Microsoft Kills Free OneDrive Storage Loophole

Microsoft will begin enforcing storage limits on unlicensed OneDrive accounts from January 27, 2025, ending a loophole that allowed organizations to retain departed employees' data without cost.

Data from accounts unlicensed for over 93 days will move to recycle bins for another 93 days before permanent deletion, unless under retention policies. Archived data retrieval will cost $0.60 per gigabyte plus $0.05 monthly per gigabyte. Organizations must either retrieve data, add licenses, or risk losing access, Microsoft has warned.

Because of Microsoft's latest data sniffing AI

[Senshi]

So no need to convince the fools to store their data into OneDrive for Microsoft to sniff upon.

Good News?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Does this mean NSA has stopped paying for the additional storage?

Re:

[Misagon]

Probably because it has been superseded by Recall now.

Re:

[Rockoon]

I think they are in a post storage concern world.

Everything? Everywhere? All the time?

They are now beyond that I think. They are inside the fence. They dont need to store copies of your data. You are doing it for them.

Departed?

[rossdee]

" allowed organizations to retain departed employees' data without cost."

Is that departed as in "shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!"

Re:

[i.r.id10t]

Only difference on our ERP is termination code/reason ....

I just wish,

[Travco]

But they'd stop trying to make me use it. Don't want it, don't need it, take care of my own needs, it's bad enough that I use your damn operating system.

Does anyone use it?

[Misagon]

The only times I have ever used OneDrive has been to recover or delete something that has been stored there by mistake.

Re:

[quonset]

We require everyone to use it by default except for one or two program areas which federal rules prohibit them from using it.

Amazing how often people's butts are saved when something is backed up to OneDrive and their machine goes down, such as when they spill their water/tea/coffee/wine/whatever on it while working from home.

Re:

[CubicleZombie]

I would like to use it at work. The problem with it is you can only back up your "My Documents" folder. Many things I work with don't like long paths or paths with spaces, so I wish I could back up "C:\Dev". But, nope. (Yes, I use source control. This is different.)

Re:

[Zocalo]

I don't use OneDrive either, but have you tried creating a junction to "C:\Dev\" inside your documents folder? It's kind of like the Windows equivalent of a *nix hardlink, so a lot of tools just see the link as a physical sub-directory rather than a filesystem level symlink. You can carry on using "C:\Dev\", but OneDrive might see it a a sub-directory of "Documents" and back it up.

The SysInternals suite has a tool that'll help you create them if you don't already have one.

Re:

[fph il quozientatore]

Jesus C:\hrist... Windows has had paths with spaces for 30 years now, and programs still choke on them?

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Windows has had paths with spaces for 30 years now, and programs still choke on them?

To be fair, Unix has supported space in filenames since the beginning, but even today you run into problems if you have spaces in filenames.

I think the only OS to be fine with spaces would be MacOS, and necessity has made it even on the transition to OS X that spaces were going to be a thing.

Re:

[Daina.0]

My work provides OneDrive for my MBP for backup purposes. It is completely worthless because it doesn't understand Unix filenames. I've turned it off and keep having to turn it off after upgrades/updates.

Re:

[thegarbz]

The only times I have ever used OneDrive has been to recover or delete something that has been stored there by mistake.

The article is talking about business. Yes people use OneDrive. Corporations use it extensively, they pay for many petabytes of storage. Hell as part of my job I occasionally spin up a high performance Windows 365 instance and run a simulation that generates several hundred GB of data at a time since it's faster for me to download those several hundred GB from one drive than it is to run simulations locally.

Yeah I'm an exception to the rule, most of the people in our organisation are limited to 5TB of stora