we gotta cut back"... but don't call it "all you can eat buffet" and then be shocked when someone comes ready to eat all your food.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, never mind... RTFA, they don't call it abuse. Stupid summary, then.

Re:Abuse?

[Dracos]

I think the abuse claim is cover for scaling issues. Why else would they reduce all the plans?

I have a cloud technology too

[Anonymous Coward]

I had some swedish meatballs for lunch and I don't know why, but I started farting right there during lunch.
I just said it's my new cloud technology. We're still laughing.

I dumped my load into Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Guilty as charged.

abuse from the people with 15GB space

[itsme1234]

They are citing abuse over 1TB but are cutting those having 15GB. Go figure...

Remember when Skydrive had 25GB free?

Half the space of Gdrive for the 1.99 plan ... that will go well.

Users will have up to a year to get under the new caps? Like how, once January 2016 comes you will only be able to delete stuff. Sure, they won't nuke your whopping 15GB of data but still you won't be able store/share/change anything once you are over the top...

Re:abuse from the people with 15GB space

[Anonymous Coward]

They are citing abuse over

No they are not. "anonymous submitter" is calling it abuse, OneDrive is not.
Nice how being totally wrong gets a +5 Insightful.

Re:abuse from the people with 15GB space

[AmiMoJo]

They are probably hoping that Windows integration will make OneDrive attractive, but it's actually rubbish in Windows 10. In 8 it was more or less seamless, with placeholders for data in the cloud not stored locally. In 10 it's been downgraded to a simple sync system that needs manual management. There is no advantage over Google Drive or Dropbox or any of the others now.

Re:abuse from the people with 15GB space

[ILongForDarkness]

I've had to kill and restart the onedrive service several times since upgrading to windows 10. It just doesn't sync reliably anymore. I have win 8.1 at work I use one drive to sync my podcasts. I delete several podcasts as I listen to them and hours later my home computer still has those files around. Only fix is to reboot or exit and re-open the one drive app. Windows 10 it just worked.

I agree they've given us a lesser product in windows 10 and now they want to reverse the trend and double to cost of a GB of storage too. Nice.

Re:abuse from the people with 15GB space

[Macman408]

I think that they just wanted to have an attractive price to get people on the service, and now that people are there, they want to hike the price. But they're deflecting anger by saying "there's been abuse, so we're cutting our sizes if you don't sign up soon", rather than "we're doubling our prices".

Suck 'em in

[Anonymous Coward]

Then ramp the prices. Why is this news? Every company with an on-going fee will do the same if they can.

Abuse?!

[wwalker]

For crying out loud, why is it *abuse*?! If you are offering something "unlimited" without blinking an eye, why are you so surprised when people try to treat it as such? Unless you are selling a lie and then shocked to discover that people try to stick it to you? Every time I see any offer of something "unlimited", I'm soooo tempted to accept the challenge.

Re:Abuse?!

[bluefoxlucid]

Figure a reasonable person has maybe 1-5TB of hard drive space. At the extreme, they might average half a terabyte. You'll have a few power users who hold up like 3-4TB of shit, but they're not all too common.

You could put a cap somewhere, but it's nonsense. Someone might actually hit it; on the off chance that they do, you don't really care. The average doesn't shift too much, so you're figuring on middle-ground numbers around where you expected. It's fine.

Then: Every single person in the world somehow finds 150 times their hard drive space's worth of shit and uploads *all* of it to your storage servers.

Re:Abuse?!

[Anonymous Coward]

If I go to a restaurant having a all you can eat buffet, and the guy in front of me puts all of the food on his plate and walks away. Yes, I would say he is abusing the service, as he has prevented me from getting anything.

Now I am not saying he broke the rules, but he is abusing the service. If that restaurant then said well from now on its no longer all you can eat, its all you can fit on three plates. That is a good thing because it makes sure there is food left over for the rest of us paying customers.

Re:Abuse?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to spend a lot of time abusing my ISP's bandwidth allowance in order to get to the point where I'd torrented enough stuff to abuse OneDrive's storage allowance.

Re:Abuse?!

[ILongForDarkness]

They were way cheaper than anyone else offering an unlimited plan, and AFAIK they were the only one offering syncing between multiple computers that was unlimited (Cabronite has unlimited but it is one computer cloud I think, onedrive is many to many). Anyways, I can see how a more useful syncing for half the price would attract all the hoarders out there.

Also, if my usage patterns are any indication: I download and then delete things because I don't want to run out of disk space. If I had infinite storage I might just keep an "already watched" folder instead. I think the very fact that their is no limit might have encouraged people's storage "needs" to grow.

Re:Abuse?!

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah, but by that much? 75TB? A Debian mirror of all packages on all architectures, including source, is 1.3TB. I don't have that much data on my hard drive; I don't even access that much data combined from hosted storage. XBox 360 uses DVDs, single or dual layer, at 4-9GB; with their full game library, that's at the most 10TB. Playstation 3 uses 50-100GB Blu-ray, and has enough games to hit around 100TB--that's around 1100 games for each system.

It's reasonable to assume a reasonable space usage average, spec your system for that, and let the big users use much and the small users leave slack space to compensate. Really, they'd otherwise have to underspec: they'd have to say, "Well you get a 5GB limit, and we have 5GB x $USERS space, and will have to add 5GB for each user, and will always have about half our space unused." There's a sufficiently small size where everyone fills it up, but it's not adequate for most people; there's a sufficiently large size where you're above 99.7% of users's usage and thus only have to account for 0.3% of the average storage per user to expand. They tried to do that and people came back and showed them their expectations of user behavior was wrong.

Storage needs don't grow that rapidly. I can't even find that much recorded data passing my hands in my life.

Translation:

[Anonymous Coward]

"We weren't making enough money, so we raised our prices. Nothing to see here."

The thing is, the only reason Microsoft raised their rates at all was because they wanted to take business from Google Drive. Now that they have either done so successfully or concluded that it was futile (no idea which), there's no reason to continue giving a better deal, so they've scaled back to a paltry one-third the storage provided by Google, matching Apple's meager free offering.

Re:Translation:

[MightyMartian]

Yes, I think the whole thing was an attempted Triple-E (embrace, extend, extinguish) against Google Drive and Dropbox. I'm sure they did pick up some users, but I doubt enough to make handing out 75tb to ever OneDrive user worth it.

Re:Translation:

[Bosconian]

You may want to also consider Windows 10's increasingly heavy reliance on OneDrive (photos, music, backups) and MS cloud services for your phone, computer, tablet and refrigerator. As people are encouraged to use more space and dump more things online, they will quickly approach the new limits, and will hopefully buy more space from the convenient nag prompt that appears at 4.5 GB.

I've had a few free SkyDrive / OneDrive accounts for a while, and have gotten some bonus space via photo sync, reclaimed the extra 15 GB to counter the reduction to 7 GB, etc. So now they might be taking 10 GB away from me, in addition to the "Camera roll bonus" which is another 15 GB? I'm not sure what the final count will be... Possibly 15 GB out of currently 40 GB usable?

I didn't fill up their space, but it was nice knowing that was available to me. Oh, well. The last thing I bought from Microsoft was a force feedback Sidewinder wheel in 2000, so I'm hardly their target customer anyway.

At least I had the foresight to stock up on some free 50GB Box accounts during their various promotions. It's probably also time to figure out how to get OwnCloud running on the NAS, fighting Apache SSL and ports, rewrite rules, NAT, etc. For free, the external cloud services with paltry storage might work for important documents, frequent files, and current projects.

And the Chinese services give away 1TB for free to anyone with an email address. As long as you don't mind the Party admiring your photos and other collections stored there...

First it giveth, then it taketh away - QoTSA

Great work Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another brilliant move by Microsoft!

- DoltmanDives

Define 'unlimited' ?

[Idisagree]

If you take back something you previously gave for free, you are going to have a bad time. Some companies never learn this lesson - breaking previous expectations of service levels is not a way to go about gaining/keeping customers (happy).

Nothing is unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like unlimited data plans, somebody has to pay for the infrastructure. It is never unlimited. Bad on the company for claiming unlimited. But also bad on folks who took advantage of a lax policy forcing them to tighten it up. That is why we can't have nice things.

Re:Nothing is unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really blame the people that where offered "unlimited" for actually just take what was offered?
If you do not want people to use huge amounts of storage just say so!

Re:Nothing is unlimited

[ILongForDarkness]

They probably were just assuming that no one had enough upload bandwidth to get to really large values quickly. I have (10Mbps upload) about 1MB/s reliably upload bandwith. It would take me close to 3 years to get to the 75TB they are claiming some had assuming I didn't upload anywhere else. I think they probably didn't count on anyone having say a symmetric 1Gbps connection.

Was this "abuse limit" advertised somewhere?

[Lisandro]

If not, sorry Microsoft, you don't get to whine if someone uploads 75 Tb to your unlimited free storage service. In fact, in some countries this would qualify as false advertising and deemed illegal.

Re:Was this "abuse limit" advertised somewhere?

[The-Ixian]

I don't see any whining anywhere.

Microsoft tried something and it didn't work as they expected.

At no point did they limit the people uploading 75TB of data and they are giving everyone plenty of time to adjust to the changes in pricing.

Worst case is you can call it a "bait and switch" move.... but really, its not like you are locked in to using OneDrive to store you stuff.... There is a LOT of competition in this area.

I too am affected by this. I have 200GB of OneDrive storage and my cost will likely go up after all is said and done. However, I can always uninstall OneDrive and install GDrive, Dropbox or any one of a hundred other services.

Better remove your files before 2016

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

These changes will roll out in "early 2016," and users will have up to a year to get down under the new caps.

Otherwise, they'll delete all your shit!

Fight for your bitcoins!

Unsuprising money grab

[Anonymous Coward]

"Free OneDrive storage will decrease" to below the average users usage.

I hope not-many pay and go elsewhere. M$ are betting they won't switch.

Transcript of what happened

[wardrich86]

"We recently noticed a huge spike in cloud usage and got real excited. With pecker-in-hand we began perusing what we expected to be millions of nudes and selfies, but instead found full-blown DVD collections and other crap we're not interested in. As punishment for not providing us with sexy nudes, we have decided to just lower the cap down. Too bad, so sad."

Re:Transcript of what happened

[Anonymous Coward]

This is shockingly insightful.

Vintage Microsoft

[erp_consultant]

When the cost of storage is going down they put the prices up. Maybe instead of OneDrive they should call it HalfDrive. Thanks MS but I think I'll stick with my Dropbox.

Yet another failed attempt to find a home in the post Gates era. Epic fail.

Re:Vintage Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

"Micro-Drive"

Re:Vintage Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's HalfDrive can be measured in months.

we did this with email, people dont get it.

[nimbius]

ive worked for several companies that do this shit to keep up with, usually, Google. They unveil unlimited email, and then 2 years later accounting shoots through the roof with the amount it costs them. upper management is baffled as to why this is so expensive, and ops then spend 6 months carving away at spam accounts until things return to normal/affordable.

What microsoft doesnt understand is that Google does not operate in the traditional weasle-word sense of "enterprise grade." while youre purchasing shiny new netapps, theyre using off the shelf commodity hard drives modelled by their own statisticians to predict failure. they dont repair arrays or disks, they dont have to worry about memory failures. anything that dies gets chucked, replaced, reprovisioned, and brought back into the fold as if nothing ever happened. this free storage model works for them because the very same ecosystem microsoft fostered and is now constrained by, is not part of what Google has intentionally designed.

Re:we did this with email, people dont get it.

[swillden]

What microsoft doesnt understand is that Google does not operate in the traditional weasle-word sense of "enterprise grade." while youre purchasing shiny new netapps, theyre using off the shelf commodity hard drives modelled by their own statisticians to predict failure. they dont repair arrays or disks, they dont have to worry about memory failures. anything that dies gets chucked, replaced, reprovisioned, and brought back into the fold as if nothing ever happened.

Do you really think MS isn't using the same commodity hardware approach? That seems very ulikely to me. Beyond a certain scale it's the only reasonable way to approach the problem. You can't rely on even the most "enterprisey" of enterprise hardware to be sufficiently reliable because even with MTBF measured in millions of hours, when you have hundreds of thousands of drives they're going to be failing left and right. So you have to architect systems with plenty of redundancy and completely automatic failover and recovery. And once you have that infrastructure in place, there's no point in paying the enterprise prices. Instead, you buy commodity drives by the truckload.

OneDrive subscription Cancelled

[MBGMorden]

Well, there goes my onedrive subscription.

I personally wasn't using 75TB, but I was up around 4TB - I got the OneDrive subscription to keep an updated mirror of my large storage RAID which has about that much space.

With a limited of 1TB I no longer have need of their services. Newsflash: if you advertise unlimited, people will use the feature as such. Nobody expects infinity, but what is considered extreme usage by you may well be considered normal by some of your users.

Re:OneDrive subscription Cancelled

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the same boat. I don't need 75TB, but I do need more than 1. I think they could have dropped it to 5, solved all of their "abuse" problems, and still kept almost everyone on board. Now, their 1TB level is the same price as several other competitors, additional space is twice as expensive (as GDrive, at least), AND they've lost a lot of goodwill by very seriously limiting what was once an unlimited service. I'll take my money elsewhere.

privacy

[igsmo]

"Since we started 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." I wonder why they're specifically pointing out "entire movie collections and DVR recordings" ... oh wait, why is Microsoft poking their noses inside these subscribers files in the first place?

Re:privacy

[Maxo-Texas]

That actually seems reasonable.

Wow-- some accounts have 75TB of data. Some of the files are 25GB! WTH? What kind of data is that? It's a bluray image. Mein Gott!
Okay this is ridiculous. It's not how we intended this service to be used. Why can't people be reasonable? There's always a few people that shit in the pond.

Should be enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we finally just say that 600TB should be enough for anyone?!

Unlimited lying

[Cro Magnon]

My GF's phone provider advertised "unlimited" and in the same ad mentioned "1 GB data". IMHO, it should be illegal to advertise "unlimited", since there's no such thing.

You would think these companies would learn

[istartedi]

This has been going on for years. Companies offer unlimited service, and then a hand full of customers try to see how far they can take it. You would think that they would have some standard boilerplate specifying something to the effect that while there is no specific limit, they reserve the right to cap accounts that are at or near the top of usage. I imagine these things are a typical bell curve with a long tail. I think clipping the crazy long tail of users who are using 100,000 more resources than average is perfectly legit. The lawyers need to put their heads together and come up with a commercial definition of "unlimited" that 99.9% of us can live with. The 0.1% who think they have a right to store 70TB for nothing are just as much dick-heads as anybody else.

Re:You would think these companies would learn

[Archangel Michael]

Unlimited, as a word, has a meaning. That meaning becomes meaningless if you change the definition simply because someone fully tests the the terminology.

The point being, "Unlimited" is a great marketing term, but will cause issues in practicality. Do not use it if you can't fathom people pushing the limit towards infinity.

The lawyers need to put their heads together and come up with a commercial definition of "unlimited" that 99.9% of us can live with.

No, they don't. Marketing droids can say "We offer 'nearly unlimited*' storage" and then define what "nearly unlimited" actually means. e.g. "*Nearly Unlimited = 25 TB" (or whatever they want to define it as)

Re:You would think these companies would learn

[DarkOx]

Exactly words need to have meaning. Unlimited means exactly that and should. Therefor no business should really be offering anything unlimited ever. Generally 'unlimited' and basic economics are at odds.

There no good reason why Microsoft could not have just said 'up to 100TB of storage - more than most will ever need!' I suspect that would have been just fine for them too. I would be Microsoft is correct in that most of the 75+ TB users are probably morons who just wanted to see if there was an upper limit. If Microsoft had just said so at the outset even if that limit was higher like 100TB most would not bother testing it, the fun already being ruined for them.

The handful of people who have a use case for 75TB+ Microsoft could probably deal with and not have it ruin the profitability of the service.

Re:You would think these companies would learn

[istartedi]

Everybody knows there are limits to how literally you should take things. :)

Re:You would think these companies would learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlimited, as a word, has a meaning. That meaning becomes meaningless if you change the definition simply because someone fully tests the the terminology.

The point being, "Unlimited" is a great marketing term, but will cause issues in practicality. Do not use it if you can't fathom people pushing the limit towards infinity.

The lawyers need to put their heads together and come up with a commercial definition of "unlimited" that 99.9% of us can live with.

No, they don't. Marketing droids can say "We offer 'nearly unlimited*' storage" and then define what "nearly unlimited" actually means. e.g. "*Nearly Unlimited = 25 TB" (or whatever they want to define it as)

Isn't "Nearly Unlimited" by definition Unlimited?

Re:You would think these companies would learn

[Archangel Michael]

Nearly Unlimited means there are possible restrictions. Kind of like how Calculus works. ;)

Re:You would think these companies would learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's why I think it is unlimited. Now please forgive me, but I'm clueless as for how to write mathematical equations inside Slashdot comments and Slashdot is still missing unicode support.

When something is near something else, it means that it is equal to it with a difference of some epsilon. For example, 1.9 is near 2 with an epsilon >= 0.1.
For every r that is part of R, doesn't exist an e that is part of R such that r+e = infinity.
Therefore, in order for our Nearly Unlimited to be nearly unlimited it has to be unlimited itself.
(As a side note, even `unlimited` is limited, just not directly by whomever provides the service, but by reality. Even with unlimited data plan, you can hit your limit when you use your pipe at maximum speed 24/7.)

Microsoft didn't see the high usage coming?

[QuietLagoon]

Microsoft has said that Windows 10 will be free with no monthly or yearly charges. Is Microsoft going to renege on that also?

.
Why should anyone believe them when they say "no"?

Re:Microsoft didn't see the high usage coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering their history, why did people believe them in the first place?

Re:Microsoft didn't see the high usage coming?

[ProzacPatient]

Microsoft has said that Windows 10 will be free with no monthly or yearly charges. Is Microsoft going to renege on that also?

Actually they only said Windows 10 would be free for existing Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 machines for up to a year. Users that don't already have Windows (or a recent enough version) will have to buy retail copies.

Re:Microsoft didn't see the high usage coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they're working on a way to have Windows 10 users collectively host OneDrive. The fineprint probably allows it because Microsoft already uses your bandwidth to send Windows updates to other people.

Re:Microsoft didn't see the high usage coming?

[QuietLagoon]

I was talking about the Windows As A Service comments made by Microsoft executives.

Re:Microsoft didn't see the high usage coming?

[sims 2]

Wuala used to work like this however they closed down entirely a few months ago. The only operating distributed storage service I am aware of is symform.

Microsoft was supposed to add in p2p update sharing on lan back in windows vista. It certainly took them long enough.

Re:Microsoft didn't see the high usage coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. Once that year is up, they can start charging the subscription for the OS (while continuing to spy and deliver desktop ads).

Hell, once your 30 days is up they could do it because they know you can't go back without buying a new license for an older version of Windows.

Dumb.

[Anonymous Coward]

2015:
Still trusting 'The Cloud' with your data

It's like you're trying to fuck up.

'Brilliant'

[Oakey]

This is some bullshit, will they be taking back my 10Gb 'loyalty bonus' as well?

I'm only using 20Gb as it is. Guess I'll just have to move it elsewhere.

redefining unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

So M$ is now trying to re-define unlimited as 1Tb? Not that this will affect me, as I do not trust any "cloud" service providers not to look at or sell my data. Once the data leaves your own PC or private network, you have NO control over who can see, copy, or delete it! NONE AT ALL!!

Option to purchase more than 1TB

[FlyHelicopters]

I would really like to see the option to purchase more than 1TB of storage.

I get that they can't offer it for free, that's fine. But we store the videos that we take with our phones on OneDrive, and that adds up quickly.

The phones even auto-upload all photos and videos taken. Right now, our video folder is about 700GB. This is not movies, or DVR content, or porn, this is home videos taken with a camera or cell phone.

That number will pass 1TB by the end of next year.

If I could pay some reasonable amount, maybe $50 a year, to add another 4TB of storage, I'd do so.

Re:Option to purchase more than 1TB

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now, our video folder is about 700GB. This is not movies, or DVR content, or porn, this is home videos taken with a camera or cell phone.

That number will pass 1TB by the end of next year.

You take 150GB worth of home movies a month? I call BS, unless you are running a porn shop out of your house, no way. If you're not, then you're taking way more videos of little Johnny that will ever be watched.

Re:Option to purchase more than 1TB

[Anonymous Coward]

GP stated that within 14 months, they would have used up 300 GB of space on home movies. That equates to ~21.5 GB/month. Not 150 GB/month as you have estimated.

4k@120fps videos take up a lot of space. Myself, what I shoot is only ~22Mbps (certainly not 4k), so I only need to record ~2.3 hours of video a month to use that much up. With my kids running around with the cameras, I easily generate more than this each month. In my case, I edit out the uninteresting parts, but keep the originals in case I want to go back and find footage that was cut out before. I've been doing this ever since an incident a handful of years back where I edited out most of the (to me) boring Christmas present opening, only to have my wife disappointed that it was missing. I didn't have much spare disk space at the time and deleted the originals. (Crap!!)

But back to the subject at hand, even if I'm ONLY backing up the original data, and not intermediate files or a final cut, yes, it is very easy to fill up the space GP has mentioned in the timeframe described.

Photos

[Etherwalk]

It's not a porno collection problem, it's a photograph and home movies problem.

The cloud is a great place to store those, and if you live for a decade or two, even if you don't photograph all the time, you get a lot. Add that to the documents you have and you go way over a 50G limit. Single SD cards are 8GB at this point. At $1/month for 25 GB, personal RAID starts looking better and better.

Re: Photos

[ArmoredDragon]

I have about 8tb worth of movies and tv shows on my nas and was considering doing exactly this. I guess it's a good thing this happened before I started stitching together a hack to make this work with Ubuntu server.

Re: Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

Only 8tb? That's less than 2 modern hard drives. My collection is 30tb, mirrored with DrivePool.

Does anyone have a reasonably priced solution to host 30-40tb of data?

Re:Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a porno collection problem, it's a photograph and home movies problem.

The cloud is a great place to store those, and if you live for a decade or two, even if you don't photograph all the time, you get a lot. Add that to the documents you have and you go way over a 50G limit. Single SD cards are 8GB at this point. At $1/month for 25 GB, personal RAID starts looking better and better.

How about printing and keeping the most important photographs in your life ? You know, how people have been doing for the last century or so. This idea (fad is a better word) of keeping EVERYTHING trival, stupid and important in your life is just plain idiotic. Do you really want to record every moment of your life, 24 hours/24, 365 days/year till the day you die ?

Not everything in your life is important.
Not everthing warrants to be recorded and kept till death keeps you apart from your "earthly things".
Not every mail is worth keeping.
Etc....

Re:Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

Single SD cards are 256GB at this point. FTFY

Re:Photos

[JeffAtl]

In most cases, photos that turn out to be important or have high sentimental value aren't known at the time.

Re:Photos

[jedidiah]

30G IS after considerable culling.

The problem is accumulation. Interesting things accumulate over 5 or 10 or 20 years.

Plus, hard copies aren't nearly secure enough. Even the best archival quality printing will fade. That's even true just for the relatively short amount of time some of us have been keeping digital archives.

Perhaps you just never did anything interesting ever...

Re:Photos

[sexconker]

Plus, hard copies aren't nearly secure enough. Even the best archival quality printing will fade. That's even true just for the relatively short amount of time some of us have been keeping digital archives.

Perhaps you just never did anything interesting ever...

One day you will die.
Your children, friends, neighbors, or government will then go through your crap and toss the vast majority of it out.
When those people die, the same will happen to them, and wait trace remained of your shit will be further diluted.

Your futile efforts to preserve everything are nothing but a symptom of your inability to accept your own mortality.
Even if you die on a cross or you end up buried in a pyramid, people will forget you and your mark on the world will fade out of existence.

TLDR: Let it go, let it goooooooo!

Re:Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

I am concerned with the items relevant to me during my existence. I am not concerned with the post-mortem conditions of said items.

But you were addressing those who have enough narcissism to believe their items/thoughts "ought" to be important to everyone else, that their shit is everyone else's concern.

Granted, that unconscious arrogance is a (all too) common attitude. OP certainly think s/he's hot shit that everyone will give fucks about forever. Sorry, "interesting" shit.

Re: Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

My server is being buried with me too.

Re:Photos

[Cederic]

I have 400 videos on Youtube. The oldest ones still get views from people discovering them for the first time, or perhaps revisiting old favourites.

I don't keep them for myself, I keep them for other people. Shit, I haven't even watched all 400, from start to finish. I was there when I filmed them, saw it all live, just sanity check for quality before posting.

Tell me, how do I print a video and share it with several hundred people?

Re:Photos

[viperidaenz]

Yeah, because everyone forgot about Tutankhamun, Cleopatra, Spartacus, Julius Caesar, Jesus, Mohammad, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Re:Photos

[blazer1024]

You, sir, are no Spartacus... ...because I'M SPARTACUS!

Re:Photos

[MightyYar]

They didn't forget Tutankhamun because they raided his tomb and paraded his mummified corpse around like a circus freak. The last thing I read about him was about how freaking inbred he was. Now that's a legacy!

Re:Photos

[viperidaenz]

From the post I replied to:

Even if you die on a cross or you end up buried in a pyramid, people will forget you and your mark on the world will fade out of existence.

Re:Photos

[BoogieChile]

No, I'm Spartacus!

Re:Photos

[MightyYar]

I'm agreeing with that guy. Tutankhamun is remembered, but not as a living God. And someday, when the pyramids have been weathered down to piles of sand, he will not be remembered by anyone except some hardcore Egyptologists. You could say the same thing about Julius Caesar. Very few people know anything about his role in the Roman empire - most know him as a character in a Shakespeare play that was written a thousand years later.

Re: Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

While wer are on the subject, is there anyway to send focused beam data into space minimizing the spread of the signal (focused so it can go further before it spreads out too thin to be detectable by radio receivers)?
Of course, we would not be able to read data off the "beam" now, but maybe within a millenium, we will have warp drive or some other capability to "catch up" with the signal and retrieve data from it. I have stuff I worked decades on I would love to beam into space. So far, most media isn't up to the task, and even the ones that are rated "archival" are stil vunerable to all kinds of physical (and political/economic) calamities.

Re:Photos

[Etherwalk]

True. The first one that came up on google was 8GB. :)

Re:Photos

[goarilla]

But Shakespeare could have only written about Caesar if he were remembered.

Re: Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

I never thought I'd defend the likes of Microsoft, especially under their current management, but I'm glad they did this. It's time the world learns that 'the cloud' isn't magic. It isn't unlimited and it isn't free, and it never will be.

If you use someone else's stuff, then someone else gets to decide the rules of that usage, especially if your usage costs them actual cash.

My OneDrive use is tiny because I only keep some things of convenience on it. The notion of using it for anything important would never have crossed my mind. I do use a cloud backup provider in addition to (not instead of) locally produced backups, with my data being encrypted by keys I control before it leaves my network because I assume anything I put on anybody else's servers is handed over to the NSA illegally.

Cloud stuff is a tool. It can be useful, but it should never be your primary anything without an ironclad contract which you will pay for, and you should never trust cloud providers with anything you can't do without.

To expect Microsoft or anyone else to provide that much managed and backed up storage for free or for super cheap is just stupid. This isn't cable companies ripping people off with caps and stuff that costs them nothing more if you use it or not.

Big storage costs actual money to run and maintain. The people crying about this are lucky that it is Microsoft, which can afford some patience here, and not some stupid startup that simply went out of business and took their data with them.

Re: Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

No I am Spartacus

Re:Photos

[MightyYar]

I'm just pointing out that the incredible luck of having a singular talent like Shakespeare just happen to write about you instead of any number of other ancient leaders is the only reason his name is in the common vernacular. This is unlikely to happen with others. Even with the Shakespeare connection, sadly he's probably most associated with terrible pizza. Eventually even Shakespeare will become practically unknown.

Re:Photos

[Talderas]

Congratulations. You're both being crucified.

Re:Photos

[stdarg]

Your futile efforts to preserve everything are nothing but a symptom of your inability to accept your own mortality.

That may be true for some people, but it's pretty ridiculous if you think that's true for everyone.

People also preserve memories so that they can recall them later for their own pleasure. When you're 80 years old and you've got a great-grandchild who's 2, you'll pull out your old picture of your own son when he was 2, and your old but newer picture of his son when he was 2, and you'll say "Wow look at that resemblance!!!" and you'll actually feel happy. Your son will feel happy. Your grandson will feel happy.

It's sad that you're not aware of that alternate use of preserving memories. Are your memories all unhappy or something?

Even if you die on a cross or you end up buried in a pyramid, people will forget you

That's hilarious. It's not "good enough" for you to be remembered and actually worshipped as a God by billions of people? That's not impressive? I think your standards are a litttttle bit too high.

Re: Photos

[godefroi]

How much of that was legally acquired?

If the answer is "all of it", then you should be able to recover it from source materials (DVD, BD, etc).

If the answer is "not much of it", then you should probably take a hard look and decide how much of it you'd miss if you lost it.

Re: Photos

[pnutjam]

excellent idea... I'm going to have all my data copied to a drive that will be installed in my headstone with a USB connection.

Re:Photos

[pnutjam]

Yeah, I was just recently looking at emailed baby announcements fro 2004. Still sitting in my gmail.

Re:Photos

[ai4px]

The bigger problem for most slashdotters is stuff that isn't deleted when they die. Mom is going to have to go thru all those LoC's of HDD's in the basement one day.

Re:Photos

[goarilla]

I agree in general (everything fades) but not on these specifics. On the mainland of Europe Caesar will be remembered for a long time since the Roman influence was ubiquitous and its stories seems to be written in the golden age of our (shared) history writing. We didn't learn Caesar from Shakespeare, we learned Caesar because he kicked our asses in his expansion efforts (Gaul).

Re:Photos

[MightyYar]

I think your timeframe is just too small. Caesar was a mere 2100 years ago. While we do have written language that makes things easier to preserve, ask yourself how much is written about Caesar in Chinese or Sanskrit.

Re:Photos

[jbengt]

We remember Tutankhamun because his successors erased him from their history lessons and his tomb got buried, so the tomb raiders didn't find him until recently, making his the most well-preserved tomb to study.

Re:Photos

[jbengt]

And how much of Tut's life details do we really know, anyway? Nothing compared to the terabytes of home movies and photos that we'll forget about of a modern person.

Re: Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

At 25GB each, that would be about 320 movies.

Re:Photos

[viperidaenz]

Quite a lot considering the limit of their data recording capability was drawing little pictures on a wall.

Re: Photos

[godefroi]

And at 1TB each, that would be 8 movies. What's your point? The question stands.

Go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

See, when companies like MS or some ISP reduce bandwidth and say "abuse", they are just reinforcing the belief that marketing is total horseshit.

Whatever claims are made are BS. Company X - XFinity - makes claims about bandwidth or whatever, I assume (and rightly) that they are liars and can get away with lieing because they paid off politicians to do so.

So, my response? I don't buy anything - unless, I ABSOLUTELY need it.

I vote with my pocketbook and American business is horribly lacking.

ISP monopoly? I complain with my public service commission frequently. And then the FCC, FTC and every other government agency who will listen.

ATT - Fuuck you assholes!

Re:Go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote with my pocketbook and American business is horribly lacking.

ISP monopoly? I complain with my public service commission frequently. And then the FCC, FTC and every other government agency who will listen.

ATT - Fuuck you assholes!

And look how far that got you. Nowhere, you still get fucked by nearly every corporation with which you have no choice but to do business.

The gouging begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

500GB spinning rust hard drive => $50
512GB SSD => $260 (Sammy 850 pro with 10 yr. warranty)

Cost of TEN TIMES LESS for a single year: M$ 50GB: $24
that you must access (push or pull) over the network.

Which are you going to choose?

This should be part of the standard intelligence test given in
grade school.

And they wonder why we don't trust the 'cloud'.

Is "GDrive" equivalent?

[trylak]

Anyone out there using Google Drive instead of this or Dropbox and can comment on how well that works? Maybe I'm confused or thinking about years ago but I seems to recall it wanting to change MS Office files to be opened with Google Docs instead and other things that seemed to modify the files. I'd be interested to hear otherwise.

Re:Is "GDrive" equivalent?

[daid303]

Got no experience with OneDrive. But I have used dropbox and GDrive. Dropbox functioned way superior in this case, never really caused issues.
GDrive on the other hand once deleted ALL data by mistake of an syncing error (yes, could be recovered, but that was shitloads of work), and you shit yourself when you see all your files disappear.
I've also had a few times that GDrive refused to sync at all, without a clear cause. It just kept refusing.
The web interface can be dog slow when you have 1000+ files in a folder.

Alternatives

[jest3r]

I posted this back when Wuala shut down. Seems relevant again just a few months later.

I've been using Sync.com for the past year. They've been sort of in beta but releasing features. 5GB free.

SpiderOak is decent but they recently dropped their free plan, so not sure what's going on there.

MEGA was great but Kim.com said last week in Wired that the company is run by criminals

Tresorit is good but expensive. Maybe that's why they've been around so long.
Bitcasa pulled a Wuala last year and closed down their consumer cloud storage after a lawsuit. That's pretty much it.
There's OwnCloud which is do it yourself. And BitTorrent Sync which is kind of do it yourself but they've been adjusting pricing so it's bait and switch as well.

Re:Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

To add to your list, I've been using Amazon Cloud Drive for my offsite backups, and so far, so good. $60/year for unlimited storage; just hope they don't follow Microsoft and get rid of that. I currently have about 1.7 TB backed up there.

It's worth nothing that they also offer unlimited photo backup/storage free to Prime members. But of course this means you have to upload your photos unencrypted so they can verify that the files are actually photos; all of my backups are encrypted before they leave my machine.

Re:Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to go DIY, go with Seafile over Owncloud. The latter does not scale well when you are talking tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of files. I have a test folder in Seafile with 85,000 individual files with a total space of 5GB, and it has no problems. It's not a large amount of bulk space, but it's a goodish number of files and a lot of services fall over when you get past 10-25k files.

(Such as Microsoft OneDrive for Business - which is not, as you would think, a shared version of OneDrive personal. Instead, it's based on SharePoint which means it can't store all file types and starts having trouble when you have more then a few thousand files in the same library.)

I promise

[Ol Olsoc]

to cut back my zero useage of one drive from zero bytes to -0 bytes.

Seriously folks

This

is

the

Goddamned

Cloud!

Here today, and vanished into blue sky tomorrow.

Re:I promise

[MightyYar]

Yes, because (a) lots of people here are advocating using the cloud as the sole repository of your data and (b) a whole freaking year isn't enough time to migrate to a new solution.

Re:I promise

[Ol Olsoc]

Yes, because (a) lots of people here are advocating using the cloud as the sole repository of your data and (b) a whole freaking year isn't enough time to migrate to a new solution.

The way I see it, is that if I have to store locally, and all that entails, Storing it in the cloud as well, merely makes for another and pointless task.

I liken it to the state we are in now, where we have cheap 100 inch TV's but people watch movies on their little smartphones.

Storage is pretty cheap these days. I have a lot of pretty inexpensive storage on site, with lots of nice local backups. plus one to store offsite but under my control.

disclaimer, I do use Apple's cloud to "find my iphone" because I'm one of those shits who's always laying the phone around then can't find it. But other than that, I trust myself, not some outfit who might not be accessible when I need it, or might put me through the research to find another cloud every year or so.

Re:I promise

[MightyYar]

The way I see it, is that if I have to store locally, and all that entails, Storing it in the cloud as well, merely makes for another and pointless task.

That's true for you, but most people are different. If not for cloud backup, most people would be completely without backup - or their "backup" would be whatever they happen to also keep on a memory stick. Even people who routinely back up to an external drive or a Time Machine would be without any sort of offsite backup.

I have a server in my basement. But I don't run Owncloud or some other such service on it because Dropbox is so much easier, and I don't need to expose my probably insecure box to the public internet. In addition to Time Machine and Windows Backup, I run Crashplan for offsite backup because that's a lot easier than finding some friend in a different geographic location who wants to swap backups.* I run Plex rather than XBMC or similar because Plex has wonderful cloud features that effortlessly share with all of my mobile devices - as you point out, the kids are far more interested in watching TV on the tablets than on the TV :)

Am I tied to the cloud? Sort-of. I mean, if Dropbox or Crashplan went away overnight, I'd have to install a competitor's product and it would take a few hours to sync. If Plex went away, I'd have to fall back on another similar product. But my data would be fine as long as my house didn't decide to burn down at the exact same moment that the cloud service decided to go away :)

* I actually host off-site backups for friends and relatives. When I work on their PC, I setup Crashplan to backup their drive to my basement server. I lose a little drive space, but when they ask me to help me recover from a dead hard drive it makes things much easier...

"Only"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you really grasp the meaning of that word...

What home user could possibly think it's reasonable to store 75TB of data on a cloud service? What possible legitimate use is there? Sure, these people may be hobbyist filmmakers who are making their personal 4k movie masterpiece in their spare time. But it's highly unlikely.

Re:"Only"

[arth1]

What home user could possibly think it's reasonable to store 75TB of data on a cloud service? What possible legitimate use is there?

A copy of /dev/urandom seems sensible, in case you lose the device node.

Really, backups. Say a full backup monthly, and a tower-of-hanoi incremental approach for the rest of the days. If you want to be able to restore a file that only existed for a day a couple of years ago, you are going to have big backup needs.

Re:"Only"

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? Unlimited is unlimited.

If they couldn't handle that, they shouldn't have offered it.

To quote an old classic:

Luke Skywalker: Well, more wealth than you can imagine!
Han Solo: I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit.

Clearly Microsoft suffers from a lack of imagination.

Microsoft Not a Safe Bet For Services

[HannethCom]

I know I'm missing some from this list but:

Windows Live Mesh (discontinued)
Windows Live Folders (Renamed to Windows Live SkyDrive
Windows Live SkyDrive (Renamed to SkyDrive)
SkyDrive (Removed features and renamed to OneDrive
OneDrive (Removed groups, reduced storage)

Honestly, with their constant failures and reduction of features, why anyone would trust Microsoft with any online services I don't know.

Re:Microsoft Not a Safe Bet For Services

[Anonymous Coward]

Why anyone would trust Microsoft at all?

FTFY

Re:Microsoft Not a Safe Bet For Services

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had Microsoft delete my account without explanation or any possible recourse. So, I trust them a helluva lot more than Google.

Wut

[Anonymous Coward]

75 TB is only what would be used by 75 people under these new rules. Why do they care if the 75 TB is taken up by one person or 75? How does that make a difference on their business cost? By their own admission it was an outlier of extreme proportions. This doesn't even make any sense.

Punishing the Average User

[Anonymous Coward]

In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.

According to those numbers, that puts the "average" user at around 5.3GB. Since storage is free for 5GB or less, this means that the "average" user will have to cut their storage requirements, or pony up for a paid plan.

Plenty of better services out there, with more free space for casual users.

Re:Punishing the Average User

[tomhath]

You need to learn the difference between "average" and "median"

Re:Punishing the Average User

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to learn the difference between "average" and "median"

Nope. It's pretty clear that "average" in this sense means arithmetic mean and not median, which is the middle datum in an ascending- or decending-ordered data set.

Re:Punishing the Average User

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, there is no difference. Average is an ambiguous term. It can mean either a mean average or a median average, but both are averages.

Re:Punishing the Average User

[Anonymous Coward]

I was taught that there was 3 types of numerical average:

Mean - the sum of a list numbers divided by the number of items
Median - the n/2 item of a list of ordered numbers where n is the number of items
Mode - the most common item in the list of numbers

As I understand it the majority of printed non academic statistics use the median when they say average

They shouldn't have advertised it as "unlimited"

[rainer_d]

While using 75T (I have maybe a 100GB, mostly photos and podcasts in iTunes, of which the Apple Events probably consume most space) is insane, if it's advertised as "unlimited" chances are that some people are using it to that extent - who could have foreseen that, in all honesty?

MyCloud(tm)

[Anonymous Coward]

I use MyCloud(tm). It has a higher up front cost, but $0 ongoing. It looks like a 2 bay network attached storage drive with 2x480GB solid state drives. Works like a champ. Total cost: $630. Cost per month: $26.25. 24x7x365 reliability. No limits how much data (except the maximum cap of 480GB). You can get a high data rate to the "cloud" without internet bottlenecks or bandwidth fees. Just two days ago I moved 1.8GB to MyCloud(tm) in about 75 seconds. If you don't feel the need for SSD's, you can get a 2TB MyCloud(tm) service for about $269, or about $11.21 per month over 2 years. I say 2 years because 75GB/month will take 26 2/3 months to fill 2TB, or 2 years, 2 months and 20 days.

Wow, 5 whole Gigabytes?

[jandrese]

Microcenter gave me a free 32GB thumb drive just for showing up in their store. 5GB is getting into "Why bother?" territory. That's so little storage that even people who just casually take photos and upload them to the cloud are going to bump into the limit in relatively short order. It looks like Microsoft is basically killing off the service by making it worse than the competition. They already started on this when they dumped the OS integration they had in Win8 and made Win10 users go through the app to move their files back and forth.

Re:Wow, 5 whole Gigabytes?

[The-Ixian]

OneDrive is not meant to be a stand alone product. It is meant to integrate their Office 365 offerings by having a centralized storage location.

I am sure that Microsoft would rather you use a dedicated storage service like Dropbox if you are not going to buy into their ecosystem.

Also, while 5GB is not a lot, it is special-purpose storage. Putting things there gives you several benefits that just storing those things on local media cannot provide. It is not meant to be a place for every piece of information ever... only stuff that makes sense to put there...

Re:Wow, 5 whole Gigabytes?

[supremebob]

Not to mention that Google is still giving out 15 GB of data for their free accounts. I wonder if they'll offer a deal for soon to be former free tier Onedrive users like myself who now need a new place to back up their photos.

So Microsoft is looking at your data.

[Holi]

" a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings"

Not really cool to have them checking out what you are storing. Glad I let my free sub expire.

Re:So Microsoft is looking at your data.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is to be expected with cloud storage.

Encrypt before upload.

Re:They shouldn't have advertised it as "unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

if it's advertised as "unlimited" chances are that some people are using it to that extent - who could have foreseen that, in all honesty?

Anyone doing their job if their job involves building out, maintaining, designing or selling this service.

Make that, anyone capable of doing their job. Clearly those at Microsoft were incompetent

70TB is a lot

[blogagog]

I only own ~3TB of data across all of my devices. I want to meet the guy who has 70TB on OneDrive and shake his hand.

Re:They shouldn't have advertised it as "unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

While using 75T (I have maybe a 100GB, mostly photos and podcasts in iTunes, of which the Apple Events probably consume most space) is insane, if it's advertised as "unlimited" chances are that some people are using it to that extent - who could have foreseen that, in all honesty?

Anyone who is into any data intensive hobby
- Photography - My wife and I shoot around 1TB of files per year.
- Video - Not my hobby but with HD video consuming around 200-400MB/minute when shot with a DSLR, we're talking 12-24GB/hr before you even start editing it.
- Science - Astronomy data like publicly available Hubble data, various astronomy catalogs etc. can quickly consume terabytes.

There are lots of uses other than a stupidly large TV and Movie collection. It's unfortunate that people lack the knowledge or imagination to understand this.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

"We don't like customers; please stop using our services."

1TB?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

[Anonymous Coward]

A paltry 1TB?!
That won't even hold my HOSTS file!

Good Job Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, amazing. Keep doing all the wrong things Microsoft. Just gives people more reason to move away from your products.

What does their backing storage look like?

[swb]

75 TB is kind of a lot of data by many standards, but I would not have expected it to be super meaningful by Global Evil Empire Scale standards.

My old Compellent certification books list an SC8000 controller as supporting 5 SC280 fully configured enclosures, for a total of 1.6PB raw in about 30U. They always talk about these data centers being extremely vast, so I would expect that storage would be approaching exabyte scale.

So I'm guessing that device capacity isn't the actual problem but instead its some kind of migration/load balancing/operation issue that makes user "blobs" of 75TB problematic.

1TB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

When a 3TB desktop drive costs $75, how can I even back up with only 1TB of cloud storage? Sure cloud storage means it's available anywhere, but if a 2TB drive fits in my laptop for under $120, it's effectively with me wherever I might need it. I can't imagine a lot of people use more than one computer on a regular basis.

I realize that OneDrive is probably just meant to store Office documents or something, but that seems like a pretty boring application of the service.

Typical short-sighted MBA thinking

[JDG1980]

From a big-picture perspective, this is an incredibly boneheaded move. Microsoft has put a great deal of emphasis on "the cloud" in recent years, making it a major part of their business strategy, yet they are now sending a clear signal that their cloud offerings can't be trusted.

For that reason, I doubt that Nadella made this decision personally. This looks like the kind of thing that was probably done at the middle-management level. We know that Microsoft's internal corporate structure is highly siloed, with divisions often refusing to cooperate and even trying to sabotage one another. Probably the grand poobah of cloud services was upset that his quarterly bonus wasn't as high as he wanted, so he ordered his underlings to find any possible way to cut costs and boost profits, and this is what they came up with. I wouldn't be all that surprised to see Nadella have to walk this back in a couple days due to the backlash.

Re:Typical short-sighted MBA thinking

[viperidaenz]

They're giving a clear picture that any changes (which they said may happen, you decided to read the terms) will be given adequate notice.

Wizbangy; I don't need the hassel.

[wnfJv8eC]

I still haven't figured out why a consumer, with the price of USB/3 drives so low, I need offsite storage. My access time is slow, my upload limited. Back up to a usb drive is quick and cheap.

Re:Wizbangy; I don't need the hassel.

[viperidaenz]

I like being able to save my photos I take on my phone. I'm sure many other people do too.

I don't want to lose everything if I lose my phone, or fall off the side of a boat and get salt water in everything in my pockets.

Re:Wizbangy; I don't need the hassel.

[MadKeithV]

And I tend to be very mobile working from different machines on different days. In other words, I am often "offsite" myself. It's nice having certain bits and pieces globally accessible, editable, and backed up (including the backups on all the devices that have copies). I don't use a lot of storage, but where I use it it's because it's important. Onedrive is convenient because it's so transparent on the machines I use most often, and there are still working plug-ins or web access for other devices.

75TB

[ajzimm3rman]

That is just ridiculous. I couldn't take up that much space even if I tried.

how is it abuse

[ILongForDarkness]

to use what you are paying for?

Work around

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so 75TB is cut down to 1 TB. That means I create 75 email accounts with 1TB each with PC software like google drive that merges them (spans) them to look like one 75TB drive.

Next problem !!!!! :)

Re:Work around

[spacepimp]

With the added benefit of inflated user/subscriber accounts. I assume we can watch their numbers artificially grow somehow.

Even the 1 TB space is partially mythical

[jandjmh]

I just signed up for 365 for business. I supposedly get a 1 TB OneDrive account with it. Sounds great, until you try to use it. I have a pretty solid business cable modem internet account. Reliably 50/10 mb/s.
Three days ago I dropped an existing folder that had about 60 GB of content in roughly 36,000 files into the OneDrive folder on my desktop PC.
As of this moment, less that 50% has synced to the cloud, after more than 72 hours.
Files are uploading at about 350kb/s at best, with lots of pauses..
There are no preferences in the OneDrive client that allow me to tell it to go ahead and use more bandwidth.
Upload rates to my Google Drive on the same computer can saturate my local upstream, 30 times faster than OneDrive.
So I was searching on "slow OneDrive" and found that the very slow upload is universal - and universally despised.
The same searches also revealed something that is not at all clear when you sign up for Office 365: there is a hard limit of 20,000 objects (files+folders).
For my files, with an average size of about 1.7 MB, the maximum I can store is 34 GB, about 3% of the advertised terabyte.
I feel cheated ...
And I now know the folder I wanted to upload has too many items. I'm not sure what I am going to do. The whole point of the OneDrive was to make a complete set of some business files on my desktop available to my laptop while traveling. Yes, I know lots of other ways to do this, but since I wanted the Office 365 account for mail hosting in any case, the OneDrive space was a nice bonus. Except it is not really usable at all, and that is very frustrating.

Re:Even the 1 TB space is partially mythical

[swillden]

Upload rates to my Google Drive on the same computer can saturate my local upstream, 30 times faster than OneDrive.

Heh. The common complaint about Google Drive used to be the opposite. Whatever your connection was, Drive would saturate it to the point that nothing else worked. You can now set rate limits.

Re:Even the 1 TB space is partially mythical

[Anonymous Coward]

We are a large company that is migrating from Lotus Notes to O356. We brought this up in the POC when we were evaluating O365 and Google. It was kicked up to an Azure Engineer that said this is be design. O365 writes the upload to both datacenters (Primary and the Geo-redundant one) at the same time, the upload is slower. Google handles this on the backend, so that is why they are faster.

Re:Even the 1 TB space is partially mythical

[Whiteox]

Oh but there is more!
A few months ago it was possible to stream AV to your Windows Phone 8 from your personal server/desktop/tablet/laptop as long as it was on your LAN. You used Device Hub which is just another name for Windows networking and pinned the server/machine as a tile on your screen. No problems and I could watch anything or listen to anything on my LAN.
But now MS in their wisdom changed that. Device Hub shows the LAN, but cripples access, advising "Use App to connect". When you try to use their music/video player, there is only one choice and that is stream from One Drive!
So MS's official solution is to upload music/video/to Onedrive and then you can stream them to your phone!?!!
So I got about 10GB of music files and uploaded them to Onedrive. It did work, but was a bit clumsy.
Now however, I will lose my 30GB storage and be stuck with an almost useless 5GB.
All this because they won't allow me to play music from my LAN.

Oh, the spy cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

These changes will roll out in "early 2016," and users will have up to a year to get down under the new caps.

Mmhmm dangit. I guess since I would never use a global spyware company's "clouds" I am unaffected.

Looked at another way, I am already down under the new caps.

Coren22 proven a LYING punk

[Anonymous Coward]

"APK doesn't think that DNS servers are worth running and seems to believe that somehow Microsoft Active Directory can run without DNS." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @12:58PM (#50811615)

Where'd I say AD will run minus DNS Coren22? I've said AD = internal network DNS dependent as far back as 2007 http://forums.tweaktown.com/wi...

(Searching this in BOLD "To warn users who have ActiveDirectory/AD LAN-WAN setups to NOT use external DNS servers!" referring to OpenDNS suggestions for those using AD stupid in the POSTS BEFORE IT in my security guides for users (geared to stand alone single machines no less), & right there on that page proves it stupid - so even if you posted as myself someplace here on /. "impersonating me", I have your ass NOW, shithead!)

I've also stated MANY TIMES I use remote DNS in OpenDNS @ home (but not @ work on AD networks + exchange/outlook: Free OpenDNS model doesn't work with AD dependent Exchange + Outlook specifically you lying little imbecile).

I also don't hardcode in "every site there is under the sun" is why, so I have to use DNS, but OpenDNS & rarely.

I also RARELY MISS A LOOKUP since I put where I spend a good 95++% of my time online in my favorite sites into hosts @ the TOP of hosts for utmost LOCAL FASTER RESOLUTION SPEEDS and more reliability vs. Open DNS (not OpenDNS) resolvers being abused, Kaminsky redirect poisoned DNS servers (of which 99.999% of ISP DNS are not proofed against to this very day even though a patch exists which OpenDNS uses), rogue DNS servers, and yes ROUTERS with bushwhacked by malware DNS settings (happening a LOT lately).

Hardcodes in hosts are faster than remote DNS, waste less resources than local dns in power, cpu cycles, RAM, & other I/O by FAR considering ALL THE PARTS of such a setup in programs, data, I/O, & power (especially if setup as a separate machine).

APK

P.S.=> You're a disgusting liar... apk

Coren22's desperation, lies, & libel

[Anonymous Coward]

"I guess we should avoid your crap, it looks like it is marked as malware. Good luck getting that removed." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Monday November 02, 2015 @03:52PM (#50850445)

False positive: I've wrote 'em long ago, no response vs. 60++ REPUTABLE sources (not nobodies) below that fries you Coren22!

Is that your fake site for more lies Coren22?

Lying about me LIKE YOU DID HERE punk? -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ??

---

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus per this VERY recent testing of them all http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

&

It's safe proven by 57 antivirus programs recently in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

+

Its 32-bit model too https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

More "SALT IN YOUR WOUNDS" -> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...

APK

P.S.=> /.'ers say my work is good too:

"his hosts program is actually pretty good" - by xenotransplant (4179011) on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:34PM (#50287195)

"I like your host file system." - by Karmashock (2415832) on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @03:57PM (#50489401)

"APK is kinda right... I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works." - by bmo (77928) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#50736071)

"his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources" by alexgieg (948359) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:57AM (#50596461)

Coren22 "security guru" wannabe fails security

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU say "hosts=bad" (but they add security, speed, & reliability) & bitch on admin privelege to UPDATE vs. threats:

"So, have you figured out why privilege escalation is a bad thing yet?" - by Coren22 on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @05:15PM (#50577809)

Hypocrite - You use admin priv admitting it

&

How else can I programmatically update hosts minus it in Windows?

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"Of course it requires elevation to write to the hosts file" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday September 23, 2015 @05:35PM (#50585879)

You FINALLY later admit there's no other way!

FACT:

Even MalwareBytes AntiMalware (best one) DEMANDS you use admin privelege (you saying it's "bad" too?) it can't do its job fully otherwise, like many security tools do!

---

Aryeh Goretsky NOD32/ESET says hosts = good security-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...

Oliver Day (Symantec) does-> http://www.securityfocus.com/c...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts hosts & recommends my APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit-> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

---

* HOW MANY SECURITY PROS DO I NEED TO KNOCK THE CHOCOLATE OUTTA YOU?

---

Those security pros INCLUDE me: I work w/ guys from malwarebytes' hpHosts on a regular basis!

I've professionally worked for decades as a combined domain-wide network admin & software engineer since 1994 (Even showing you HOW to migrate a hosts across an enterprise-> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

I've also been securing computers + WRITING GUIDES using CIS Tool (who took fixes from me http://slashdot.org/comments.p... - bonus) http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...

You told me you learn from guides?

I write good ones that MILLIONS USE & was PAID FOR IT http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

+ WARES TO PROTECT USERS that are endorsed & hosted by security pros -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

You did all that? No!

(& that's ONLY a SMALL part of what I could put out)

APK

P.S.=> You're all TALK -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... & a "ne'er-do-well" in security... apk

An Open Letter to Microsoft

[BoogieChile]

Dear Microsoft,

What part of "If you build it, they will come" don't you get?

Lots of love,

The Internet.

A 100% increase in price.

[plopez]

AKA hidden inflation.

Newspeak

[Anonymous Coward]

Abuse now means taking advantage of what you were offered... How is it abuse to do exactly what you were told was allowed..."When we said unlimited we never thought that people would believe us" ... How soon do they change their mind on windows 10 ???

fie

[Anonymous Coward]

if we were to cut everything subject to abuse, i would have no penis.

Just surprised it took so long for them to do this

[Anonymous Coward]

It is called "Bait and switch".