... after some people upload too much.

“Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365.”
Julia White, general manager of Office 365 Technical Product Management. 27th October, 2014

Fast forward to November 2015 and storage limits have just become present again. A little over a year after Microsoft announced that Office 365 subscribers would get unlimited storage on OneDrive – Microsoft’s cloud storage solution – the offer has been revoked and downgraded.

Apparently, according to this blog post from the OneDrive team, “a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB…”

Microsoft were not expecting OneDrive users to upload so much, despite the “unlimited” promise. If you’re an existing OneDrive subscriber, you should be aware of the changes as they may affect you differently depending on how you use the service.

  • Starting immediately, Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers get 1TB of OneDrive storage instead of unlimited storage.
  • There will be no more 100GB and 200GB plans for new OneDrive subscribers – these are being replaced by a single 50GB plan. Existing OneDrive subscribers to these plans will continue un-changed.
  • Storage for non-subscribers (free users) drops from 15GB to 5GB, and the bonus 15GB OneDrive storage when you upload your camera roll from Windows devices will be discontinued – with effect from early 2016.

If you’re currently using more than the new quotas on your OneDrive account, you have a 12-month reprieve to find an alternative provider. If you’re a free user using more than 5GB, you can also get a 12-month subscription to Office 365 which gets you 1TB space as well as access to the Office suite on web, Windows and Mac.

It seems Microsoft need to invest in more of these.

It is disappointing that, as an Office 365 subscriber (and hence I hadunlimited storage space on OneDrive) I found this information from an article in a newsletter. I wonder how many other OneDrive subscribers that will be affected, have been made aware of this? I look forward to some kind of notification from Microsoft soon.

It seems as though the question on everyone’s lips last year – “how can Microsoft offer unlimited storage space?” – has been answered. They can’t.