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Office 365 gets 1 terabyte of storage

Microsoft raises the bar for cloud storage quantity but not quality.

Microsoft has laid down a serious challenge to Google, Dropbox and other online storage provider with big increases in OneDrive storage limits for free and paying customers.

Sadly, no mention of improvements to OneDrive itself, especially security and privacy, but we digress.

Over the next month, all OneDrive users and Office 365 subscribers/renters will get big raises in their storage limits.

Office 365 subscribers will get 1 terabyte (1TB = at least 1,000GB) per user.

Office 365 Personal and University customers will get 1TB, up from just 20GB.

Office 365 Home package (for up to 5 people) will get 1TB for each person linked to the subscription. Also up from 20GB per person.

OneDrive for Business customers already get 1TB of storage, though the Business product is quite different from standard OneDrive.

If that isn’t enough or you want OneDrive without Office 365, the prices have dropped a lot. 100GB used to cost $7.49 per month, it’s now $1.99. 200GB was $11.49 now $3.99

OneDrive free accounts will get 15GB at no charge, up from 7GB.


When

Microsoft says these changes will ‘take effect next month’ meaning July 2014.

You should not need to do anything. Existing OneDrive and Office 365 customers will see their allowances and free space magically increase. OneDrive paying customers should be charged the lower prices automatically.


Pedantry corner:

“Hey – whaddya mean – 1 terabyte is 1,024 GB not an even thousand”

Welcome to a world of mixed standards. The international standard units (SI) are based on multiples of 10 while the computer world is based on multiples of 2. The official SI units and most drive/cloud storage providers use the decimal units so a box labelled as a ‘Terabyte’ drive contains 1,000GB. As far as we can tell, Microsoft’s OneDrive is using these decimal definitions for Terabyte and Gigabyte.

There are a separate set of binary based standards for sizes where a ‘Tebibyte’ of storage is 1,024 Gibibytes … see Wikipedia for an explanation and table.

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