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Cloud Data Storage Microsoft

OneDrive Delivers Unlimited Cloud Storage To Office 365 Subscribers 145

Posted by samzenpus from the bigger-cloud dept.
First time accepted submitter FlyHelicopters writes "Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others have been competing to become your favorite place to store stuff in the cloud. Just this past June, Microsoft upgraded Office 365 users from 25GB to 1TB, now they are upping the ante with unlimited OneDrive storage. There remains a single file size limit of 10GB per file, it is not clear if that limit will be removed with this upgrade.
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OneDrive Delivers Unlimited Cloud Storage To Office 365 Subscribers More

OneDrive Delivers Unlimited Cloud Storage To Office 365 Subscribers

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  • Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:19PM (#48246001) Homepage Journal

    when most of your subscribers have an upstream bandwidth of 1mbps or less, does it matter whether their storage limit is 1 TB or 100000 TB?

    • Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)

      by FlyHelicopters ( 1540845 ) on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:22PM (#48246037)

      While that is a fair point... Those speeds will increase over time.

      Just this month, Verizon FIOS upgraded our service with what they call "SpeedMatch":

      http://campaign.verizon.com/fa... [verizon.com]

      So if you have 35 megabits down, now you have 35 megabits up. 75 down, 75 up, etc...

      Granted, not everyone has FIOS, or can get it, but it may well provide pressure to others (Comcast we're looking at you) to match it.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • So if you have 35 megabits down, now you have 35 megabits up. 75 down, 75 up, etc...

        Granted, not everyone has FIOS, or can get it, but it may well provide pressure to others (Comcast we're looking at you) to match it.

        Cable's limitations on upstream bandwidth are architectural and not caused by their normal asshole business practices.

        Even the latest and greatest DOCSIS 3.0 hardware being rolled out to consumers is limited to bonding 4 upstream channels.
        Cisco's literature says it's capable of 120 Mbits upload, but that seems a little optimistic, and I don't know where they pulled 30 Mbit/channel from.

        In some markets, Comcast has pulled fiber to the home and offers 505/100 Mbit service, but the rest of their markets only h

        • the vast majority of home users don't require significant upload bandwidth

          You're quite right, even with cloud storage...

          The average home user may well take some videos and pictures on vacation or for a holiday, then end up with 50GB to upload... Once in awhile...

          Even if it took 3 or 4 days to upload, so what? Few people generate that often enough to matter, even a 5 megabit upload would be fine for most people.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

          The majority of home users would benefit greatly from a secure, off-site backup system. I'm hoping that as broadband speeds increase they become more common.

          Having said that, since bandwidth is infinite over time many people already have terabytes in their online backup accounts. I've got something like 80GB in mine, all fully encrypted of course.

    • Dropbox et al have built a business model on selling what MS and Google are now abundantly giving away for free. I'm sure they care quite a bit and it will be interesting to see how they respond in an effort to stay relevant.

      • The Dropbox client actually works and reliably syncs documents across devices. As somebody who has been struggling to get OneDrive to work properly for the year that I've had a ton of free storage (from the Surface Pro 2 promotion last winter), that is much more than Microsoft can offer.

      • I was thinking of that when I was typing it up...

        DropBox was our first "cloud" service, mostly because it came with our Galaxy III phones and included 50GB of "bonus" space with the phones. Boy, that was a lot at the time. :)

        We still have that space and keep some files there, but we moved on to Google Drive last year and then this past summer, to OneDrive when the 1TB offer came out.

        We were still on Office 2010 at the time and I was going to skip 2013, but for $100 a year, I get a complete copy of Office 2

    • If it supports rsync I'll care. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ron_ivi ( 607351 ) <sdotno@cheapcomp ... s.com minus poet> on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:42PM (#48246231)
      Anyone know of such a service that supports the rsync protocol (either over ssh or any other rsync-friendly transport). If so - bandwidth limitations don't suck so bad; since you'd be typically just streaming incremental changes.

      • Anyone know of such a service that supports the rsync protocol (either over ssh or any other rsync-friendly transport). If so - bandwidth limitations don't suck so bad; since you'd be typically just streaming incremental changes.

        Yea, Dropbox. Use the Linux client. I kinda feel like I am missing something here ..... There is also a third party Linux Google Drive client. That feels a little clunky to me but would probably do the trick.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

        Are you claiming that OneDrive isn't incremental? Or just assuming it isn't?

    • So it takes a while to upload all my data after initial setup. After that, for most users, they aren't going to be uploading massive amounts of data.

      So it takes a few days to upload my music collection, it will only take a couple minutes to upload new albums individually, and I'll be able to access it all from anywhere.

      • So it takes a few days to upload my music collection, it will only take a couple minutes to upload new albums individually, and I'll be able to access it all from anywhere.

        ^ This...

        I have to say, until you experience the joy of simply having all your files online for you any time, any where, on any device, you don't know what you're missing.

    • I used to hang out in a swedish photography/videography forum. Bandwidth is cheap in Sweden, so a lot of these guys were on 100+ Mbit connections and liked to keep a backup in the cloud. Whenever a new "unlimited" storage service came around they'd hop on and upload tens of terabytes of photos/videos. (None of wich could be de-duplicated, since it was all original work.)

      Inevitably, the storage service would update its TOS within a year, or go bankrupt.

      • Most of those "unlimited" services weren't Microsoft, or Google, or other such very large companies that can afford a hundred million dollars for a proper back end system.

        10TB of data used to be a lot. Today? Meh, single hard drives that size are about to come out, 10 USB flash drives can hold that these days.

        A Terabyte isn't what it used to be... Just wait until consumers get 4K video cameras... :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      when most of your subscribers have an upstream bandwidth of 1mbps or less, does it matter whether their storage limit is 1 TB or 100000 TB?

      Actually, I think a lot of customers aren't consumers, but companies. And I've seen reasonably big ones move to O365 as well. These could conceivably make good use of the added space.

      I don't think the average home or small business user would even fill up 1TB of space with all the documents they generate unless they distribute movies in PowerPoint or something.. On the p

  • Wow (Score:3)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:20PM (#48246019) Journal

    > now they are upping the ante with unlimited OneDrive storage.

    Think of the Pr0n! You could put the entire country's Pr0n in the cloud!

    But seriously, it'll be "unlimited" until disk space becomes an issue. Which is to say, it's unlimited until it isn't.

    • But seriously, it'll be "unlimited" until disk space becomes an issue. Which is to say, it's unlimited until it isn't.

      Fair point... Of course, with 8TB and 10TB drives starting to ship and larger tape solutions coming online, it is quite possible that the storage they can hold will continue to grow as fast, if not faster, than the demand.

      Will people upload tons right away? Sure... but I don't think it will keep up from the initial surge, after all, does the average user really produce that much original content?

      Home movies are probably the single largest source of "original content" and honestly the past 6 years of HD h

      • You're right, it's actually a policy thing more than a cost thing. Using white box like google and I think Yahoo, the price of storage is dirt cheap. (Compensate for reliability with some decent raid/backup scheme) No reason why they couldn't take advantage of that.

        But storage on the intranet remains miniscule and expensive. Try to get a partition big enough to build a reasonably sized virtual instance, and you'll get handed 20 Gbytes because "storage is expensive".

        And so, potential customers continue

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by unrtst ( 777550 )

          ...

          But storage on the intranet remains miniscule and expensive. Try to get a partition big enough to build a reasonably sized virtual instance, and you'll get handed 20 Gbytes because "storage is expensive".

          And so, potential customers continue to do their stuff on their own PC, because really, storage isn't that expensive.

          [bold by me]
          Is that really what you mean? Do you mean that when you ask your local IT for space, you get jack squat? IMO, that's their own (bad) decisions. They can easily do the same sort of thing the others are doing to provide loads of space. There's lots of ways to do it, but here's a really simple one: use a bunch of white box servers; max out their onboard SATA with largest disks you can get; stick glusterfs on them all and enable sufficient redundancy. In most cases, they'll probably still go with t

          • > Is that really what you mean? Do you mean that when you ask your local IT for space, you get jack squat?

            That would be hyperbole, but, essentially, yes. In a time when 4 terabyte drives can be had for less than $200, (wholesale, but any PC builder knows where to get them) trying to get larger than a 40 Gbyte share or virtual drive is like pulling teeth, and you pay a monthly price for the storage for which you could more than buy the storage outright every month. Now, mind you, a lot of this pays for

      • don't you think that Microsoft is not just doing a "store once, mark for all" system, where they note that the same large files are being backed up by 10,000 users. They store a single copy and just put a pointer to that copy for everyone.

        No, their actual storage hardware probably uses block-level deduplication.

    • Anyone willing to test the limits?
      Just upload 10 GB chunks of random data with a zip, rar, 7z, tar, whatever extensions.

      • Take daily full snapshots of your 3 TB system? You'd reach a petabyte in less than a year.

        • Take daily full snapshots of your 3 TB system? You'd reach a petabyte in less than a year.

          Nope. If they are using any reasonable de-dup algorithm, they will only be storing the diffs.

          • That's why you encrypt your backups, dedup won't work then.

            • :) Normal people aren't uploading anything that requires encryption.

              My family vacation pictures, my saved documents, etc... None of that is really worth caring about...

              If I encrypt before uploading, it becomes a big fat pain in the butt to use and might as well not bother, just thumb drive it.

              • And normal people aren't trying to test the limits of an unlimited servics

                • Yep, as it is, I'm using about 850GB of my OneDrive now. Do I have more to put there? Meh, maybe...

                  The important stuff is there, the full system backup is handled by proper backup services.

      • I vote we upload archive.org ;)

  • It's an easy marketing stratagy (Score:3)

    by Barlo_Mung_42 ( 411228 ) on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:28PM (#48246089) Homepage

    I'm using a tiny fraction of the 5Tb they already give me even though I put all my photo's, music, home video, documents, etc up there. So it's already basically unlimited.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by tompaulco ( 629533 )
      I'm only using 0 bytes, but now that they have increased the limit, I will be using 0 bytes.

  • NSA Indexing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by labnet ( 457441 ) on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:28PM (#48246093)

    What a gift to the NSA!

    • Re:NSA Indexing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Shaman ( 1148 ) <shaman@@@kos...net> on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:31PM (#48246127) Homepage

      This.

    • What t a gift to the NSA!

      Or not.

      Outlook.com and OneDrive have also been updated to use perfect forward security (PFS). In PFS, the keys used for each connection are randomly generated on a per-session basis. This is important because it protects against bulk data collection. Without PFS, if a law enforcement agency or hacker can demand or steal the long-term key used to secure connections, they can use that key to decrypt all historic, recorded sessions. PFS prevents this; compromising one session's key only enables decryption of that session.

      This will secure Web access, the OneDrive mobile clients, and the OneDrive desktop clients.

      Microsoft is also using certificates with 2048 bit keys on both the Outlook.com and OneDrive Web front-ends, another change planned last December.

      Microsoft expands the use of encryption on Outlook, OneDrive [arstechnica.com] [July 1, 2014]

    • What a gift to the NSA!

      Perhaps... But I'm not under the false allusion that the data being on my local hard drive is any safer from the NSA.

      If the NSA wanted to read my local hard drive, they could do so I'm sure. Either there is a back door in Windows, or they could somehow get something installed on my computer to put a back door in...

      Or, you know, since they are the government, when I'm not home, they could just break into my house and physically copy the hard drive. :) I'm sure they could do that without my noticing.

      Thankf

      • I'm completely harmless. I'm a married middle class worker who pays his taxes and has no interest in harming anyone.

        Same could be said of most of the Japanese-Americans whom the federal government put in concentration camps during WWII.

        Innocence and harmlessness are no protection when governments go bad.

        • While you are correct, none of the nerd ideas are going to help should that come to pass.

          Encrypting our OneDrives is not going to make a difference if my government decides to lock me up because I'm white (or black or any other color).

          It is focused on the wrong problem. Hiding from the NSA isn't likely to work. Not having a NSA or a government that does such things requires solutions and actions FAR beyond cloud storage.

          What was done to the Japanese was wrong. Then again so was slavery. What has been do

  • All cloud services story needs this in the headlin (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sandbagger ( 654585 ) on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:31PM (#48246137)

    OneDrive Delivers Unlimited Cloud Storage To Office 365 Subscribers...for now.

    Clouds evaporate, people.

    • Unlimited... "for now" Take bitcasa as an example. I bought the unlimited plan a few years ago and just renewed a month ago at $99 a year. They just sent an email that I have until around mid November to get all my data out by around mid November or the data will be deleted unless I subscribe to the new 10 TB plan for $99 a month. There is no chance I could afford that so I am forced to remove my data. Luckily I had most of it already local otherwise it would take a long time to download all of my dat

      • ...so I am forced to remove my data

        I don't understand this... you didn't have local copies of everything?

        While I have lots stored in the cloud, every single bit of it is local as well.

        We are a long way off from where I'd ever consider storing stuff ONLY in the cloud.

        • I believe he means that he simply took his data from bitcasa since they were going to delete it anyway, essentially, canceling his account before they did anything.

          I'm just hoping that he got his money back if they offered him a years of unlimited, but only gave him three months of it.

          • While you might be right, his words were:

            "Luckily I had most of it already local otherwise it would take a long time to download all of my data from the cloud."

            He said "most of it"... that is why I replied with my surprise and question...

        • That is correct. There are things that I deem not important but nice to have with an unlimited plan. Car DVR recordings (I never even look at them honestly), some movie backups (I can recreate them if i had to), full system backups (encrypted of course and financial stuff not stored in them) older than 2 years, etc. If the storage is unlimited I was just going to always store everything I have had.

    • If all stories came with that disclaimer then all stories would be burdened with a load of FUD.

      Computers become outdated and useless, hard drives crash, thumbdrives are lost, LTOs break, RAIDs die, etc etc. Everything is temporary, no single solution is reliable and should be solely relied on. The cloud is no better or worse.

      On the other hand TODAY while the cloud is still here OneDrive gives me a really nice service to consolidate my data across multiple machines. So why would I toss a great service to

  • It seems when it comes to mobile data, "unlimited" always means unlimited up to a point, when the service gets throttled unless you pay more. So "unlimited within the envelope of activity that we decide to allow". Even having no information about this particular offer, I would guess there is either a "reasonable use" clause hidden somewhere in terms of service, or somehow being able to throttle the service, e.g. by limiting upload bandwidth.

    "Unlimited" seems to be one of those words that are used mainly for

    • "unlimited" always means unlimited up to a point

      Well of course... I'm sure they have some terms and conditions that provide them some limits, and they always have the ultimate protection. If you're really a pain, they can offer you a refund and cancel your service. But that is always an option for any service provider, isn't it?

      I'm sure they have thought about that, a few people may well upload 5TB, or 10TB... But someone, somewhere, just to be a pain, will try uploading 500TB... They'll probably cut that user off at some point, or throttle them...

      L

    • Well, unlimited storage doesn't say anything about speed, just the volume.

      You may have unlimited parking in a garage, but that garage still has a speed limit, probably a couple stop sighs, and a speed bump or two.

  • So MS biz model = Olive Garden? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Monday October 27, 2014 @08:44PM (#48247113)
    It's back! Never Ending Data Bowls starting at $9.99!
  • I began to upgrade my O365 account to the Unlimited Preview but the App demanded access all my pics and addresses. Until I research this more, Microsoft can take an unconditional branch off a short pier. It seems a completely unnecessary privacy violation.
  • Do they claim to backup unlimited data volumes? I see a disaster coming.

  • Without privacy and/or enforcement of constitutional rights, the storage is worthless. As far as business goes, what happens if data or connectivity is lost during business hours? The potential for information being stolen by governments and private entities is just too great to use such storage services for anything important. Those public SANs are massive 'hack me please' and no-such-letter targets.

    If employees need 'unlimited' much storage to do their jobs, then a local san is the most economical optio

    • There's stuff I really don't care if the NSA or FBI reads. If I want to keep something secret from them, I should do my own encryption. (Actually, I should encrypt a few files and put them in my Dropbox folder, just to keep things confused.)

  • At a file size of 100 Mb, Word is barely usable (especially if you have Autosave on [1]). I still have nightmares about a job a couple years ago that involved such files.

    1: and the larger the file, the more likely you'll need it at some point.

  • How is this possible and still make $$$ off the service? I know that for the vast majority of their user base won't come close to using 1TB any time soon, so this is largely a symbolic move to generate interest in their products, however what about these scenarios: #1 I use it to store my company's encrypted backups.....forever, no more need to delete old ones to make room for new ones. If every sys admin did this...the would run into trouble pretty quick. Just make sure no single file goes above 10GB. #
  • Google recently announced they were switching their Google for Education members to unlimited storage as well. This seems like Microsoft trying to one-up Google to me.

  • It was my understanding that OneDrive had an arbitrary limit of 20,000 files. I wonder if this limit has been removed as well. Many organizations couldn't come close to hitting their storage quotas due to this limitation.

    http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/154/t/226245.aspx

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sh3p ( 1716756 )
      Just to clarify, it appears the limit is in the 'OneDrive for Business sync client", not OneDrive itself.

      • OneDrive for Business uses SharePoint as the storage backend. It's a puzzling choice, and seems to be responsible for most of its limitations and brokenness.

  • So i wonder what the real limit is?

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