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At Microsoft 'unlimited cloud storage' really means one terabyte

Office 365 OneDrive plans slashed after some folk upload 76TB apiece

A year ago, it probably looked like a brilliant idea: bait products like Office 365 with unlimited cloud storage: documents and PowerPoints and Excel don't take up that much space, do they?

Users, given a shot at a disk that was never full, took a different view, with some punters using it as a backup for small networks or DVD collections.

Rather than buy up the Milky Way's entire supply of spinning rust to keep things going, Redmond's decided OneDrive desperately needs a downgrade.

In a move that's bound to attract a Twit-storm, both paid and free services are getting downgraded.

If you're got more than a terabyte of stuff hanging around on the service, you'll get a year to find some other way to store it. Given that Redmond says one OneDrive-unlimited user has 76 TB on the used-to-be-unlimited service, that's probably just as well, since whoever that is will be trying to back up a couple of hundred GB a day to meet the deadline.

Office 365 Home, Personal and University users will have 1 TB of storage, as of early 2016. If you're a user of the 100 GB or 200 GB service, you keep your plan, but OneDrive won't be offering those plans to new paid users, who will have a relatively-slim choice of 50 GB at US$1.99 a month or … well, that's it, really.

The free service will drop from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, Microsoft's blog post says, and the old 15 GB bonus “camera roll” storage will be discontinued.

“Instead of focusing on extreme backup scenarios, we want to remain focused on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of OneDrive users”, the post says, omitting to mention that the unlimited service is probably costing it a bomb. ®

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