On November 2nd, 2015 Microsoft announced that it was going to change it’s storage plans for OneDrive. Previously Microsoft had given unlimited storage for Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers in OneDrive. These subscribers now have 1 terabyte of storage.

At the same time they announced that they were going to change the free offer from 15GB to 5GB & that they were eliminating the 100GB and 200GB plans and replacing them with a 50GB plan.

This met with some frustration from users… to the tune of 72.4k votes on the User Voice suggestion. This morning Douglas Pearce closed the suggestion with the following message:

It very encouraging to see Microsoft listening and rectifying the situation to the benefit of those who enjoy the service.

The process for keeping your 15GB+15GB situation is very straightforward. Simply visit http://aka.ms/onedrivestorage and log in with the account that you use for OneDrive.

To keep your storage you are going to need to grant OneDrive Preview permissions to Add or remove bonus storage & some additional permissions may be required depending upon your account. I saw two different lists when I did this for my accounts, perhaps because I had already granted the permissions before as a part of the Next-Gen Sync Client Preview.

Once access is granted the process completes and you get the happy message that your account will remain intact as it was before.

The one piece of the puzzle that is going to be interesting to me to see how they handle is the offer of 1 year free of Office 365 Personal to users who have more than 5GB in OneDrive. Office 365 Personal retails for $7 per seat per month and comes with installation of Office 2016 on one machine, 1 TB of OneDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype calling per month.

The feature benefits of Office 365 Personal at $84 per year out weigh those of the Dropbox Pro which simply gives 1 TB of storage for $99. If the Next-Gen Sync Client for OneDrive is as good as advertised, this could tip the scales for some users.

In addition to my use of OneDrive & OneDrive for business I pay for a Dropbox Pro subscription as well. what can I say… I like to have backups of my backups I don’t see that changing anytime soon as I like being able to test the services against each other so that I can give people the real world advice about what each one does well vs the others.

My fun finding this week was that free Dropbox users are penalized for the amount of storage that is shared with them. This means that If I share 2GB with a user who is on the free plan and they accept the sharing request, they only have .5GB left to use or be shared with, even if they have never stored a file themselves. If I add 1GB to that shared folder the free user is now out of space and cannot accept sharing requests from other Dropbox users. They have to go delete their membership to the share and remove the files from their Dropbox completely before being able to accept another request.