Microsoft Allowing OneDrive Users on Free Tier to Keep 15GB Free Storage and Camera Roll Bonus

[BigMcGuire]

You have a 10 TB Office 365 subscription? Is that for a business acct or something? I only have 1 TB. I don't need any more, just curious.

When Microsoft announced that they were giving 365 subscriptions unlimited storage - they gave us the ability to sign up for it early. I was one of these people. Instead of giving us unlimited, they gave us 10TB with the promise that unlimited was coming soon. Unlimited never came - but that's why some of us have 10TB.

 

[EvanMax]

Can someone clarify this?

Best I can find (an unsourced comment on The Verge's version of this article) is that MSoft will be sending out emails to eligible users early next year.

So I guess I'll be uploading a bunch of files tonight...

 

[Thunderhawks]

Incredibly ignorant comment. And as others have hinted at, very closed minded.

Looks like you do not want to accept reality.

No company can afford to give away UNLIMITED data storage anymore
as nobody can forecast future technology with future demand of data storage.

Complaining about what parameters they set isn't changing that.

All consumers want things for FREE, the lowest price etc. which is normal
consumer behavior. Whatever a company gives FREE will never be enough.

Until they run their own business and have to make money with it,
they will forever be in the dark about what things cost and
what the purpose of a business is.

Very simple: You don't pay, you don't play!
(I know very cynical)

PS: I used to have a FREE dropbox account of 2GB and kept recommending others to boost my FREE GB portion to the max.

Eventually I realized that I like Dropbox enough to buy a yearly $ 99 subscription.

I am glad I got to try it for FREE.

That is really what all the companies want you to do, hoping you will sign up for more.

Like somebody posted :

They give a piece of cheese to taste, hoping you'll buy some more.

 

[Candlelight]

This is typical. Two years ago I bought 1TB of OneDrive but then a month later Flickr went with their 1TB free service, and so I let my OneDrive lapse and used them.

Now a couple of weeks ago I bought a 365 Personal but now Microsoft are giving it away???

I can't win. Hopefully the 'license' can be retained so I simply use it when my current 12 months expires.

 

[arturmeireles]

I would like to rely only on iCloud but its almost impossible for me because iCloud Drive app is only available on IOS and I although I use an Iphone 6+ I also use a Lumia 950 XL. If it was possible to upload the Lumia camera roll to iCloud, Iwould definitely use iCloud services only but instead I have the setting on both of my phone to "save camera roll" so I have pics from both phones on Onedrive but if there was a way to back up the lumia camera roll to iCloud, that would be PERFECT as I need the pictures from Lumia to work on the Ipad Pro and the lumia pics would instantly appear on the IOS photo app.

 

[Peepo]

You have a 10 TB Office 365 subscription? Is that for a business acct or something? I only have 1 TB. I don't need any more, just curious.

It is Home account. When they went to "unlimited" they moved users to 10TB as a stop-gap until we got the full "unlimited" - but that never happened. I don't think MS has acted yet on their announcement to downgrade everyone to 1TB, mine hasn't changed anyways.

I'm also using only 2GB out of 10TB now LOL. I pay yearly for Dropbox because I don't trust OneDrive (had many issues with it syncing incorrectly and losing data in past - maybe it is fixed by now) and it is much slower. I just subscribe for the Office Apps.

 

[RobertArrington]

Best I can find (an unsourced comment on The Verge's version of this article) is that MSoft will be sending out emails to eligible users early next year.

So I guess I'll be uploading a bunch of files tonight...

I did a little searching and found that Douglas Pearce at Microsoft explicitly says this in a forum post:

"For customers of our free service who have over 5 GB of content and who are directly impacted by the storage change, we will offer one free year of Office 365 Personal, which includes 1 TB of storage. These customers will receive an email with redemption information early next year."
Source: https://onedrive.uservoice.com/forums/262982-onedrive/suggestions/10524099-give-us-back-our-storage

So it looks like anyone with over 5GB in used storage is eligible and should receive a redemption code. He doesn't say when the cutoff day is, though. I just uploaded a bunch of files. We'll see what happens...

 

[Max(IT)]

I did a little searching and found that Douglas Pearce at Microsoft explicitly says this in a forum post:

"For customers of our free service who have over 5 GB of content and who are directly impacted by the storage change, we will offer one free year of Office 365 Personal, which includes 1 TB of storage. These customers will receive an email with redemption information early next year."
Source: https://onedrive.uservoice.com/forums/262982-onedrive/suggestions/10524099-give-us-back-our-storage

So it looks like anyone with over 5GB in used storage is eligible and should receive a redemption code. He doesn't say when the cutoff day is, though. I just uploaded a bunch of files. We'll see what happens...

It seems a quite strange move by Microsoft...

 

[szw-mapple fan]

I don't get why people are crying about free cloud space from anybody.

You have a lot of options:

1) Keep your stuff on your computer/hard drive
2) Buy more hard drives

These days HDs are very cheap.

Thinking that any business owes you something is silly.
They don't even care that the stuff they are selling you works.

Running and keeping up servers, updating software etc. costs money.
R & D how to compress things better, making up/downloads faster etc.
costs money.

Just like ATT had to cancel unlimited data, all of these players will have to go away from
providing unlimited or large storage capacity for little or no money.

They never expected the misusers, which btw they are not doing anything but taking them by the word UNLIMITED. They also weren't smart enough to recognize that people never throw anything out.

From the time a child/teenager can store music, photos, films etc. they are creating gigantic data bases
over their lifetime apr. getting to about being 76 years old.

There is no way to anticipate what is next.

I always have to laugh when people believe "lifetime membership" and UNLIMITED terms for anything.

Just pay already, cut down on your Starbucks and $ 10 a month gets you a lot of storage.

Combine that with the (currently) FREE stuff and most of all, start throwing out stuff!

They are crying about the free space consumers in general do no like to hear that the free stuff they thought they would get would be taken away. It doesn't matter if it's justified or not.

 

[You are the One]

At least you don't have to pay to have all your information backed up in real time @ NSA.

Wait a minute, actually you do, through your taxes and the inflation created by printing tanker-loads of worthless FED-paper.

There seems to be a strong trend where NSA outsources their intelligence gathering to commercial companies. My guess is that MS is selling their customers info all over to anyone who wants to buy it, whether it's intelligence or advertisers.

Greedy suckers with no moral or ethics.

 

[nia820]

If you want free or cheap storage Google drive is the way to go. I only started using one drive because it's easier to use when using office for ios.

Thankfully I'm a 365 subscriber but I would be pretty pissed if they tried to take my storage away.

 

[D-Dave]

I've not run Windows since 2002 - I have no need for it on my Macs. So I could care less. I am only forced to use that garbage OS on my work computer as some things need it. But those are getting fewer and fewer.

I've also hated Microsoft since before it was cool to hate them. They have always been a scummy company, back into the 80s.

This comment tastes strongly of bitterness...btw...it must have been a very big slight done to you by ms for holding a grudge for 30 years...then again, maybe you should just think about the term open minded a bit more...

 

[BigMcGuire]

I have a heavy "cloud" background - was a JungleDisk user with Amazon S3 buckets in 2007. I then used Dropbox for many years until I finally moved to Google Drive in 2011 and vowed to go 100% cloud.

Why? Convenience. Instead of wondering what thumb drive had the latest version of my files, getting to college and finding I had left a file at home, or had a hard drive die and lose x days of data (I backed up but not every day). I wanted to go 100% cloud. Google Drive offered versioning, unlimited photo storage, and unlimited text files (and cheap storage).

Since 2011 I have created about 2600+ Google Documents (about 168MB of text when exported). I have 68,000 photos/videos stored for free in Google Photos (about 60GB+ worth being stored for free). I have Google Drive installed on my Windows PC and my Mac Mini backing up data to my hard drives in real time. I also have http://spanning.com/ backing up my Google Drive data every day for $40/year.

I started to use OneDrive as my long term storage backup when they started talking about Unlimited storage (great, getting more use out of my $10/mo!). So, I offloaded about 200GB?+ of backups, large files, ISOs, long term storaged' data to OneDrive. Yeah, not even using 1% of my 10TB.

But I still feel slighted for being promised Unlimited storage because all my data lives in the cloud and my data is very important to me. Why would I use Microsoft OneDrive when they go back on their word like this? I pay Microsoft ($10/mo for Office 365) and I pay Google Drive ($1.99/mo for 100GB).

I don't want to give $ to a company that goes back on its word. My files are important. I feel bad I'm giving $10/mo to a company that goes back on its word.

If I stored all my data locally on hard drives - I could care less. I'd laugh and think these cloud guys are crazy. But for $143.88/year I have (had*) 10TB (OneDrive) + 1.29TB (Google Drive (Chromebook promotional storage)) that syncs to all my computers and is accessible from any device. I couldn't ever go back.

Like Thunderhawks said - free tier brings paying customers. What is Microsoft thinking?

 

[chillywilly]

Don't know what I did, but I have 40GB of free storage. I have been on this through all of the iterations, so maybe this is a loyalty bonus for hanging in through all the transitions. I do have an office 365 subscription through my university so that might have something to do with it as well.

I have pieced together a bunch of space by referring people to various cloud systems, so I use One Drive, Drop Box, Copy, Mega, and Flickr. It would be nice to have one system but that's the price of not paying for cloud space. My favorite was Sugar Sync, but they eliminated my free space.

I still have the 10gb loyalty bonus showing up on my account. I am assuming that will go away in early 2016 when they make the other changes/reductions.

Nice work on piercing together other cloud storage services. I do the same with Box, Copy, OneDrive and Dropbox.

 

[Max(IT)]

If you want free or cheap storage Google drive is the way to go. I only started using one drive because it's easier to use when using office for ios.

Thankfully I'm a 365 subscriber but I would be pretty pissed if they tried to take my storage away.

I will NEVER give my important and sensible data to Google. NEVER.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I will NEVER give my important and sensible data to Google. NEVER.

Hasn't harmed me and I've been using Drive since it came out. You hold the same view with OneDrive and iCloud?

 

[knownikko]

I really can't stand the Google drive interface. It's terrible. So many others do it better.

 

[alexgowers]

I love that microsoft are still claiming that it's the users that backup terabytes of data that are to blame for the free space changing from 15gb to 5gb. I'm sorry but MS just want to gouge the user once they realised 5gb was the tipping point for data, most people can live with 15gb without ever needing more. The users who occupy massive amounts of storage have nothing to do with that and the price hikes they want to save the company, that is less and less profitable by the day.

If they had given 2GB free and increased to 5GB they would have looked great by they chose to over promise and they their PR department must have been asleep to have let them blame users for the change.

I don't know how anyone can love MS, they make hitler look compassionate.

 

[alexgowers]

The biggest issue i have with apples iCloud is that multiple devices have to share 5gb of data despite that fact you could have multiple apple IDs and have paid for a whole device expecting to get more storage. I really would love to see this change in the future.

 

[Max(IT)]

Hasn't harmed me and I've been using Drive since it came out. You hold the same view with OneDrive and iCloud?

Surely not Apple: they weren't found guilty of data mining several times like Google was.
I'm not sure about OneDrive, that I actually use, but surely Microsoft 's main business isn't data mining (Google 's is).

 

[MacAddict1978]

So let me get this straight, if I upload 5GB worth of files to OneDrive, I get a year of office 365 subscription?

Sadly no. Once upon a time, but now more, there was a free account that let people access outlook.com email, one drive, and stripped down web version of word with almost no features. They no longer offer it. So this is stating people who still have that keep it for a year.

 

[brinary001]

How do you know Apple not looking at your files?

I don't. Apple just wasn't stupid enough to get caught.

 

[brinary001]

The receipt for your Christmas gift to aunt Edna is really worth looking at!

Seriously, who puts anything into the cloud that could be dangerous
for somebody else to know?

Umm I do? Where else will I go with all these nuclear launch codes?

 

[nia820]

I will NEVER give my important and sensible data to Google. NEVER.

Well sensitive data should be stored somewhere on a HDD or SSD. My very senstive documents are never saved in any cloud storage.

 

[Max(IT)]

Well sensitive data should be stored somewhere on a HDD or SSD. My very senstive documents are never saved in any cloud storage.

There are files I need to have in the cloud to share or access everywhere. They are important (not classified). I trust Apple and Microsoft for those files. I don't trust google.