Microsoft gives Office 365 users until March 1 to cut their OneDrive storage

Microsoft seems to have started giving Office 365 users a notice that their unlimited OneDrive storage will revert back to 1TB beginning on March 1, 2017. Blogger Paul Thurrott posted on Twitter what he claimed to be a screenshot of said notice shared by a reader of his blog.

The software giant announced the unlimited OneDrive storage offering for all subscribers of both the consumer and business version of Office 365 in October 2014. Prior to that, Office 365 users only got a maximum of 1TB storage on Microsoft’s cloud-based offering. But in November of last year, the Redmond company retracted its promise due to what it described as an abuse on the part of consumers who used the service for limitless storage.

Microsoft lamented then that premium users had used OneDrive as a backup for PCs and huge collections of movies. To stem the supposed abuse, Microsoft decided to scale the unlimited storage offering back to just 1TB and replace the 100GB and 200GB premium plans with a 50GB plan at $1.99 per month.

Part of backtrack is also the removal of the 15GB bonus for saving camera roll in OneDrive. Then Microsoft gave Office 365 users a one-year grace period to keep their storage beyond 1TB. Come March 1 of next year, users will have to cut back to below 1TB.

Many users unhappy with the backtrack

Although many expected the scale-back to come one day, not everyone will surely welcome the move. Some users find it “pathetic” that Microsoft should retract its promise to all subscribers just because of the perceived abuse by a few users. Others believe Microsoft should never have made the announcement to begin with, knowing that consumers would take the company’s word for it and use the unlimited storage.

Once the backtrack takes effect, OneDrive users will need to back up their data somewhere else, though they will receive pro-rated refund.

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