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

Posted by Soulskill on from the now-that-they-have-you dept.

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.

47 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Using your advertised space != Abuse by guruevi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    1. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by Sowelu · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by Xenx · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    4. Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse by guruevi · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    5. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by hawguy · · Score: 2

      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?

    6. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by Etherwalk · · Score: 2

      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.

    7. Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      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."....

    8. Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse by radiumsoup · · Score: 3, Informative

      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...

    9. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by kelemvor4 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    10. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by lgw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    11. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by xaxa · · Score: 2

      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...

    12. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by suutar · · Score: 5, Informative

      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"

    13. Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse by guruevi · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    14. Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    15. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by ITRambo · · Score: 2

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

    16. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by rahvin112 · · Score: 2

      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.

    17. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by thewolfkin · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Just another second banana
    18. Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      One station wagon on the Interstate...

    19. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      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?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    20. Re: Using your advertised space != Abuse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Pray they do not alter it further.

    21. Re:Using your advertised space != Abuse by BoogieChile · · Score: 2

      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).

  2. The real definition of "abuse" by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:The real definition of "abuse" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:The real definition of "abuse" by arth1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      $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.

    3. Re:The real definition of "abuse" by Coren22 · · Score: 2

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

      Amazon Glacier comes out pretty cheap for backups too.

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

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    4. Re:The real definition of "abuse" by SuperKendall · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  3. I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

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

  4. They admit user data snooping! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  5. Re:Abuse? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  6. abuse from the people with 15GB space by itsme1234 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

  7. we did this with email, people dont get it. by nimbius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  8. You would think these companies would learn by istartedi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    1. Re:You would think these companies would learn by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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)

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  9. Microsoft didn't see the high usage coming? by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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"?

  10. Re:Was this "abuse limit" advertised somewhere? by The-Ixian · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
  11. Photos by Etherwalk · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Photos by JeffAtl · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Photos by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!

    3. Re:Photos by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

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

  12. Re:privacy by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  13. I promise by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  14. Re:Pron by hawguy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  15. What does their backing storage look like? by swb · · Score: 2

    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.

  16. Re:Pron by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 2

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

    --
    Do you have ESP?
  17. Wizbangy; I don't need the hassel. by wnfJv8eC · · Score: 2

    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.

  18. Even the 1 TB space is partially mythical by jandjmh · · Score: 2

    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.