Microsoft announced that it will cap it’s OneDrive Unlimited Cloud Storage at 1TB for Office 365 customers, and the previous initial 15GB of free storage will be slimmed down to 5GB. The company blames the changes on client misuse, claiming that some customers stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings that took up to 75TB of space per user on their current OneDrive storage plan, which is 14,000 the amount of an average OneDrive Unlimited Cloud Storage user.
The announcement, made by the OneDrive team in a blog post on Monday, chooses instead to focus on extreme backup scenarios, and not on promoting piracy or unauthorized content sharing. Microsoft will replace OneDrive storage plans of100GB and 200GB with 50GB plans for $1.99/month, and OneDrive’s 15GB camera roll storage bonus will be taken down. All of these changes are to go into effect in early 2016, and the 1TB limit on Office 365 users is to go into effect immediately.
As opposed to this reasonable explanation, there is also the fact that having this kind of unlimited storage is not profitable. Giving away this much OneDrive storage for free makes Microsoft lose quite a bit of money that it could greatly benefit from. Although it is true that the company should not support piracy or public content sharing illegally, there is also the fact that those extra TBs are dollars that Microsoft isn’t making. It’s yet to be seen how many Microsoft users will opt out of the service entirely thanks to this announcement, but Microsoft added that it will allow customers with over 1TB of storage to keep their content for 12 months, after which all files stored will become read-only.
