Everyone’s been tweeting about it – the OneDrive Blog announcement that came out 11-2-2015 that states OneDrive storage will 
no longer be ‘unlimited’. Yes, once again the sins of the few greedy people who decided to use 75 Terabytes (about 14,000 times the usual space people use), have affected all of us.
OneDrive (consumer) New Limits
Now instead of unlimited, everyone’s OneDrive (consumer), will be capped at 5GB of space. Remember the 15GB bonus for activating automatic backup of your camera photos? Yes, that will be gone as well.
For we consumers using OneDrive, this will most likely have a big effect on those of us (I’m included in this group), who were grandfathered in with 15GB of OneDrive space from the way-back old days when everyone first got 15GB. I have several Microsoft accounts and was feeling pretty good that I thought I’d always have access to 45GB of storage if I ever needed it. This change will be rolled out in early 2016 and those of us with over 5GB of storage will have access to that for 12 months before it’s taken away.
For those of us who are Office 365 users, there are changes for us too. This is for Office 365 Home, Personal, or University users. Effective immediately, we will get 1TB of storage for each account.
There were 100 GB and 20 0GB storage plans available to consumers and they will no longer be offered. Instead, you will be offered a 50GB storage plan for $1.99/month beginning early 2016. If you currently have one of these subscriptions, you get to keep them – at least for now.
Check your Current Storage
If you’re wondering where you’re at with your account, right click on your white OneDrive cloud icon in your system tray and click ‘Manage Storage’. Then you’ll be prompted to sign into your account on-line and you’ll be taken to a page (mine is below), where your current storage information is located.
You’ll see I have a 10GB loyalty bonus (I’ve not read anything about this being taken away). My Home O365 subscription storage is included in this since it’s tied to this OneDrive account.
A quicker way to quickly see how much storage you’re using is to right-click on your OneDrive cloud icon and select “Settings”. Since I get a terabyte with my O365 Home account, I’ll be OK here.
Cloud Storage Wars
The give and take among all the cloud providers is ever changing. The results have been, overall, very beneficial to us as consumers. With all the various offerings, just about all of us should be able to backup all of our pictures, documents and yes, even some videos and movies that we’ve purchased. I’d imagine other cloud storage providers are looking at this and will/may adopt or modify their policies because of it.
So how will this affect you? Are you going to look for a new place to move your documents, etc.?