Mobile first, cloud 'second'....

[Rose640]

Thing is, regardless of how much space any individual uses be it 2TB or 200TB - Microsoft welcomed everyone a year ago stating unlimited. Now they use a silly excuse to pull back. Is it a PR stunt gone wrong? well it certainly is wrong as of today's announcement. They have taken a gun and shot themselves in the foot. I really hoped these silly mistakes were behind Microsoft. As for costs well Microsoft wrote off a Billion dollars of stock with the Surface, they have VAST amounts of cash and reserves to keep them in business for many years if they stopped selling everything tomorrow. Yes I have Onedrive for Business which is same as Onedrive Personal in name only. I share soo many different files with different people across different business's that its easier to use one system. Anyhow its about time I created own cloud for the company, this is the push for me to get it done I guess.

Well, in my country, there's no unlimited, anything. I have unlimited internet package, which basicly says i can use the internet in all of it's glory as much as i want. But, in the end of the contract, there's that tiny footnote (there really is) and it literally defines the word 'unlimited'. It's something like this 'The unlimited internet package allows you to use internet and download stuff as much as you want, on the fair basis.' Then it defines 'fair' and says 'Fair usage is based on 12hrs internet usage.'

Now i have exceeded those 12hrs numerous times, especially in winter times, but again i barely reach that 12hrs in summer. What i want to say is, there's no such a thing as 'completely free' or 'unlimited.'

 

[Richard Toft]

Tbh this does not affect me but I do feel for the guys that have just lost 10gb of storage this is hitting the wrong target someone with 17tb of data will probably be able to afford the inconvenience but the smaller customers are probably the ones that value the storage the most.

 

[Great deal]

Well, in my country, there's no unlimited, anything. I have unlimited internet package, which basicly says i can use the internet in all of it's glory as much as i want. But, in the end of the contract, there's that tiny footnote (there really is) and it literally defines the word 'unlimited'. It's something like this 'The unlimited internet package allows you to use internet and download stuff as much as you want, on the fair basis.' Then it defines 'fair' and says 'Fair usage is based on 12hrs internet usage.'

Now i have exceeded those 12hrs numerous times, especially in winter times, but again i barely reach that 12hrs in summer. What i want to say is, there's no such a thing as 'completely free' or 'unlimited.'

True, nearly all mobile operators offer unlimited X and in the T&C's they have a 'fair usage policy'. Vodafone UK for example offers 'unlimited' data when the reality is a 5GB limit. I did some research as I was due for an upgrade and was moving house (1 month no broadband grrr) and noticed Vodafone offer true unlimited for the first 3 months.....I uploaded 200GB in a week to Onedrive via mobile lol..felt gooood. Oh well back to reality and companies changing offers like the the wind.

Quick question, I have office 365, and will get 1TB. I can share with 5 people, would they also get 1TB under the new scheme?

 

[matt john2]

It's silly when people whine when something that is completely free messed up. You know the rule, you get what you pay for.

 

[Great deal]

It's silly when people whine when something that is completely free messed up. You know the rule, you get what you pay for.

Its not free. Its part of the service when you subscribe to Office 365 which costs ?79.99 a year for the Home edition including unlimited OneDrive storage.

 

[Slovenix]

First of all I'm Interested why having 75T of data is abusing if it clearly says Unlimited ?

 

[hb1x]

Lol.... You never own the cloud storage. All you do is rent it. They hiked up the price/put a price tag on it. Accept it.
If you aren't happy then move on....
mail.ru offers 25GB of storage for free. Use that.
I was lucky enough to grab a couple of free 1TB lifetime accounts when they were running a promo/offer.
This is why one shouldn't be a diehard ****** of a 'business company'.

PS: Box was giving away 50GB storage for free. Maybe that promo/offer is still active. Google it.

 

[Demian Mioc]

I'm reading about Tencent Weiyun, Chinese tech company which has 1B users, owns QQ IM app etc, they offer 10TB of free cloud storage!!!! It's insane.

 

[jlzimmerman]

Owning your own NAS is cool and all, but time is money. OneDrive and other cloud options are already there and maintenance free. Home NAS's are subject to long-term power outages (ice storms, tornados, Hurricanes, etc...) and surges. Oh, you need UPS for that and power spikes? That's another $100-200. And the average users has no idea what NAS stands for anyway. Most would tell you he's a 90's rapper. Somebody can get about 4 - Office 365 subscriptions for the price of setting up a NAS. Then there's the administration piece.....

Photos is one thing, but what about everything else? So what about the financial tracking I share with my wife, the spreadsheets I share with my siblings on our elderly parents, and videos of my kids? Music? Cloud options such as OneDrive are the answer. Worries about security? Encrypt your files before you upload. And I've used Google Drive. As a amateur photographer I no longer use it because of their photo compression. I want zero compression on my work. Flickr is the better alternative, but again it's only for photos.

TLR Setting up your own NAS is cool, it's just time, knowledge, and money that most people don't have and Office 365/OneDrive combo is the best bang for the buck for 1Tb storage.

I'm reading about Tencent Weiyun, Chinese tech company which has 1B users, owns QQ IM app etc, they offer 10TB of free cloud storage!!!! It's insane.

Real secure and private I'm sure.

 

[Demian Mioc]

Real secure and private I'm sure.

Well, everything is more private and secure nowadays than OneThirdDrive.

 

[realwarder]

Quick question, I have office 365, and will get 1TB. I can share with 5 people, would they also get 1TB under the new scheme?

I believe the Office 365 Home is not changing - 5 users with 1TB each. And given that you can share one user account to the other, while not fully supported in apps, via the website it is like having access to 5TB. This is by far the best value storage for now.

 

[realwarder]

As stated abouve, the solution is to create your own cloud which is what im going to do. In fact I will pay someone to copy all my dvd's and will uplaod the whole lot to my own cloud, 100TB here i come!

Please tell me how much that will cost you to get a server with 100TB storage online... and remember, OneDrive has redundant storage so if drives fail or data centers are lost your data isn't. So storage used is really multiplied two or three times for Microsoft to keep the data. So you're talking 200-300TB to get the same!

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Have you been around for the past 3-4 months? Considering your post, i assume not.
Microsoft can, and has done a bad things and still is.
I bought my 640 because of one year free Office365 and 30GB of OneDrive storage (or somewhere around), and guess what, Office not supported in my country, and i'm in god damn Europe.
As i said, they do make mistakes, and no one is justifying.

Which country is this? I'm in Kenya and my brother bought a 640 and he got office 365 as it was advertised

 

[taymur]

Ok, i have almost read this thread completely and figured that no one really touched on the most important point.

can we please all take one step back and see the big picture here.

Onedrive is not for "File Backup" and they want people to understand that this is not their market. what that means is, Uploading 1000 film on the could is not what they want users do, unless you need to access these 1000 films in different locations, and please don't convince me that you actually have them all there to watch them somewhere else. and if you want to share stuff, you can do it on an ad-hoc basis.

How to interpret Microsoft's move: if you want to back up files for the sake of back up, go buy a couple of physical backup storage, and set it up, some of them actually allow you to access them remotely FYI. which must be less costly on the long run.

If you want to upload content on the cloud, it should be for the use of mobility/ productivity and not backup.

Now, how can Microsoft implement this vision? first of all, cutting excessive space for personal use, as based on average numbers - that i am sure they have- it was noticed that unlimited is not needed, and it made people use the product in a way it was never intended.

PS, i am not saying that people who used this in an unlimited fashion were doing anything wrong, just remember that Microsoft -the company- could close because the owners got bored :S, will you start crying for it to open again? no more windows no more cloud. that's life.

 

[Demian Mioc]

Then for what? For backup of Cute Kittens photo collection? For 2-3 Word documents? When I record or make something I upload it on cloud, also I'm sharing documents with other people, companies etc. Designers, artists, engineers, photographers, composers use various software, uploading files to the cloud.
Note: MSFT needed to be more specific about what it wants from us to store on OneDrive. I think that MSFT was too greedy about cloud, going over its limits, offering and promising more it can swallow, waving the White flag on Monday.

 

[taymur]

Then for what? For backup of Cute Kittens photo collection? For 2-3 Word documents? When I record or make something I upload it on cloud, also I'm sharing documents with other people, companies etc. Designers, artists, engineers, photographers, composers use various software, uploading files to the cloud.
Note: MSFT needed to be more specific about what it wants from us to store on OneDrive. I think that MSFT was too greedy about cloud, going over its limits, offering and promising more it can swallow, waving the White flag on Monday.

I can explain for what then?

I have office 365, and have got the 1TB of storage, I have all my work documents there (which are barely 20GB), so that if my manager calls me when i am at my vacation to la la land, asking for a document or even a huge list of versions of a document, i can look like a prepared champ, and simply open my mobile, and share that, and i have done this soooo many times, it was very convenient.

Now for personal use, I used to have all my RAW files from my SLR there, which i very quickly rated as not convenient because no one wants me to share a RAW file with him, and i wouldn't do this anyway, its like handing someone a paint bucket and telling him here is your drawing, you just need to get a canvas, draw it, and frame it, to get the picture.

same with videos, if i want to show someone a video while i am on the go, i am pretty sure that my bandwidth cant handle a 4GB movie, with god knows what bit rate. so also not convenient. also i can assume that sharing a link to a movie could be pirating, don't you think?

so Microsoft just wants to keep it real, i guess, and figure out where to make money from all of this, which clearly they don't want to do it in the backup business.

 

[Great deal]

Please tell me how much that will cost you to get a server with 100TB storage online... and remember, OneDrive has redundant storage so if drives fail or data centers are lost your data isn't. So storage used is really multiplied two or three times for Microsoft to keep the data. So you're talking 200-300TB to get the same!

Decided to get 3x Synology 1815+ based in 3 different countries, Seagate Enterprise grade storage (Im after max capacity x36 - for future proofing is it worth spending more to get SSD?) in Raid 5 or 6 config, not sure yet and cloud as a final backup. To start with I wont store personal films, music on cloud, only encrypted files, I guess 1TB may be enough for that. Cost wise, its going to be a fair bit, needs to be done thou. Any tips are appreciated, is the 1815+ good, is it easy to setup 3 of them across different geo locations so one fails (gets stolen, act of god etc) the others work fine without data loss?

 

[Great deal]

Ok, i have almost read this thread completely and figured that no one really touched on the most important point.

can we please all take one step back and see the big picture here.

Onedrive is not for "File Backup" and they want people to understand that this is not their market. what that means is, Uploading 1000 film on the could is not what they want users do, unless you need to access these 1000 films in different locations, and please don't convince me that you actually have them all there to watch them somewhere else. and if you want to share stuff, you can do it on an ad-hoc basis.

How to interpret Microsoft's move: if you want to back up files for the sake of back up, go buy a couple of physical backup storage, and set it up, some of them actually allow you to access them remotely FYI. which must be less costly on the long run.

If you want to upload content on the cloud, it should be for the use of mobility/ productivity and not backup.

Now, how can Microsoft implement this vision? first of all, cutting excessive space for personal use, as based on average numbers - that i am sure they have- it was noticed that unlimited is not needed, and it made people use the product in a way it was never intended.

PS, i am not saying that people who used this in an unlimited fashion were doing anything wrong, just remember that Microsoft -the company- could close because the owners got bored :S, will you start crying for it to open again? no more windows no more cloud. that's life.

Well as of the announcement its clear its not for backup. I have several machines including a Surface Pro 2 with only 256GB storage. That has 3 users and only 30GB left without any films on the device. I travel a lot too so thats exactly the reason to put films on, so I can watch what I want when I want, in my reply previous to this, im solving that by creating my own cloud.

I guess the lesson learnt is do not trust tech companies.

 

[a5cent]

Owning your own NAS is cool and all, but time is money. OneDrive and other cloud options are already there and maintenance free.

Then there's the administration piece.....
Photos is one thing, but what about everything else? So what about the financial tracking I share with my wife, the spreadsheets I share with my siblings on our elderly parents, and videos of my kids?

I have the same requirements as Greatdeal. The difference is that I've been using a 6TB Synology NAS for the things he's attempted to use OneDrive for.

What I want to point out is that OneDrive and a NAS are two very different things. They aren't just two different forms of storage that are accessible over a network.

While it's true that setting up your own NAS is more work than just using OneDrive, a NAS also has its own unique set of advantages over OneDrive. Greatdeal and many others mentioned how bandwidth throttling meant they had to wait almost an eternity to upload their movies to OneDrive. I have about 2TB worth of DVDs on storage, and it takes me but a few seconds to transfer 1GB accross my network. IMHO, for media storage purposes, that alone already makes the NAS far superior to OneDrive.

A Synology NAS' support for DLNA or PLEX also makes it ideal as an audio/video streaming server. OneDrive can't stream directly to my TV. My Synology NAS can. For anyone that has converted their media collections to purely digital form, why not also reap those rewards/features and actually get something in return for having made the conversion?

A Synology NAS also gives you far better and more manageable control over how to share photos with family and friends than OneDrive ever will.

As far as I'm concerned, with the exception of music tracks, OneDrive never was the right tool for serious media storage and sharing. OneDrive is for synching spreadsheets and other such documents accross devices. That's what it's designed for and that's what it is good at doing.

OneDrive or a NAS should not be an either/or choice. They do different things well, and depending on what any of us want to do, one or both may be appropriate.

 

[a5cent]

Decided to get 3x Synology 1815+ based in 3 different countries, Seagate Enterprise grade storage (Im after max capacity x36 - for future proofing is it worth spending more to get SSD?) in Raid 5 or 6 config, not sure yet and cloud as a final backup. To start with I wont store personal films, music on cloud, only encrypted files, I guess 1TB may be enough for that. Cost wise, its going to be a fair bit, needs to be done thou. Any tips are appreciated, is the 1815+ good, is it easy to setup 3 of them across different geo locations so one fails (gets stolen, act of god etc) the others work fine without data loss?

I have some experiences I'll gladly share, but that might be more appropriately discussed in another thread or via PM, not here. I will say this:

What you definitely don't need to do is create your own geographically dispersed data replication service. Symform does this for you. The brilliance of it is that you can contribute your own storage to the cloud backup network.

http://www.symform.com/nas-cloud-backup/

So, if you want 10TB backed up to the cloud yourself, then you'd create a single NAS with 30TB of storage, provide 20TB to the cloud backup network, and then get your own 10TB backed up to two different locations at no extra or recurring cost to you.

If you use Groove music then you'll also need to be aware of Groove not playing well with file shares that are hosted on non-Windows boxes.

Let me know by PM if you want to know more.