Saturday, December 12, 2015

OneDrive now allows you to keep your free storage

Months ago, it was announced on the OneDrive blog that Microsoft were to do a couple of things concerning the storage of OneDrive. First, they were axing the "unlimited storage" option that came with Office 365. That has now been reduced to 1 TB max. However, the other major change made was the storage for free users. Users were to have their storage reduced to 5 GB, and the camera roll bonuses have been removed. However, there is now a way to not have these changes applied to your account.

In fact, the process is quite easy, obviously. All you have to do is click this link, and click the box to move forward with the process. You are not required to sign up for their newsletters, although personally I haven't seen newsletters very often come from them at all.

I'm really glad that OneDrive has added in this measure, honestly. There were actually a lot of previously "grandfathered" users of SkyDrive from back in the day where storage was 25 GB. When Microsoft reduced storage for free users to 15 GB, they allowed us to keep the extra 10 via an "enthusiast bonus", although personally I would have named it something better.

As always, I do think that it was sad to have consumers originally punished in the first place, due to the storage abuse caused by only a handful of people. I really think that Microsoft should have added something to their Office365 fine print to deal with folks who abuse the storage, but I guess that axing everything was much easier for them to do. Nonetheless, at least this ability to reserve your storage is here now.