Microsoft Is Making Changes To Office 365, Removing Unlimited OneDrive Storage

Late last night, Microsoft announced that they would be changing up their offer for OneDrive for both Office 365 customers and free users. Prior to the announcement, if you subscribed to Office 365, you received unlimited OneDrive storage and free users received 15 GB of cloud space but that’s all going away.

For Office Home, Personal, and University users, you will no longer be offered unlimited storage. Instead, those subscriptions will include 1 TB of OneDrive storage. The company is also doing away with the 100 GB and 200 GB plans and instead will be offering a 50 GB plan for $1.99 a month.

For users of the free service, the announcement is especially bad as your storage will be cut from 15 GB to 5GB, this is for new and current users.

If you have any promotional storage that you received by turning on photo backup with iOS/Android, for example, that will not be going away.

If you have gone over the 1TB storage limit, Microsoft is letting you keep the additional storage for 12 months while you figure out how to deal with this issue. After the 12 months, your content will go into read-only mode for 6 months but what happens after that time period is unknown.

If you are a free user of OneDrive, you will have 90 days to make changes to your plan and after that time period, your content will become read-only for 9 months. After 1 year, your content may be deleted.

Microsoft’s reasoning for this is that they said a small number of users abuse the system and backed up entire movie and DVR collections. The highest end of these abusers were using 75TB of storage but what the company doesn’t explain is why they don’t target these individuals instead of letting a few bad apples ruin the entire bunch.

If the new terms don’t meet your needs, you can ask for a pro-rated refund; an updated FAQ for those who are impacted by this announcement has been posted.