back to article 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, …

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  1. Grunchy Silver badge

    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      In 1999 I signed up for Bigfoot.com which was advertised as "Free email forwarding for life".

      And guess what...

      1. muddysteve

        The trouble is that, when these people say "for life", they mean the life of the offer, not your life.

    2. Lee D Silver badge

      Or OwnCloud.

      At least you own your OwnCloud. And you can mirror it between your home intranet, your outside VPS or even a handful of EC instances or whatever.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Google don't delete your files, they just stopping you adding more, once you are over limit, or your limit drops (like a subscription ends).

      Big difference.

      1. Tommy Pock

        "Google don't delete your files"

        No, but it won't be long before they start embedding adverts in them

        1. Alumoi Silver badge
          Facepalm

          Re: "Google don't delete your files"

          Google? Shoveling ads in your face? Naaaah, it couldn't be.

    4. Potemkine Silver badge

      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 mont

      I doubt it, unless you got your NAs and your HDs for free and produce your own electricity!

    5. JohnLBergqvist

      Re: NAS Drives

      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.

      1. Code For Broke

        Re: NAS Drives

        @JohnLBergqvist: do you mean the default firmware or the software did this mischief? Forgive me for sounding judge, but what you describe sounds more like the result of an errant operator of a disk operating system.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: NAS Drives

        "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.

        1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

          Re: 1. "its", not "it's". 2. Its only a pointer

          Oh dear, oh dear. Please try to be consistent, at least.

    6. rejkelie

      Not quite $0 per month ...

      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.

      1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

        Re: Not quite $0 per month ...

        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?

        1. johan162

          Re: Not quite $0 per month ...

          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.

        2. Adam McCormack

          Re: Not quite $0 per month ...

          I'm £50/year for 4TB on up to 10 machines;

      2. ben kendim

        Re: Not quite $0 per month ...

        The cost of electricity is for access, not for storage. The drive would happily keep storing the data even if powered off.

      3. John 104

        Re: Not quite $0 per month ...

        @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.

      4. inmypjs Silver badge

        Re: Not quite $0 per month ...

        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.

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "These cloud services are just smoke, they are all liable to evaporate at a moment's notice.

      I got a NAS"

      ... a NAS is great, until your house burns done then it disappears in a cloud of smoke!

      1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

        Dual Servers

        Which is why the example posted above uses TWO NAS Devices.

        I have this sort of thing already setup. One NAS is in my Garage. The second is in my 'Man Cave' (Aka Garden Shed) that is 120 ft away. Both are powered by PV cells.

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      NAS and a hard drive

      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.

      1. Updraft102

        Re: NAS and a hard drive

        Unfortunately for some of us, though, it would take about two months at full utilization of my upstream bandwidth to get one backup done-- and by the time it finished, it would be two months out of date.

    9. Pookietoo
      FAIL

      Re: it costs me $0 per month

      Except when you average the purchase cost over the life of the drive ...

  2. Youngone Silver badge

    @ Grunchy

    This is the correct answer.

    The only data you own is the data stored on your own discs.

    But then I'm an untrusting sod.

    1. Graham Marsden
      Unhappy

      Re: @ Grunchy

      > 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

  3. Dwarf

    Trust the cloud

    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.

    1. energystar
      Childcatcher

      Re: Trust the cloud

      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.

      1. energystar
        Boffin

        Re: Trust the cloud

        Commenting to MS: IF serious about 'Cloud' THEN should be heavily injecting money to 3D and optical tape storage.

        Just imagining a two meter wide optical tape, and an optical scanner this size. Just 32-64m long the tape, not to make stressful the winding.

      2. energystar
        Childcatcher

        Re: Trust the cloud

        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.

    2. energystar
      Childcatcher

      Re: Trust the cloud

      Archival should be priced lot down from 'on line'. The offerings should contain both. The User should expect orders of magnitude more latency for putting Archival onto 'on line' buffers.

  4. MotionCompensation

    Never before in modern history has a company tried as hard as Microsoft is trying now to alienate its customers. I guess Windows 10 was not enough. What's next? Wipe Windows 7 machines?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Trying hard to annoy users

      @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.

      1. Code For Broke

        Re: Trying hard to annoy users

        Oh, oh, we have one of those ISPs here in the States too. Except ours, naturally, is the top shelf provider. Verizon offers terribly attractive loss leader pricing, but then wallops the customer with unannounced price increases brought every 9 months.

      2. Graham Marsden
        Facepalm

        @EastFinchleyite - Re: Trying hard to annoy users

        > PlusNet, has announced that it is going to raise prices and improve their FTTC service by cutting upload speeds by 50%.

        And Big Brother has increased the chocolate ration to 20 grams...

    2. raving angry loony

      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".

      1. BobChip
        Linux

        Unless I find alternatives..

        Follow the penguin. It just works.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      They have already sabotaged windows 7 machines by deliberately messing up windows update.

      Try installing a clean copy and letting it download all the updates. It wont complete. Reproduced 4 times on different machines.

      I think they want me to take windows 10 as the fix.

      1. spellucci

        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.

      2. shade82000

        WSUS Offline

        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.

      3. energystar
        Boffin

        You just need the latest Service Pack and a 'roll up' of updates, already packed, search ElReg about details.

    4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "Never before in modern history has a company tried as hard as Microsoft is trying now to alienate its customers."

      I'm not sure about that. It's a race to the bottom and there's plenty of room there.

    5. oldcoder

      Didn't Microsoft already start doing that? Forced replacements with Windows 10?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cloud...blah, blah...someone else's computer....rant, froth...subject to someone else's whim...drone. Etc.

    Told you so.

    1. Mark 85

      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.

      1. nematoad
        Headmaster

        Um...

        "Maybe we need something Darwinish ..."

        Nitpicking I know but the accepted word is "Darwinian"

  6. Magani
    WTF?

    People actually use this stuff?

    Who'd have thought? Amazing!

  7. TReko
    Flame

    Ransomware

    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'.

    1. Badger Murphy

      Re: Ransomware

      Out of the frying pan, into the fire, eh?

      1. VinceH
        Coat

        Re: Ransomware

        Hence his choice of icon, I presume! ;)

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