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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.
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.
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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
How would they know about "entire movie collections" being stored?
So very comforting!
Ah, never mind... RTFA, they don't call it abuse. Stupid summary, then.
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...
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.
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"?
.
Why should anyone believe them when they say "no"?
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.
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.
In most cases, photos that turn out to be important or have high sentimental value aren't known at the time.
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!