Thanks To Data Hogs, Microsoft Dramatically Reduces OneDrive Storage Limits

In the world of technology, rarely does “unlimited” truly mean unlimited. We’ve seen it with mobile data, and heck, even home Internet data. We’re now also seeing it with cloud storage, courtesy of Microsoft.

About a year ago, Microsoft unveiled a truly impressive cloud storage package: for $10/mo, users would be granted “unlimited” space. As if that wasn’t notable enough, that $10/mo applied for up to 5 users in a household, and included the full Office 365 suite. Considering the fact that competitors were charging about the same for 10 TB, Microsoft’s deal almost seemed too good to be true.

And well, as we now see, it was.

Earlier this year, Microsoft quietly reduced the “unlimited” storage on new accounts down to 1 TB. In order for users to be granted the full storage capacity they were promised, they’d have to contact support. It’s not hard to understand why the company decided to go this route, as it appears that there have been some people really taking advantage of Microsoft’s offer.

In a new blog post, the company notes that some people utilized up to 75TB of its storage – 14,000x the average. That’s an insane amount of storage even for a data hoarder kicking it at home. Do the math, and those using that kind of storage were losing Microsoft money, and fast – for the regular consumer, that’d be $2,500 worth of 8TB hard drives.

Unfortunately, rather than just downgrade the unlimited package to 10 TB for everyone, Microsoft has decided to punish us all. Going forward, the same $8 (personal) or $10 (five user) Office 365 plan will grant 1 TB per user. Those looking for just basic storage will be able to secure 50 GB for $2/mo. Even the free tier is getting whittled down: it offers just 5 GB now, rather than the original 15 GB.

These are some dramatic changes. Here are how things stand between OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive now:

Microsoft was a trendsetter for offering 10 TB for $100/yr, but now it doesn’t offer that tier outside of business. Google meanwhile has retained that package. Arguably, Microsoft does still offer the most attractive $10/mo package, as that grants five users 1 TB each, and supplies them with a license for Office 365; Dropbox and Drive meanwhile offer just the storage option.

It’s unfortunate that Microsoft had to take these steps, and I still believe it should have simply throttled everyone down to 10 TB rather than punish the rest of the customer base, but alas. If you are using more than 1 TB of OneDrive storage right now, you will have one year to save the excess data elsewhere.