Empty your free 30GB OneDrive space today – before Microsoft deletes your files for you Microsoft is cutting its free 15GB OneDrive cloud storage space down to 5GB, and eliminating the 15GB free camera roll for many users. Files will be deleted by Redmond until your account is under the free limit. Back in November, Microsoft announced it would no longer provide free unlimited storage for Office 365 users, …
Omg just delete these services from your life. These cloud services are just smoke, they are all liable to evaporate at a moment's notice.
I got a NAS and a hard drive and the Western Digital app and I have 10 TB of storage, and it costs me $0 per month. Microsoft and Google can both go suck it.
I hope you didn't get the NAS drive I got - where (using the drive's default firmware) I renamed a Samba share, thinking it would, naturally rename it. Instead it DELETED the original samba share & all it's contents, and then created a new one with the name I wanted it renamed to -_-
Thankfully I backed up, but still. Geez. I just use a sever of my own construction now.
"Instead it DELETED the original samba share & all it's contents"
1. "its", not "it's".
2. A Samba share is just that, a share. Its only a pointer to a file system, which you can create, rename, delete - without affecting the file system that its sharing. If your appliance deleted the file system as well, then its using some sort of braindead script which links the processes of managing the share with the separate processes of managing the file system - would be worth letting everyone know which brand this was, as its clearly crap.
I also use a home NAS for everything (actually x2 for redundancy and data security) but its definitely not for free. Let's see what this roughly equates:
Synology: £350x2 = £700
Drives (8x3T): £150*8 = £1200
Network cables: £15
Electricity: £1/month
Excluding the electricity bill this turns out to a total of: £1915
Assuming a 5 year write off gives a monthly cost of about £32
This is also assuming I value my own time for maintenance of the setup to £0
Over the 5 year lifetime it's probably fair to expect 1-2 drives to fail which gives another £5/month so all in all the cost (including electricity) is
£38/month
So not free - but safe and secure, no surprises and complete flexibility with a NAS that serves as for example git/svn server, mediacenter, timemachine backup, file-cloud, etc. etc. etc.
Just annoyed by anyone who says its for free to do things at home. It's not. But you do get a LOT of benefits if u have the know-how and time to do it.
So £38/month for around 12TB of protected storage (i.e. 400 times the original MS offer) assuming RAID-5 on each of your NAS and then they are mirrored somehow, and with gigabit access speeds and no dependency on foreign government policies.
Hmm, how much for the same size and speed from a cloud provider?
Google charges $0.02/GB so just taking the storage (never mind any bandwidth/download/upload limitations) into account this would be ~£190/month in just storage cost (for 12TB).
Over the original proposed 5 year write off this would be a total cost of £11,400 (which is about 6 times more than the original poster invested). The original poster was however a little bit on the conservative side on the monthly cost since he/she excluded his/hers own time and financial costs and had, in my opinion, too long write off time. A more realistic cost would probably be something like £50-60/month.
One additional big drawback, in addition to the higher cost, is that most people at home seldom has more than 60-90Mbps external bandwidth in practice so rolling your own Cloud solution with Gigabit network which is only limited by the NAS and drive performance is better on all account.
@rejkelie
Talk about over-provisioning. This isn't work.(read: enterprise SLAs and large storage trays).
Buy yourself a couple of internal 1TB drives, or larger if needed. $50 to $100 depending on what you get. Remember high performance is not needed here.
Set them up on two PCs as SMB3 shares. Copy your bits from your phone to one, mirror to the other.
Done.
Unless you are playing with JOBDs for shits and giggles, its just a waste of effort and money. And time.
I have 11TB of raidz drive built from an obsolete server and drives running freenas which I only use for backup so it is turned off most of the time.
I suppose the bits on ebay might fetch a couple of hundred quid but apart from that it is close to $0/month.
I also have a little 2 drive zyxel NAS box which cost about £65. An obsolete part 2TB drive and a 4TB drive cost about £84. Mains electricity cost is about £12 a year so I can leave it and the various servers it runs online.
Its not off site though is it ... so if you're burgled or you have a fire in your house, your data is gone.
Even if you have a local storage appliance, CrashPlan and its ilk are woth looking at for long term backups, which are dedicated backup solutions unlike OneFail which only exists to hook customers for Micro$oft... The fees for many of these services are quite low and I think are worth the peace of mind.
> I'm an untrusting sod.
Or just sensible.
I read recently of an author who suddenly found that Google had deleted his Blogger account which had been running since 2002 for "terms of service violation" and removed his gmail account too.
Hopefully he had back-up copies of all his work, but it wasn't just the work, it was a network which he used to communicate with followers and other artists.
Things like this are why you should NEVER trust Cloud services, because they're entirely at the mercy of someone else's whims :-(
See http://artforum.com/news/id=62177
Vendor A Marketing : Cloud is good, put all your stuff here for free, let us make it 100% reliable etc etc..
Vendor B-Z Marketing : Me too ... mine is bigger than yours.and ours is looked after by little pixies that you can't see, they work 7x24x365
People listen and get taken in..Hey, its free, it must be OK, right ??
Then a few vendors go bust and your data vaporises
Then a few vendors get things wrong and accidentally delete your data.
Then a few try to move you to a subscription model.
Then a few cut the freebie level to half a dozen bytes on every other Tuesday.
So, where does that leave cloud - Monthly subscription and the risk that tomorrow its gone ?
No thanks - stick your clouds ! I've got spinning rust and its my fault if I don't manage it and its off-line / off-site backups properly.
I'm not buying any subscription models for anything - "money and old rope" and "cheap = nasty" seem to keep coming to mind.
Most of the cost is micro-management. In behalf of STABILITY -user side, never should be pricing decided on averages, but on well pondered ranges.
"Redmond said one OneDriver had 75TB of files stored in its cloud, although said that this was "14,000 times the average," meaning most users were more sensible".
Instead of calling Their CUSTOMERS 'abusers' of the ecosystem, a Company like MS is able to offer an unsurmountable competitive price to Him/Her.
A Customer who was offered, and accepted a certain price, should be offered another two equal terms, at equal prices. That's STABILITY.
Once those two terms have passed. Those loyal Customers should be offered a gradual increase in tariffs over another two equal periods.
A total of four preferential periods, over new Customers.
@MotionCompensation
I agree that MS are world class but they do have competition. In the UK , one of the second tier ISPs, PlusNet, has announced that it is going to raise prices and improve their FTTC service by cutting upload speeds by 50%.
Microsoft reneges on its OneDrive capacity, PlusNet reneges on its upload speeds. Maybe it is common in ICT to be like this.
The lessons: never commit to only one provider. Never put all your eggs in one basket. Always be able to walk away. Keep local back-ups; storage is cheap.
MotionCompensation writes "What's next? Wipe Windows 7 machines?"
They don't need any such fucking stupid ideas from you, sunshine. I'm quite sure they have entire departments coming up with the things for themselves.
I had enough trouble getting some older software to work on Windows 7. They'll have to pry this version of their operating system out of me with their cold, dead, decaying hands. Unless I find alternatives that run on non-Microsoft, non-Apple products, in which case I'll be gone faster than you can say "Brexit".
Decent Security has a workaround for Windows 7 clean install issues: https://decentsecurity.com/enterprise/#/windows-7-fast-update/.
This is more of an enterprise solution, as the author says the solution is "unwieldy" but it might get you past the known issues of trying to use the unpatched Windows updater.
I've done a few Win 10 > Win 7 rollbacks for people who "were sure they had clicked the red close button on that popup banner thing" and ended up with a new or broken OS. Done at least 12 in the last year plus multiple VMs built from scratch takes it to well over 40 clean Win 7 Builds.
Each and every one of them just sits there checking for updates. It will get there after about 18 hours [tested once :-) ] but it sure feels like MS have done it deliberately. While testing I couldn't think of a valid reason why the same VM should take 2 hours to find updates, then restore a snapshot and it does it in 5 minutes, then restore again and it takes 6 hours, etc etc.
Anyway, I found WSUS Offline to be much faster and more reliable than anything MS have offered to date, even if used only to get over that first hurdle and then let Windows take over again.
A lot of us have been saying this. Then again, a lot of us have been around the block so to speak, a few times. "Cloud" is just PR hype/speak. People believed in Zing a long time ago for photo storage... gone. Since then there's been a lot more go belly up. When will people learn? Maybe we need something Darwinish to happen to those who believe the BS about the cloud? Like maybe getting horned by a Unicorn or something.
Currently moving all my files over to Google. Google Drive still offers at least 15GB free. There's even an automatic conversion app called Syncdocs which automates the Microsoft to Google migration.
Longer term, probably just gonna buy a big USB drive. Cloud storage is only two steps away from being Ransomware: 'Pay up or your data is gone'.
It does - this is the "free" OneDrive storage that comes with a free MS email account. If you've got Office 365 you get 1TB storage on OneDrive.
And if you saw the link, signed up and protested the change last year when it was mooted, you got offered Office 365 free for a year (complete with the 1TB storage). <smug> Which I did. </smug>
During that free year, I'll be pulling my data down onto my NAS, naturally. I'm not actually going to *pay* for cloud storage.
Could have waited until this year and indeed at least as recently as last week though my friend. Same offer being provided, and the storage allowances have remained as they were until now, so your free year would only just be starting. Which would be more smug.
The smuggest people don't use Office 365 to start with.
It is a corporate problem.
Some high ranking member , speaks to a "new hire" who just wants some new shit on his CV for the next position they move too.
Thinks the 'old timers ' are past it and not uptodate with technology, and shit like this keeps happening.
I'm all for hot shit that can help running a business, but where does the risk analysis begin?
Clearly with the new hire who just pays lip service.
What happens to all these 'services' when governments change or companies go bust?
Actually I give them the same trust that I give Microsoft and even more than I pus on Google but it's 50GB vs 15GB and a cleaner sync client that doens't go deep you throat analyzing your content and offering brainded proto-applications (Google Docs) to view or edit. So I'm with Mega but only for convenient short time/ephemeral storage or transfer.
I only have 1 TB of data, not much I know but some of it started out on an MFM drive 25 years ago and made it this far; it's all I felt I needed to keep along the way.
Only around 40GB of it is what I would consider important.
Out of that, only around 500MB it really, really important.
The rest is stuff like films and music that I would be disappointed to lose but not the end of the world.
So, I have a 2TB drive in my desktop, which is mirrored to my laptop drive, for convenience more than anything. The same data is mirrored to our server.
The important stuff is stored in a Veracrypt volume which goes to Mega - the VC volume is unmounted by a script and split into 50 MB files which means 9 times out of 10 only one or two files need to be re-uploaded after a change.
The really important stuff gets encrypted, split to 50 MB files and stored in Dropbox as well as Mega.
That may or may not be your cup of tea, and I'm sure someone will see a problem with my way of doing it, but my point is that one cloud vs. another, or HDDs vs, Blu-Ray vs. punched card is pointless. I believe distributed storage is the only way.
Some years ago a mate in IT responded to my loss of data with a "[Preach mode on] Always keep a backup...blah blah blah [Preach mode off]" speech which stands the test of time. It really could not be simpler. Cloud is another form of backup for which purpose it has a number of advantages. Disadvantages? Sure, but nuffink's perfeck. Problem is average user does not know,, does not think, is not told and will not set up a home NAS even if he knows he should - Now there's a thought to save the drive manufacturers if every home comes with running water and NAS. Won't happen.
Stop right there : Cloud is not backup.
Not when the providers can authorize themselves to delete your files without your permission.
A backup is supposed to be reliable : the Cloud is not. At this point in time, there is not a single cloud storage provider that can be trusted to not lose your files, delete your files or not hand your files to any TLA that mentions your name in passing.
Yes, the Cloud could be a perfect backup service, but relying on it today is just putting your data on a straw rowboat and hoping it won't sink before you need it.
"The changes in OneDrive were necessary, Microsoft claimed, because a few bad apples were abusing the system and storing vast amounts of data in their cloud. "
It it is "a few bad apples" that are causing the issue, punish them. What this suggests, M$, is that you really didn't scope out the cost/value of your offering before you offered it. If I am paying for a certain amount I should be entitled to continue paying for that amount at the "contracted" rate. If I am a new customer I get the offerings available when I start my service.
"I should be entitled to continue paying for that amount at the "contracted" rate"
Yes, you should, but you don't actually have a "contract". What you have is Ts & Cs that can be changed anytime by the provider, in other words, you've got an empty promise.
A contract is a binding agreement between two parties, agreement that cannot be changed without the consent of both parties. It was decided, somewhere at the beginning of the IT industry, that this model did not correspond to the Internet, and now here we are : companies are all-powerful, can change offers at a whim, and the only thing you can do is lose and go somewhere else if you don't accept the new terms.
One of these days, Joe Public is going to have to wake up and realize that he's being taken for a fool. That day, somebody might think of doing away with the EULA nonsense and Ts & Cs that only the paying customer cannot change. That day, the law will once again enforce the proper idea of "contract".
In the mean time, bend over and try to enjoy it, because that's the choice we have.
' If I am paying for a certain amount I should be entitled to continue paying for that amount at the "contracted" rate.'
A couple of problems with that. First, if it's free then you're not paying and it's doubtful whether there's a contract at all. Secondly, remember the old saying: if it's free it's worth every penny you paid for it.
Windows 10 seems particularly badly affected:
http://www.deltics.co.nz/blog/posts/2449
(Full disclosure: That's a post on my own blog, but easier to link to it than to re-produce the details here).
Bottom line: Windows 10 + OneDrive = recipe for deleted files, no matter how much storage you are officially signed up for/entitled to.
As Sorry that handle is already taken says, that's utterly ridiculous.
However, my guess (bearing in mind I only read it very quickly) is that the sync from Windows 10 is doing exactly what it thinks it should. It's not that it's deleting difficult files, but a case of it "synchronising" the remote storage with the local storage: Making sure the remote location contains the same files by deleting those that aren't local. i.e. the perfect example of a SNAFU.
I might try the Windows 10 method* of deleting OneDrive files.
I delete them manually from OneDrive but then find the WinPhone has put them back. I then delete them from the WinPhone and find OneDrive has put them back. I don't use either enough to worry about this but it's a bit of an 'oh no, not again' moment when deleted picture come back from the dead.
*Actually I can't. My old MSI motherboard desktop has a Creative Audigy card in it and between them they crash the Win10 install process. (A really nasty HDD sector ruining crash. Well that's who I'm blaming for the outbreak of bad sectors.)
I use Dropbox myself, mainly because it integrates with my Android phone, my Linux computers and my Windows computers. I have 50GB of space available for free, of which, I have used about 2GB.
What do I use it for? --> It's real handy when I need to copy a file from one computer to another. I have some music on there as well, that I can share amongst my computer.
Do I store important files on there --> Hell no, I have an external drive that I use for keeping important files and doing backups to.
Would I be upset if Dropbox were to suddenly disappear? --> No, I do not keep anything of important on there, and what is there, is also saved elsewhere.
To keep it on the topic of OneDrive, the OneDrive main page says it connects all your devices, but then does not give any info on how to integrate it into a Linux system.
75tb / 14000 is just over 5gigs avg.
bullshit it was problem users... they just needed to find the amount most people would need/use and then give away slightly less.
i'm one of the few that clicked to keep my 15gig... not that it really matters, i'm moving away from my M$ ecosystem.
I feel bad about this. I bought a Lumia 1020 and part of the deal was 30gb of camera roll space on OneDrive (SkyDrive at the time). We concluded that deal years ago and now here you are cutting my storage. I feel like you came round my house and ripped out the memory from my phone. I hope you enjoy the 25gb you got off me. And yeah I backed up, but OneDrive use is closely integrated into the 1020 to the point I can't remove the app. And last time I looked, the page advertising the 1020 still said it comes with 30gb of OneDrive storage.
part of the deal was 30gb of camera roll space on OneDrive
Probably too late now but you could apply to keep a certain amount of space that was being reclaimed (can't recall the details), but I'm keeping 25GBs plus photo roll (I think). Maybe look into it.
As for a 'few bad apples', absolute tosh, don't offer unlimited storage space, it's obvious some people are going to abuse the offer, it's fucking human nature! 15GB free storage space is astoundingly generous anyway and I doubt anyone would complain if that was bundled with O365.
True, but to the general population without the cynical, untrusting, megamind el-reg commentard experience of real world this is a real problem.
Most people I speak to really have no idea where their data/cat pictures/inappropriate selfies or in the case of office365 the important letters from school/lawyer/employer etc are stored and are surprised that they have nothing left when they upgrade their phone or PC, let alone what gets to someone's cloud storage.
Also setting up a home NAS with Wi-Fi auto sync is not always straightforward for these people to set up.
Cloud is just vapour and that's where the important stuff stays nowadays, and even paid ones can be just as bad...
Old school methods still work but they need knowledge people don't have and younger people are encouraged to ignore by tech pushers...
A promise is a promise. That fact that the price was zero does not change the fact that people were promised something, got used to using it in the given parameters, and now are being deprived of the usage they were promised.
Boiling it down to a "free" thingy change is you missing the point.
There is free, as in free beer, and free as in bundled in at no extra charge.
When I bought my big telly, it came with a free extended warranty. It was one the of the reasons I bought that particular model of TV from a particular dealer. If, after say six months, the dealer came back and told me that the free extended warranty was not going to be honoured and I should just suck it up and stop whinging because it was free, then I think I would have a legitimate complaint. I wouldn't have bought that telly in the first place.
The only good thing is that people are learning the value of Mircosoft's promises. As my transatlantic friends would say, " that, and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee."
I attended an Executive Committee meeting a few years ago and certain chaps were getting excited about The Cloud and how it was going to save us £gazillions and was like, totally cool, man. I asked someone to offer a description of what he cloud was. Stalling. I was asked for mine. I replied "someone else's servers" and the Risk and Compliance got all silent and sniffy and we retained our well-run, beautifully managed racks etc. because they were, in fact, cheap and secure. This was an investment bank.
I use OwnCloud precisely because I don’t trust any of the others to (a) keep my data intact, (b) keep my data secure and (c) keep their promises.
I know that involves running a (Linux) server at my home office, but that is a lot less of a headache than losing your data or being beholden to a third party who keeps changing the rules.
That is just what I have done. I chose Plusnet as my ISP for FTTC because they gave me good upload speed (20Mbit/s upload and 40Mbit/s download) which made fast bothway data transfer feasible. Now Plusnet are "improving" my service by halving my upload speed.
The lesson for me is that if you don't get shafted by your Cloud provider, then it'll be your network provider that does it. Either way you get shafted.
Glad I don't keep all my eggs in one basket. I am an Office 365 subscriber with a Tb of OneDrive storage but, after losing some old and irreplaceable photos a couple of years ago, I am paranoid about storage now.
So I use my 1 Tb OneDrive but I also use my 1Tb of Amazon cloud storage and 1Tb of Dropbox storage to hold duplicates of photos and documents. Just for safety I also keep a 1Tb external HDD with me which also has a duplicate of this data.
If all that fails then I figure I've bigger things to worry about than a few lost photos.
I have photos of my ancestors, taken in the very early years of the 20th century. Looking at them, some faded and dog eared but entirely usable, I have wondered what will happen to family shots taken today. Stored not in shoeboxes or albums but on hard drives, optical discs and USB sticks which will surely fail or become incompatible with future hardware.
Now we have the cloud and our heritage may be in the hands of greedy idiot philistines like Microsoft -- either to be deleted at will or held for ransom.
> I have wondered what will happen to family shots taken today. Stored not in shoeboxes or albums but on hard drives, optical discs and USB sticks which will surely fail or become incompatible with future hardware.
Select the best ones, print them out, and put them in an album. I don't even bother with owning a photo quality printer: it's easier to use a local print shop. You can then write names, places and dates on the back so that future viewers will have some context as well.
Another good thing about using a professional print shop is that it's more likely the photos won't fade too badly. Modern domestic photoprinters may be better, but qutie a few of my older (3-5 years) home-printed photos are looking a bit rubbish compared to 20-year-old film-based snaps.
There is a book about that. You know the things they make from dead wood. When We Are No More, How digital memory is shaping our future by Abby Smith Rumsey.
OneDrive went downhill the time M$ killed the smart files functionality on win10. I still have the 30GB (signed that petition) but don't give a f* about them, moved my files (mainly e-books, plus some personal files ENCRYPTED with encFS) to google drive, at least I can access the google drive even under *BSD or linux via grive.
I decided to look around last year when One Drive announced that they were going to reduce the amount of free storage they were giving away. Ever since Dropbox reduced their amount and then One Drive, I've a sneaking suspicion Google Drive will probably follow next. So I've looked around for alternative solutions and I found myOrb.com which is excellent. It does a lot more than just storage too, so I suggest having a look into it..
...no one gives a sh*t about my past correspondence or files. Except for photos, 99.99% of all digital data at home and at work created/received since 1982 are stored permanently at very low cost. In the trash. Have I EVER wished I hadn't trashed a file? No.
No longer using Hotmail (before it was rebranded to Outlook).
Cloud storage: Google takes care of my needs on an Android phone, and even so I don't use it except in very rare situations e.g. where I need to quickly transfer some photos over to another device.
Skype/MSN/instant messaging/video calls: Better alternatives exist.
Bing: don't like it. Google is still a better search engine, though recently there's a bit more censorship. DuckDuckGo is a competent backup search engine.
Internet Explorer/Edge: Can't remember the last time I've used a Microsoft browser. Not missing anything.
Of course, Microsoft is cash-rich and still has its merits (DirectX). And it is still in a better state than the shipwreck known as Yahoo (when is Marissa going to be sacked?).
"Redmond said one OneDriver had 75TB of files stored in its cloud"
They should give this guy a crown and put him on a throne because obviously he's the new king of porn.
Then burn the crown and throne to ashes because, uhh, that guy was touching them and now they are all sticky.
Is there actually 75 TB of porn in the world, he said, innocently...
On a semi-serious note, if there were 75 TB of porn on someone's OneDrive, I've got a number of questions:
1 how long did it take to accumulate all that?
2 has the owner actually even looked at it all, even once per pic/vid/whatever?
3 if the owner has looked at it all, how long did it take?
4 Really? Someone put 75 TB of pretty much anything onto Microsoft's servers, and Microsoft didn't lose or corrupt it? Microsoft actually wants me to believe that this really happened? Really? Pull the other one, this one's got bells on. In my experience, anything left too long on OneDrive (where 'too long' is somewhere between six months and a year) tends to either vanish silently or to be unusable. Which is one reason why I don't leave data on OneDrive. Porn girls are more likely to be able to learn to act than Microsoft is able to learn to be reliable.
For the record, I currently have something under 100 MB on OneDrive, mostly DOCX and PDF files. And all of it just for use in transferring files from one machine to another. I don't leave data on Microsoft's servers. See #4 above for why.
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