Good news: Microsoft is doubling your OneDrive storage for more than double your money Microsoft has finally begun rolling out the updates it promised OneDrive users back in June in the form of the Personal Vault and desperately needed additional storage. The company trumpeted the imminent arrival of extra capacity earlier in the summer, finally responding to years of user pleading for a little more space by …
Cost around £40 and last for years. Get a second for backups. Unless you have a desperate need to access all your files on the move, why would anyone put their files in the hands of a third party for more money, less security and your data stored at the policy whims of the vendor? If your files are sensitive then use a USB drive with VeraCrypt whole drive encryption.
Ah but if you buy a shedload of TB drives, you're paying for empty bytes to just sit there unused whilst with Microsoft's offering you're.... ah. Scratch that thought. You're paying for empty space that they can sell to someone else.
Hands up if you reckon they could provision the full 2TB for every subscriber if they all demanded it simultaneously,
The answer is fairly simple, the vast majority of users will go nowhere near the 1TB limit, so they're subsidising the more hungry users, the people who pay the extra £9.99 a month are likely to use the whole Terabyte eventually, so are carrying the full cost.
We have around 1,100 One Drive users at work, on average they're using 100GB of space, and 700 of those users are students who pack their folders with all kinds of crap we'd rather not know is there...
the vast majority of users will go nowhere near the 1TB limit, so they're subsidising the more hungry users,
My ISP in 1997 gave everyone 800MB (yes, not a typo) of downloads each month. It turned out that the average usage of the clientbase was a mere 168MB per month. (I did manage to gobble 530+MB in 3 days once by setting the alarm to wake me every 4 hours to go and dial back in after the auto deconnection) I suspect Lazlo Woodbine is correct in their assumption about the hungry users being subsidised by the light feeders.
Sync your files between your PC, Laptop, Phone, Tablet. Windows, Linux and Android (not sure about Mac/iThing) with no cloudy middleman apart from the internets themselves.
And if you don't trust the projects public discovery servers that helps your devices find each other across the internet you can run your own if you open the right ports on your router.
Only limit on storage is the smallest device you have...
My Seagate 4TB external drive was very affordable and is the size of a pack of cigarettes. For data on the go I have 128GB available on my phone. What I should really do is cycle backups between multiple external drives with one of them always off-site. I'm long in the tooth and wrote code to handle such grandfather, father, son scripts back in the mid 1970's for mainframes. The first working version was written as an exploratory prototype followed by a comprehensive flowchart. The clean production version was written from that using standard naming conventions for objects (but we didn't call them that back then).
Good practices tend not to die out.
For that reason I have a fire safe which should withstand an hour's fire. If my house burns down I doubt that my photos will be my major concern.
I've just ordered a WD 12TB drive to back up my Seagate 1, 3, 5 and 8TB drives, each daisy-chained from my 500GB laptop SSD via Synchredible to the next. I reckon that so many copies constitute a reasonable backup strategy, no? And they're mine, all mine. No monthly payments, 60MB/s retrieval when I need it rather than a tenth of that rate on a good day. And I have no intention of cancelling my WD contract with myself, so my data will be available for as long as the drives work, not for as long as MS/Google/AWS decide that they think I'm a good enough (read "money") customer.
No-brainer, innit?
(Oh, and of course I have my "essential" files backed up for external access on Dropbox/Drive/Onedrive - but if they fold, so what...?)
If my house burns down I doubt that my photos will be my major concern
After ensuring the health and safety of anyone present, photos would absolutely be my next concern. Houses can be rebuilt, electronics can be re-purchased, clothes can be bought. That one and only photo of great-grandpa Phil that's in a frame on the piano and which you scanned a couple of years ago? Lose the piano, lose the HDD on which the scan resides, lose the photo forever.
Backup, backup and backup again. Advice which many here are taking, but which is sadly lacking in my case. Oh yes, I have backups, but I have not yet got around to taking a set offsite (properly).
M.
Agreed; my docs and photo's are stored on my server, backed up to rotated USB drives, and then synchronised via Onedrive between my PC and my server (I don't have my gaming PC setup on my domain). That Onedrive account is synchronised back down to a Synolgy NAS that synchronises those same docs and photo's back up to a "Box" a "Google Drive" and a "Mega" account (all free). The NAS is running RAID 5 that is also backed up to two external USB drives that are rotated monthly with the offline drive kept in my works firesafe. Photo's have an addition backup in that they are also synchronised back to a different location, to the docs and photo's, via Plex Camera Sync system.
Paranoid, me? Never...
Mmm.. the more you take, the more it costs:
"In June, Microsoft reckoned that the additional cloudy storage would be available in 200GB increments, with the first costing $1.99 per month, going up to $9.99 per month for the full additional 1 TB."
5 x 1.99 = 9.95
Or are chunks 2, 3, 4 and 5 more than 1.99?
I don't see the hate for cloudy storage...
I rotate between about 7 different devices depending on my need, all my documents and photos are stored on onedrive - on each device default save locations are onedrive with files locally synced for hot folders and files on demand for cold folders... it works... no matter which device I grab I have all my data at my fingertips... I dont have to worry about getting drives out of a safe, syncing them with what I hope is the most upto date machine im using - I used to run owncloud, but without colocating anther machine im back to a single point of failure... coupled with my upload speed which is significantly lower than what microsoft offer!
I have an offline cache for all my data - which I transferred to another machine the other day and that came down at line speed, yes it took a while, but thats what going to bed is for!
I suppose there is the chance that microsoft will just fold one day and all my data will disappear... but I abandoned a box of physical photos at an ex's many years back - they are long gone, its an arse, but not the end of the world!
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