Microsoft Kills OneDrive Unlimited Cloud Storage For Home, Personal, And University Subscribers

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While many services like Google and Amazon are expanding their cloud storage offerings, Microsoft seems to be moving backwards as they’ve just announced that they are making changes to OneDrive storage plans – the most notable change being the removal of OneDrive unlimited cloud storage for home, personal, and university subscribers.

The first question that comes to mind of course is why? It turns out that a small number of users are to blame.

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. 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.

Microsoft went on to say that the OneDrive changes are required to ensure that the company can continue to deliver a collaborative, connected, and intelligent service and not just a file storage and backup repository. The changes being made also include dropping the free storage from 15GB to 5GB per user.

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  • We’re no longer planning to offer unlimited storage to Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers. Starting now, those subscriptions will include 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
  • 100 GB and 200 GB paid plans are going away as an option for new users and will be replaced with a 50 GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016.
  • Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new. The 15 GB camera roll storage bonus will also be discontinued. These changes will start rolling out in early 2016.

Of course, they’re taking steps to make the transition as easy as possible for existing customers:

  • If you are an Office 365 consumer subscriber and have stored in excess of 1 TB, you will be notified of this change and will be able to keep your increased storage for at least 12 months.
  • 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. To learn more visit the FAQ.
  • If you are using more than 5 GB of free storage, you will continue to have access to all files for at least 12 months after these changes go into effect in early 2016. In addition, you can redeem a free one-year Office 365 Personal subscription (credit card required), which includes 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
  • Current customers of standalone OneDrive storage plans (such as a 100 or 200 GB plans) are not affected by these changes.

I suspect that more than a few users will be looking at alternatives for their cloud storage solutions with these changes from Microsoft. Do you use a OneDrive cloud storage option? Are you affected by these changes? Let us know what you think in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

[button link=”https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: OneDrive Blog[/button]

Last Updated on November 27, 2018.

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