Microsoft Boosts OneDrive Cloud Storage to 1TB for Office 365 Subscribers, 15GB Free for All

[saturnotaku]

As a Office 365 subscriber and OneDrive user, this is fantastic news.

Amen to that.

I get 120GB of Dropbox space for $10 a month.

For $100/year, you'll get 1 TB of OneDrive space plus access to 5 licenses of Office for OS X and Windows plus 5 more licenses to Office for mobile platforms. If all you need is one Office license, the personal plan is $70/year. Both options can be had for even less if you know where to look. I got my Office 365 Home subscription with a keycode on a card for $80.

 

[nottoosmart]

It's allot faster when you're using a good wi-fi.. plus it's FREE!

I assume you mean that the upload is faster on good wi-fi. Well, my experience has been that is not the case. I've been on wifi, lan, etc. and everywhere it is slow as molasses. I even went to their own forums and support site to see if there was a problem and this is a prevalent issue that google has not chosen to fix.

 

[MacMikePro]

I hope so, but so far, nobody has come close to the simplicity of Dropbox. All these other services have limitations all over the place. Also, the Dropbox accounts made before it was extremely popular let users get direct links to their public files, and you could even host a website on one of those. I've got two

Copy is just as simple as Dropbox though, and in my opinion looks nicer too, and I'm sitting with 70GB for free just off using their referral links, that can't be beat. But I'll still use my Dropbox too because so many other apps offer compatibility with Dropbox, so to me that's their biggest advantage.

 

[0098386]

iCloud's online storage in Yosemite seems to work more like Dropbox - hopefully when it goes live Apple will also announce an increase in free capacity

It's all well and good supporting one OS, but will it support any OS via browser, will it support Windows? That's the lure of Dropbox for me. All my computers can sync a single folder across all my operating systems and devices effortlessly. (it's just that price that's off putting)

 

[MaSx]

15GB? Damn, that makes iCloud 5GB obsolete. Talk about Apple being stingy..

 

[imaccooper]

Oh that's nice

I have OneDrive (and office 365 which is a good product) and if it wasn't so stupidly designed then i might care a little bit, but honestly if i really wanted to keep an entire entertainment center worth of Blu-Rays (or whatever else you are planning on doing with 1TB of storage) Im probably going to get a 1TB external hard drive for half the cost of only one year worth of subscription. I would 1 million times rather Microsoft buy dropbox and use it (and obliterate OneDrive and all memories of it) than for them to give me 10 TB and free cookies every time i logged on. I just want products to work not products to have useless amounts of storage (i love my little 3.2 GB of storage on Dropbox). Thank's Microsoft but you aren't fooling anyone.

 

[Parasprite]

15GB? Damn, that makes iCloud 5GB obsolete. Talk about Apple being stingy..

Look at the bright side, it may encourage Apple to consider matching it.

One thing is for certain, Microsoft had really good timing with this.

 

[MacrumoursUser]

Look at the bright side, it may encourage Apple to consider matching it.

One thing is for certain, Microsoft had really good timing with this.

If I'm fine with keynote, pages and numbers and really don't need 1tb of space getting 20 gb icloud for 12 is much cheaper plus all the space I will use which is not going to be counted in those 20 gb. Apple is giving much more than you can imagine when you count everything.

 

[Populism]

I look forward to moving from DropBox to iCloud when I cloud has the level and simplicity of folder control and document/medium control that DB has now.

 

[babyj]

I think Microsoft is waiting for TechNet to expire in August before releasing Office 2014. Just a hunch.

Technet subscriptions don't expire/end in August. Microsoft also offered two year subscriptions so some people will have a valid membership until August 2015, mine runs until March 2015 for example.

Though I really doubt this plays any factor at all in any release decisions that Microsoft make.

And Technet will still be there, just no subscriptions and no license keys.

 

[kis]

Sure, let's feed all files and data directly into the NSA datacenter, ...

thanks, but no thanks, ...

Last I checked, the BND wasn't any better. If you don't want your files to be read by government agencies, print them out, put them in your drawer and wipe your hard drive.

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If I'm fine with keynote, pages and numbers

That may be, but you belong to a very small minority. Most people depend on MS Office products for their work.

 

[peterj1967]

Limited Number of Files

OneDrive for Business is limited to 20,000 files at the moment. Composed primarily of work and excel document, you run into the 20,000 file limit well before you come anywhere near a TB of data.

A typical backup of one of my servers is 126 gig and is almost 400,000 files and folders.

It will be interesting to see if they up the limit on the file count, or if that is a hard limit of SharePoint.

A free TB is a nice thing and it will be worth looking at.

Google Drive in my experience works much better and doesn't have the file count limit.

 

[Candlelight]

So free users is up'd to 15GB - I still have more under my early-bird 25GB adoption plan!

1TB is a good move but I can get that free under Flickr. Sure I can't store documents there but I can't imagine I'd need 1TB for documents.

 

[Steve121178]

Now, please, give us Office 2014 for Mac!

This. This. THIS!

Hurry up FFS!

 

[tbrinkma]

It's a nice gimmick but I'm still sticking with iCloud all the way. It just works. OneDrive has too many issues for me and their privacy and terms and conditions are insane.

Ran into a real weird one today. The OneDrive site loaded to a blank, white page. Not to be outdone, the Microsoft download page for SQL Server Management Studio 2012 was missing the (normally prominent) download button. All in IE on a Windows server. Had to go to my workstation, and throw the danged installer on a network share.

 

[Ezhik]

Remember when people thought Office 365 was only to use Office for iPad? That was pretty funny.

 

[jedifaka]

Interesting Move

This decision appears to allow MS to compete on its strengths. With technologies like Storage Spaces and Hyper-V, MS already owns much of the stuff you'd need to pull this project off and OEM's the hardware to run it on.

Apple will have to buy everything. Their business model doesn't require them to develop lots of back end products, so they would have to buy virtualization, storage OS, everything. I've no doubt Apple should be able to buy, say, Hitachi storage cheaper than any other customer based on volume alone. But that's unlikely to be cheaper than using your own storage processors on JBOD.
So I wouldn't necessarily call this a game changer, but it does look like a reasonable attempt by MS to differentiate itself from a competitor.

I think a wise man once compared tablets and computers to cars and trucks. Microsoft is deep into trucking. Maybe trains, to bend the analogy way out of shape.

 

[69650]

As a 365 subscriber that seems a really good bonus, especially compared to what I paid recently to upgrade my Dropbox account. I hope Dropbox and iCloud follow suit as I'm not a big fan of OneDrive.

 

[PocketSand11]

Copy is just as simple as Dropbox though, and in my opinion looks nicer too, and I'm sitting with 70GB for free just off using their referral links, that can't be beat. But I'll still use my Dropbox too because so many other apps offer compatibility with Dropbox, so to me that's their biggest advantage.

Thanks for telling me about this. I tried Copy just now. 15GB starting storage is great. It's a total copy of Dropbox (with a fitting name), so that's good. It proceeded to crash my Finder repeatedly until I restarted the application, but now it seems to be working fine. Its application seems more lightweight than Dropbox. I have to say that the website is way overly minimalistic, Microsoft-style but worse, but I don't care about that. The only thing that bothers me is that you can't share folders within Finder like you can with Dropbox.

 

[2IS]

I have 30 GB with my current subscription, so I get an additional 970 GB (or 980 since 10 of that was free and promotions)?!

Time for Apple to up the base 5GB.

Either way, it's a win win for consumers and the NSA.

This... iCloud is a joke compared to it's competition. Both in terms of cost per GB as well as flexibility of use.

 

[kds1]

I really have no use for online storage because it takes up the same amount of space on my HDs as it does there.

It didn't when it was iDisk. It just was mounted like a network drive. I wish they would bring that feature back.

 

[PocketSand11]

iCloud's online storage in Yosemite seems to work more like Dropbox - hopefully when it goes live Apple will also announce an increase in free capacity

A few problems though:
1. I don't have Yosemite and don't want to have it if it's going to be anywhere near as slow as Mavericks. Dropbox works as far back as Mac OS X 10.5; yes, you can use Dropbox on a PPC Mac.
2. Apple still has no way to download iCloud files from https://icloud.com… Come on! It's such a simple feature. This is the main thing I used Dropbox for, printing my stuff on the cruddy school Windows computers that, of course, won't have my account linked to them.
3. Speaking of Windows, iCloud on Windows seems unlikely to ever happen, but I don't use Windows for anything anyway.

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This... iCloud is a joke compared to it's competition. Both in terms of cost per GB as well as flexibility of use.

It's meant for backing up and syncing application data between Apple devices. I know Apple is lamely trying to give it Dropbox features, but its useful purpose is to make sure my Mac and iPhone have the same contacts, calendars, etc. at all times.

 

[kds1]

It's all well and good supporting one OS, but will it support any OS via browser, will it support Windows? That's the lure of Dropbox for me. All my computers can sync a single folder across all my operating systems and devices effortlessly. (it's just that price that's off putting)

It supports Windows 8

 

[PocketSand11]

It didn't when it was iDisk. It just was mounted like a network drive. I wish they would bring that feature back.

Same here. These file syncing things are OK, but I'd rather have a straight up file server.

 

[2IS]

A few problems though:
1. I don't have Yosemite and don't want to have it if it's going to be anywhere near as slow as Mavericks. Dropbox works as far back as Mac OS X 10.5; yes, you can use Dropbox on a PPC Mac.
2. Apple still has no way to download iCloud files from https://icloud.com… Come on! It's such a simple feature. This is the main thing I used Dropbox for, printing my stuff on the cruddy school Windows computers that, of course, won't have my account linked to them.
3. Speaking of Windows, iCloud on Windows seems unlikely to ever happen, but I don't use Windows for anything anyway.

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It's meant for backing up and syncing application data between Apple devices. I know Apple is lamely trying to give it Dropbox features, but its useful purpose is to make sure my Mac and iPhone have the same contacts, calendars, etc. at all times.

I know what it's for, and also know that there's no reason why it can't do more. Especially for how much it costs.