Tell me if you have heard this one before, “I need more than one terabyte of cloud storage”? It’s not a crazy idea that you have a lot of data and want to back it up to cloud but Microsoft is leaving money on the table with OneDrive.
More than leaving money on the table, they are leaving an open door for competitors to come in and take away users from the platform. And this is a problem as I have reached my OneDrive storage limit and will be forced to move my data elsewhere.
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There are a couple problems here which, on the outside, seem incredibly simple to fix. Right now, I have an Office 365 Home subscription as well as a work Office 365 subscription but my personal drive is limited to the one terabyte ceiling. Currently, I have about 900 gigabytes of photos and videos and a bunch of other content that I need for podcasting which puts me at the limit of what OneDrive will support; so what do I do now?
The obvious option is to delete some content but a lot of it is photos and videos of my daughter growing up and I’m not going to remove that content. In fact, I want multiple copies of it backed up and the other option is deleting or more likely move work-related items to the company OneDrive but then I have two separate accounts to manage and it becomes a pain in the butt to know where files are stored.
The logical solution is to let me buy more storage from Microsoft, I’d happily pay $10-20 a year for additional capacity but that is not possible. What I think I will have to do is move all my photos to Google Photos for backup and then keep the higher resolution files locally on a separate drive and remove my current photos from OneDrive.
Another oddity is that if you don’t have Office 365, Microsoft says that your OneDrive data is stored in a way that does not support advanced security. I understand that Office 365 offers more functionality but in practice, this is bad marketing as it sounds like your data is less secure than if you are paying for the higher tiers; Microsoft should be stating that they protect all data with the highest levels of security.
Unfortunately for me, I quite like OneDrive which means I’m not moving to DropBox but this lack of basic functionality of being able to expand your storage capacity is a frustrating barrier. Hopefully, Microsoft will figure out that consumers will pay for more storage but until then, I’m forced to give Google my photos and Microsoft my data so that I can stay properly replicated in the cloud.
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#250928"><em>In reply to hrlngrv:</em></a></blockquote><p>"Finally, providing online storage isn't as cheap per TB as buying another 1TB drive wholesale for every new account. The infrastructure needed to provide massive amounts of online storage likely accounts for more than half of total costs for online storage providers."</p><p><br></p><p>It all depends on how the online storage is organized and configured. If offering more than 1TB of storage requires an expensive change in infrastructure, than it isn't very well designed. </p><p><br></p><p>"MSFT is certainly forgoing revenues, but there's likely to be little if any profit in providing TB-level online storage unless people were willing to pay substantially more than what they pay for a 1TB external drive."</p><p><br></p><p>You think the cost MS pays for 1TP of storage is close to the price that a consumer pays for a 1TB external drive? </p><p><br></p>
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#250957"><em>In reply to hrlngrv:</em></a></blockquote><p>The point is that offering >1TB storage for those relatively few who desire it isn't likely to substantially increase infrastructure and overhead costs. While these costs aren't fixed, they don't vary linearly with storage capacity either. Usually there are thresholds that vary from installation to installation that trigger additional costs. For example, when you reach a certain limit, you may have to add additional cooling to accomodate the next set of servers.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#251170"><em>In reply to hrlngrv:</em></a></blockquote><p>"Even so, those wanting more online storage are likely to be those using online storage more intensively."</p><p><br></p><p>Talk about speculation :)</p>
xperiencewindows
<p>Why not keep your seldom used data on physical drives, with the appropriate backup/redundancy measures in place, and your more frequently accessed data in the cloud?</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#250650"><em>In reply to terrencecrowley:</em></a></blockquote><p>It's really impossible to determine what the costs are since we don't have access to that data, but obviously there's a price point for "whales" that would provide profit without it being just a marketing expense. If the price is too high and nobody buys it, so what? </p><p><br></p><p>If other vendors are offering such storage what do they know that Microsoft doesn't? Or are the other vendors going to pay a marketing cost forever? Seems unlikely.</p>
RR
<blockquote><a href="#250801"><em>In reply to hrlngrv:</em></a></blockquote><p>Yes on the O365 economics, I don't see the conclusion that Microsoft wants to discourage onedrive as a given. Of course, in a bean counting view, they have an incentive to do this when they offer a max "free" tier, "like a health club." But Brad started the entire discussion by asking them to charge for the tier above that so the premise of the discussion is the potential tier above that, not the incentives in the free tier below it. </p><p><br></p><p>Btw, posting from a different device/handle passwords not synced but the family resemblance is clear :-)</p><p><br></p>
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#250676"><em>In reply to Roger Ramjet:</em></a></blockquote><p>"That's way too complicated for this site."</p><p><br></p><p>Ah, no.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#250788"><em>In reply to Roger Ramjet:</em></a></blockquote><p>So what's the "complicated" part that you believe other commentors are missing? Stating that neither Brad or Paul have written about cost strategy in the past isn't evidence of the complexity of the topic as it applies to this specific article.</p>
RR
<blockquote><a href="#250791"><em>In reply to skane2600:</em></a></blockquote><p>Not sure what you are referring to, my "complicated" reference basically means this site's writers (Brad, Paul) don't and shouldn't get into that level of analysis the poster demanded. I think I have explained why I don't believe they need to do that above. Nor would it be a profitable thing for them. What is the purpose of truly solving Microsoft's or anyone's business problems on a site like this?</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#250830"><em>In reply to RR:</em></a></blockquote><p>My point is that the "level of analysis the poster demanded" was unnecessary to comment intelligently on Brad's article. </p>
Stooks
<blockquote><a href="#250700"><em>In reply to egab:</em></a></blockquote><p>This! They are not a consumer company anymore.</p><p><br></p><p>I just pray they don't Efff-Up the Xbox as I bought a Xbox One X and besides the lame UI it is a pretty good product.</p>
Stooks
<p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">"Tell me if you have heard this one before"</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Not from any consumer, unless they are trying to use a cloud storage for a lot of ripped movies or their hobby/job is serious video editing. No video editing people I know use cloud storage (Onedrive/Dropbox/iCloud etc). They use fast local/external storage (multi TB of it) and make backups of it, either local backups or cloud backups from a cloud backup company (</span>backblaze etc) or both.</p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I have 7906 photos and 1041 videos in my Photos app on my Mac, which syncs to iCloud taking up 56.81 gig and I see it on all of my Apple devices. 90% of that is of my kids/family over the last 17 years.</span></p><p><br></p><p>I have 19 years of documents stored in iCloud as well and they are using 7.3gig. So my total use in iCloud is just over 63gig (mail and other stuff). </p><p><br></p><p>What are you storing on OneDrive that consumes 900gig???? Hours and hours of 4K drone footage???? Do you game a lot and record your gaming sessions and store them in the cloud? Are you using it to backup a computer/s with a backup program?</p><p><br></p><p>My opinion is that if a consumer needs more than 1TB of cloud storage then that need probably falls into the "professional", addiction (gaming recordings) or probably illegal (movie rips/sharing) bucket and they need to use "Pro" level storage.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#250836"><em>In reply to Stooks:</em></a></blockquote><p>This brings "blaming the user" to a whole new level. It used to be that the user was "dumb", now they're supposed to be a criminal or an addict.</p>
Stooks
<blockquote><a href="#250862"><em>In reply to skane2600:</em></a></blockquote><p>My point is the average consumer, that is not some video pirate, hard core game streamer using the cloud as stream storage, or some professional video editor using cloud storage…..would have a hard time using even 500gig of cloud storage.</p><p><br></p><p>Both Amazon and Microsoft reduced their "unlimited" storage to 1TB and in both of their statements they used video pirates as one of the reasons.</p><p><br></p><p>Brad is using 900gig??? I could not use that much even if I tried too. I would have to back up my gaming PC and all of its installed games. I doubt OneDrive would even let you backup to it. If they did it would take forever! Even if you did a offline backup and tried to copy the backup file it would probably be too big or they might not let you store that file type.</p><p><br></p><p>Like I said I have 8000 photos and 1041 home videos and it is only taking up 57gig. Does Brad have 17x the photos and videos I have? Possibly but I would probably not call that "average". I could be totally wrong. Maybe he has hundred of thousands of photos and video's.</p><p><br></p><p>My video files used to be much bigger, 30gig or more alone but once they were converted from the older formats (mpeg/mpeg2) into mp4/mv4 that shrunk by 10-30x or more.</p><p><br></p>
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#250897"><em>In reply to Stooks:</em></a></blockquote><p>My short response: You're not Brad.</p>