Microsoft sees the world has moved on, cranks OneDrive file size upload limit from 15GB to more useful 100GB Microsoft is rolling out a swathe of updates to OneDrive, increasing the upload file limit for the cloudy bit barn from 15GB to 100GB. "Where can I find that file?" wrote Seth Patton, general manager for Microsoft 365, in the announcement – "five short words, which are the bane to anyone's productivity." We're pretty sure …
I have hundreds of thousands of files on OneDrive, filling over 800GB, so I guess yes. However, by coincidence*, I've spent a number of hours today trying to stop the bastard doing the "constant syncing but not actually doing anything" thing. This seems to happen arbitrarily once every few months, and I think I've sorted it this time, but it did involve several reboots to safe mode and lots of swearing. This is the one thing that I get really pissed off about with OneDrive. The rest of the time it seems to be at lest moderately stable.
(*or perhaps not, considering they just messed with it)
Well, MS explicitly say that I "remain the owner of the data", for all that's worth. But in any case, unlike some people, the cloud is only one of several places I keep my stuff... even if they prod/sell/eat my files, at least I have other backups (including off-site copies that are regularly rotated).
Yes, you can buy many terabytes of storage in HDD form for less than 100 pounds. You can buy large USB sticks for a few quid.
But, if you upload anything to Onedrive (or any cloud based system), it is immediately available anywhere in the world you happen to be, and any data you store in a cloud is already off-site (unless you have a privately hosted cloud in your house or office).
It's swings and roundabouts. While any data on a storage device you own (be it an HDD or solid state device, and whether it's internal or external) is inherently safer from hackers accessing it remotely, it is also more likely to be rendered unusable if something happens to the place where it is stored (such as a fire), and you would need to take it somewhere to access it elsewhere.
Any data stored in the cloud is already off site, so won't be affected if something happened to your house or office. It's also accessible from most of the internet, as long as you have a good connection.
The downside is that it is potentially susceptible to unauthorised access (the impact of which can be mitigated by encryption), and can be lost if your cloud provider shuts down for whatever reason.
As part of my job, I am making a lot of use of Onedrive, because any changes I make to the data stored on it are automatically available on my home PC, laptop, tablet, phone and any computers I use at work.
And yes, I do get 1TB of storage through work..
Meanwhile SETI is still searching the cosmos for signs of alien intelligence, I wonder if they are looking for files this size?
How long would it take to download a few 100Gb files from galactic societies halfway across the cosmos? Of course once we've download 100Gb locally from Alpha Centauri they will have to try and decode it... is it a database, a disk image, alien porno,or has an alien hacked their cloud and all we've done is pick up their download?
Oddly that's exactly what our newest staff member was asking when she was confronted by the legacy of her predecessor who almost got how the Microsoft filing landscape and permissions worked. Anyway the data she wanted was almost inevitably somewhere in SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Office application storage, her computer's hard drive. Even if she sometimes didn't have permissions to see it because someone had moved a folder whilst tidying up and all the permissions had reset...
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