Microsoft announced yesterday that they plan to downgrade their various OneDrive storage offerings.
Office 365 Home, Personal and University customers are now limited to 1 TB of OneDrive storage instead of unlimited storage. The 100GB and 200GB OneDrive plans are discontinued. They will be replaced by a 50GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016. Free storage will be reduced from 15GB to 5GB for all free users. The camera roll bonus of 15GB will be discontinued.
Microsoft's reasoning for the OneDrive storage offering downgrades: "A small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:33PM
Which is why before placing your data on any cloud server, you encrypt it yourself before you upload it.
Never, ever, trust the providers promises that their encryption (if they have any to begin with) has your best interests in mind.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:50PM
... but also avoid 'services' that access your data. I seem to remember Microsoft's "Don't get Scroogled" campaign. Now they're sucking up personal information with Windows 10, looking at what's stored on OneDrive, etc. Nice.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:04PM
It might be hard to successfully sue them for looking at files, because their current privacy policy [microsoft.com] says
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @03:38AM
Well, who says that such privacy policies even matter in the eyes of the law?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:09PM
Clearly, you must be a pedo who is hiding all his pedo-things in OneDrive. What other reason could you have to make your data inaccessible to Microsoft and your friendly LEOs? Did I mention that the LEOs are your friend? THere is no reason not to trust them. They have your best interest at heart citizen!
Won't somebody think of the children? Pedo's do, they think of the children a lot!
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday November 04 2015, @06:03PM
You're preaching to the choir on this forum, but most people hear the word "encryption" and immediately think "wow -- totally safe." I don't what the solution is. Obviously it should start with more honesty in marketing but that's just a pipe dream.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:20PM
Which is why before placing your data on any cloud server, you encrypt it yourself before you upload it.
The problem with that is the convenience factor.
OneDrive is wired right into Windows 8 and later. It shows up in your directory tree as if it were a regular directory.
With other versions of windows you need to add a utility to map it in, but with 8 and 10 its just there.
Once you give up Drag and drop file management, in favor of any sort of non-automated encrypt-the-store you might as
well just not use it at all.
There was never a promise of encryption, there was only vague promises of not making it public. With exceptions for
law enforcement of course, and the unwary user can make the whole thing public with a couple of
errant clicks: http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/onedrive.aspx [microsoft.com]
Even worse, if you happen to be a clueless (aren't they all?) habitual Facebook user, You run into this: [microsoft.com]
When you share content to a social network like Facebook from a phone that you have synced with your OneDrive account, your content is either uploaded to that network or a link to that content is posted to that network. Content posted to social networks and hosted on OneDrive is accessible to anyone on that social network.
For a while I used OneDrive to store various user manuals in PDF form, all available on the net (somewhere), just for convenience.
I've since disabled it in every computer and device I own, and removed any apps. I can still get at it via the web interface, but I no longer have any reason to do that.
There are some third party projects that propose to use all the cloud storage offerings and meld them into one drive, with redundancy and encryption.
But I haven't kept up on any of these enough to know if they are going to survive or be banned.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.