MS boosts OneDrive storage: 15 GB for all, 1 TB for Office 365 users

This is a nice summer surprise from Microsoft.

Massive increase to OneDrive storage plans: 15 GB free for everyone, 1 TB for Office 365 subscribers

They also lowered the prices on just their cloud storage plans, if you wanted to go that route without getting an Office 365 subscription. $1.99/month for 100 GB and $3.99/month for 200 GB. Though at this point, there's no reason not to get an Office 365 subscription especially since you can order keycards for up to 20% off Microsoft's suggested retail price.

 

But but but.. SUBSCRIPTION SOFTWARE? BLASPHEMY! NSA! M$$$$$!!!!

True chat: Office 365 is a freakin' steal. The personal edition is $70 a year, which over the three year average life of Office is like 1/2 what the standalone Office Pro costs and includes all the storage as a perk.

One of my clients has started actively discussing the idea of switching from Google cloud services to Microsoft, due in no small part to the potential cost savings.

 

I really wish the place I work for would go that route. They are a Google client now but, man, that Google stuff sucks so bad. Not that I am a big fan of the interface changes they made to the newer Office versions (same kind of idiocy they did with Win8...), but, really, anything is better than that half-baked, eternally beta-quality Google stuff.

 

Those all caps titles in Office 2013 are stupid and the default white theme is rather aggressive, but once you set it to a darker gray and learn to live with the "shouting" UI, 2013 is quite enjoyable to use. I'm not an extreme Office power user by any means, but so far 2013 has helped me do the things I have to do slightly faster compared to 2007 & 2010. I have used 2003 as well, but not a lot and it's been so long, I don't remember much of it since I was still using Word Perfect back then.

I have a 365 university sub and I have no idea what I'll do with that 1 TB of storage. I guess I could image my systems on there and on externals as well. Anyways, I just hope that if I ever don't renew my 365 sub, I will get the 148 GB of storage I currently have instead of 15 GB.

 

I know that feeling.

1TB of storage is basically showing off. Sure some people will use it with all their engineering CAD drawings laying around, but dear lord how is that achievable with the Office Package?

 

In addition to the cosmetics you mention, what irks me most is the fact that they have destroyed some important Search functionality, such that you cannot search your email from the OS interface anymore, even in Windows 7. Of course, in Windows 8, that functionality has been destroyed OS-wide, but there was really no reason to cripple Windows 7 Search in the same way.

 

I'm currently paying $10/month for 1 TB of storage with Google Drive...I could get the same amount of cloud storage from OneDrive AND get Office 365 for the same monthly cost? That's compelling...

Actually, with a twelve-month card from Amazon.com, you can get 12 months of Office 365 for $72. So it'd be about half the price of what I'm paying Google Drive.

Amazon.com: Office 365 Home 1yr Subscription Key Card: Software

I will say this though: in my experience, Google Drive syncs documents much more frequently/rapidly than OneDrive does. When you're switching back and forth between multiple machines, Google Drive is a better solution than OneDrive.

 

The only area where I find OneDrive lacking is integration on the Android/iOS fronts. So many apps include support for Dropbox, iCloud, and/or other cloud storage services, but very few use OneDrive. Perhaps this increase in storage space will attract more customers, which in turn will put a spur in the saddles of mobile developers to support it.

 

Saturnotaku, there is an android onedrive app for you in google play store. I just tested it out and it loaded fine on my Samsung 12 inch tablet. However, cant find how to get all those added gigabytes of storage yet.

Oh I see it may take a month for this update to take affect.

 

I'm pretty sure they just announced it today rather than roll out the whole thing.

 

They said 8t will be rolling out next month.

Should be expected the new CEO is from Oracle who he helped push into the cloud. So anything cloud related will have a huge impact at Microsoft now. That's why I'm going all in Microsoft ecosystem and slowing saying goodbye to Google and their advertisement ways

Sent from my SM-N900T

 

Back when I signed up for SkyDrive around 2010, you got 25 GB for free. So I'm still ahead of today's newcomers.

The prices are pretty reasonable, though. And the 1 TB storage is an interesting benefit for Office 365, particularly if you can use it for more than just your Office files (which I assume is the case).

I've seen (not created) a few 1 GB PowerPoints. It doesn't take a very long 1080p film in the Powerpoint to reach that. So if you were really inefficient with your PowerPoints, you might hit 1 TB in a few years.

The thing I dislike about Office 2013 is how it says things like "Want to save your changes?", instead of "Do you want to save your changes to Book1?" It's so non-professional. Sure, it doesn't affect functionality, but it irks the wannabe-English-major in me.

 

I'm entrenched in the Apple ecosystem. No Android devices here. There is a OneDrive iOS app, and it's functional. What I was speaking about was integration with other applications, such as 1Password, WriteRoom (note taking app), and so forth that offer the ability to save to Dropbox or iCloud.

OneDrive is just like Dropbox. You can store whatever you want. The client application functions the same way. You can choose what folders to sync and share. Obviously it works best with Windows, but the Mac OS X app is fine for my purposes.

Another nice benefit for Office 365 Home subscribers is that you can add up to 4 more users to your account, and they in turn get 1 TB of storage all to themselves so you don't have to share your space with anyone in your household.

 

You and me both, plus I got some extra storage from 365 University (20 GB as of right now), a few GB from uploading photos from my Windows phone and 100 GB from a promo MS had when they lrenamed skydrive to onedrive. Way ahead of newcomers and old timers

That said, man do I miss Live Mesh

Regarding the OneDrive app, yeah, it basically works just like dropbox, it has all the files set to online only by default though, so if you make the switch to OneDrive, make sure to switch the files you want to both local and online storage or it is gonna suck when you get to a place where you can only work offline.

 

Well OneDrive will not sync with my android tablet. Syncs just fine with windows PC but not my android tablet. Seems it will sync media stuff but not documents. Weird. I can access OneDrive and upload files to the OneDrive Documents folder but I have to do that manually.

 

Interesting, I haven't tried OneDrive on non Windows devices, I run a Windows tablet and a Windows Phone, so everything is working peachy.

 

Wow, that's actually quite good. 5 TB of space overall. All of a sudden Office 365 is looking like it may be worth it over perpetual licenses. I'd have to run an OS that could use newer versions of Office than the perpetual license I already have, but if I were, that might be worth it even if the improvements in Office continue to be incremental.

I vaguely remember Live Mesh. I used it at least once. Can't really recall what it did differently at this point, though I think you could use it to keep files in sync? I've also used the SyncToy to sync files locally, although I don't think that's available for Vista or later.

 

Live Mesh was the evolution of SyncToy. What Mesh allowed to do that Skydrive doesn't was to sync files on your computers without storing them to the cloud and sync over a local network. It came quite handy to sync video and photo libraries among multiple computers without having to put hundreds of GBs of data on the could.

 

I used SyncToy extensively, and for many years, to keep data partitions in sync between computers, and even for backup. About a year ago I switched to FreeFileSync, and it handles everything SyncToy did and more. The interface is a bit unintuitive -- but that's mostly because it throws a lot of choice in your face, where SyncToy just said "trust me". Once I gave in to it, I've come to like it. No cloud access, though.

 

Seeing the fine print I see the downside of the personal Office 365 with 1 TB of storage is that it's only for "1 PC or Mac, and 1 tablet" (whereas the family version allows up to 5). Not a huge deal since the family version isn't that much more, but it would've been handy for file syncing to have 2 PCs supported since I'd reckon a common use case would be keeping a desktop and a (non-tablet) laptop in sync, or at least being able to seamlessly update OneDrive documents from both a desktop and a laptop.

Still, the family edition comes in below Google and has Office, so it's nonetheless a great deal. More than external HDDs, but if you want the convenience of cloud storage, with lots of space, it'll be hard to do better.

I'll have to try that. The only problem I've had with SyncToy is that, on my old networks where the DNS didn't work properly and I had SyncToy configured to work via IP address, SyncToy didn't have a good way (that I could find) to update the IP address without starting a whole new sync configuration (which meant re-telling it which folders to ignore, which got old fast). While I think I have the DNS issue gone, the other SyncToy issue - that it's very much not-cross-platform - also would be solved by FreeFileSync. So... that may be the successor I've been looking for!

 

I hadn't thought about the cross-platform aspect. That's a great point for anyone wanting to sync between computers running MacOS, Linux and/or Windows. So yeah, give it a try. As I mentioned, it took a little for me to get used to its interface, and the first many times I spent more time than I liked. It forces (or encourages) me to check more actively which files and folders are sync'ed in which direction.

 

What I don't like about Onedrive is that there is no duplicate local storage. At least not when using Office 2013.

Or is there?

Put it this way, I couldn't figure out how to have both a local copy and a cloud copy in OneNote 2013 when using OneDrive.

Too irked by it all to go Google it. Know what I'm sayin'? I probably should but.. dat frustration doe.

 

Have you tried Binging It On instead?

 

Right click "OneDrive" and select "Make Available Offline".

I'm not moving away from Dropbox any time soon, though, and how I use it 5GB is more than adequate, basically active projects get stored on there, and when done, I move them to my home server. I might take advantage of the 1TB storage on OneDrive to put some system images, and stuff on there, otherwise, until it is cross platform friendly and keeps local copies more manageable, I'm not interested.

 

No, I think 2.0 is right, this option is not available in this form for at least some types of Office documents. I have seen the same issue with OneNote notebooks. To be clear, these remain available offline, but they are in an obscure location, stored under an unintelligible filename. Caveats: This is with Office 2010, and I don't know the situation with other Office Online docs, such as Word or Excel.

I have and am paying for 100GB on DropBox, and will not go to the newer version of Office, so I see no reason to go to OneDrive. Besides, one of the issues I had with SkyDrive when I was using that is that synchronization was mind-bogglingly slow, plus SkyDrive would crash and/or hang when using more advanced filesystem constructs such as reparse points or hardlinks. That's when I had given up on it as unusable a few years ago.

DropBox doesn't recognize links as such either (it will simply duplicate those files or folders online), but at least it works, and does so in a robust and inobtrusive way. Why Microsoft is unable to provide a cloud storage option that fully recognizes their own filesystem constructs is beyond me, but whatever...

 

I had OneDrive/SkyDrive uninstalled, and just went to go install it again and now I can't even see a OneDrive file location.

 

To 2.0 ..Are you saying you can't sync your local OneDrive folder with the cloud OneDrive using Office 2013? You should be able to put your docs in the local OneDrive folder and that should sync with the cloud. If not then it's useless. Which is the problem I have in my android samsung tablet. Can't sync a local folder with the cloud using OneDrive. Dropbox seems to work better in that regard.

 

Word, Excel and Powerpoint files work as both offline and online through the make available offline feature. OneNote 2013 doesn't work the same way due in in part due to what Pirx mentioned. There is a way to save notebooks locally if you have Office 2013 or 365 instead of OneNote, but not sure about making the notebook both offline and online. I sure am interested in the answer to that question though.

 

The "make available offline" feature is not available on my android tablet.

 

Have you tried setting a file or folder offline rather than the whole onedrive. It might be only available on Windows tablets too.

 

I have OneNote 2013 as part of Office 2013 and it doesn't seem to allow both local and cloud storage of a notebook on Win7 or Win8.1 with make available offline feature.

Now I gotta go Google it... [insert angry biting bottom lip face meme].

 

I thought of one thing it may be shoehorned in, save a local notebook in the skydrive folder that you made available offline.

 

OK I got it to work. It does store a local copy in the OneDrive folder when "make available offline" is selected.

I had to run sfc /scannow. Apparently, there was a system file corruption on my tablet. Might have happened when I recently uninstalled all the unnecessary HP software that came with it to speed up performance.

Where's my 15GB though? Wonder when they will roll that out. Not that the 10GB I have now is shabby.

I'm going to test to see which of the cloud services auto updates/backups the fastest or most frequent. Will it be Dropbox? OneDrive? Box? Or Google Drive?

Place your bets!

 

Dropbox...

 

I haven't tested OneDrive performance for everything, but for OneNote, it syncs ridiculously fast, in less than a second, what I write on my tablet shows up on my laptop.