Massive increase to Onedrive storage plans

https://blog.onedrive.com/new-onedrive-storage-plans/

by ghshephard • 12 years ago

115 107 12 years ago

blog.onedrive.com

ghshephard5• 12 years ago

The new monthly prices will be $1.99 for 100 GB (previously $7.49) and $3.99 for 200 GB (previously $11.49).

You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation?

Other interesting pricing tidbits:

OneDrive will come with 15 GB for free (up from 7 GB). Office 365 Personal ($7/month) will come with 1 TB of OneDrive storage.

For the first time I'm rethinking my $8.25/month subscription to Dropbox for 100 GB, particularly as I only have about 10 GB of data...

mchusma• 12 years ago

Agreed. My wife had to upgrade her dropbox plan recently to the $41.60/mo 500GB plan. I had to really weigh the pros and cons of switching. In the end, I decided the costs of me having to provide "technical support" to my wife was worth the roughly $30/mo in the short term over Google Drive (and now OneDrive), but figured we would start trying to convert her over the next year or so.

Dropbox is in a really tough spot, because if they even cut their prices in half (which would still be significantly more expensive than OneDrive), their revenue would drop tremendously right before an IPO. My guess is that the primary options are to stay the course, go public ASAP, hope you don't get bled too much from Google/Microsoft and try to find more reasons for people to pay a premium for Dropbox, or to sell to Apple, which is the only big player without a meaningful competitor.

clarky07• 12 years ago

or to sell to Apple, which is the only big player without a meaningful competitor.

iCloud Drive?[1]. The Apple buying Dropbox ship has sailed. Steve Jobs tried to buy them and Dropbox said no. Turns out it was a good choice on their part, but there is pretty much no chance of it happening now.

[1] http://www.apple.com/ios/ios8/icloud-drive/?cid=wwa-us-kwg-f...

ghshephard5• 12 years ago

Apple is launching iCloud Drive with iOS 8. Pricing is pretty reasonable - $1/Month for 20GB, $4/Month for 200 GB.

rogerdpack• 12 years ago

(don't forget google drive's price decreases, which will also put pressure on Dropbox ...)

ghshephard5• 12 years ago

Yes - Google Drive was probably an impetus for this, and it will be interesting to see what they introduce at IO. I think this price drop is a bigger deal than the Google Drive Drop, as I'm pretty confident that Microsoft is in this for the long haul, and that OneDrive is going to be around in 10 years, and show great enterprise integration.

lsc• 12 years ago

You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation?

eh, I've looked into getting into this market, and the price I would feel comfortable with (at my scale... which is not large) would be around a penny per gigabyte per replication per month. 2 replications is about the minimum I'm comfortable with, so the $0.02 per gigabyte/month seems pretty reasonable to me, especially because the big players have access to some pretty dramatic economies of scale that I do not.

Hard drives are what, $150 per 4tb drive or so, to purchase? Figure that it's another $2000 for every 36 drives for a low-end motherboard and chassis; figure a 36 month life, to be conservative, and that's $5.50/month in capital. figure $200/month per kw usable. a hard drive is going to use 5-10 watts That's $1-$2/month per 4tb. so total cost is going to be around $1.88 per tb per month. Now, multiply by 2.2, as I'm going to have 2x replications and make each replication raid6, (10 disk stripes) so my cost is $4.14/month/tb If I'm charging $0.02 per month per gigabyte, that's $20/month per tb revenue. (Of course, this is all seagate gigabytes. It's more complex if you use GiB.)

That's plenty of margin. Now, this doesn't count over-subscription, and if you sell in 100gb blocks, not all of it is gonna get used.

Now, especially if you are letting users use this for more than just backups, you have per-account overheads like abuse handling.

But yeah, overall? from where I stand? the "race to the bottom" isn't even keeping up with hard drive prices. In a real "race to the bottom" someone at my scale wouldn't be able to make reasonable margins.

The biggest problem I see with the market is that most consumers don't need that much storage. I'm going to need a lot of customers to just fill my first 74 disk cluster. Then, if I let customers share the files, I'm going to have to deal with dmca bullshit, and I ain't doin' that for free.

encoderer• 12 years ago

I started re-thinking dropbox when I realized I could get 1TB from GDrive for essentially the same price I'm paying for 100GB from Dropbox.

I'm moving at the end of the year when my subscription period ends.

driverdan• 12 years ago

You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation?

Unless you're a Dropbox equity holder why would you care? As a consumer all I care about is cost and reliability, neither of which are impacted by their valuation.

ajtaylor• 12 years ago

They must be assuming that most people won't actually use all 100 GB since the $1.99 is way below the cost of the physical drive (on a $/GB basis).

DevX101• 12 years ago

Unfortunately for DropBox, Google and Microsoft can almost give away storage for free as loss leaders for their other products. Hard drive space is a commodity.

I was a bit late to the online storage game and at $2 per month for 100GB, signing for Google Drive was a no brainer over DropBox.

microtonal• 12 years ago

Getting 50GB for two years with my phone (Moto X) makes Dropbox look pale in comparison. And they still don't have something akin to Google Docs or Office Online. Space is indeed a commodity. Office, Play, Google Apps, Ads, etc. are the money makers.

pling7• 12 years ago

Nope.

I uploaded a legit Office ISO I downloaded from MSDN to SkyDrive (as it was called back then) to test throughput up and down.

After 3-4 hours it was gone.

My data isn't going near it.

Edit: just to clarify... I think they hash incoming files and delete known ones as part of a takedown system. This was an ISO that had been shared on TPB as well as MSDN. Of course their policy allows these measures but I'm not happy putting something up there on the basis that they can arbitrarily delete it.

mythealias• 12 years ago

There was also some discussion about metadata being changed once the files were uploaded to OneDrive. So if you plan to use it just for plain file storage then it might be an issue.

sz4kerto• 12 years ago

That was something completely different, and a result of Microsoft's naming screwup: Sharepoint adds/changes some metadata of MS Office files (for collaboration, etc.). OneDrive for Business is essentially Sharepoint in the cloud.

This OneDrive does not change metadata, it's a 'simple' cloud storage.

BTW: interesting, I've submitted this link an hour or so ago, and it was immediately flagged as dead. :)

nickbarnwell• 12 years ago

That's only OneDrive for Business [1], a product that (fortunately) shares nothing but branding with the consumer product. Not so say the latter doesn't have its own warts...simply that it doesn't have that particularly egregious one.

1: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/micros...

jscheel• 12 years ago

Whoa, that's seriously messed up. Can anyone else confirm that this is still the case?

brador• 12 years ago

We're you notified of it's removal?

Imagine having 10,000 files up there and they delete one...that would keep me up at night.

pling7• 12 years ago

Nope. Not a sausage. If just disappeared.

megaman8212• 12 years ago

Where you sharing this file? Microsoft has stated several times that they don't mess with you private files other than scanning for child porn.

I have several ISOs from TechNet and they are all still there.

pling7• 12 years ago

I wasn't sharing it. To be honest if they're checking for CP then they're messing with your files. There isn't a sudden distinction when you bring in "think of the children"...

m0dest5• 12 years ago

Hey pling, I work on the OneDrive team. We definitely don't do the type of content scanning that you're describing. I wouldn't be comfortable with that. The only time we currently use file hashes for automated takedown is when known child pornography is re-uploaded to the service after being reported.

For copyrighted content, we have to respond to DMCA notices like other services. Sharing content to the public and getting reported by a third party is the only path for that. And in those cases, you definitely get a specific notice about the takedown. The web UI would also show you exactly which file was affected, and prevent you from sharing it again. It doesn't just delete files. (That would be unacceptable.)

Note that there's currently a 2 GB file size limit. It seems like the most likely explanation is that you put a large ISO in your SkyDrive folder, and it never succeeded in uploading because it exceeded the limit.

megaman8212• 12 years ago

Will the file size limit ever be upped? I got dozens of movies, ISOs, and database backups that OneDrive can't sync.

pling7• 12 years ago

I'm not sure how you can explain it then.

The file was 600Mbish. It successfully uploaded via the desktop client then was later downloaded on another machine via the desktop sync thing. Later that evening it was gone. I didn't delete it (it wasn't in the recycle bin) and I confirmed it was the correct live account I was signed in as. To be clear it was still on the source machine but not the destination. No antivirus had quarantined at either end.

That by elimination would suggest that either:

1. There is a reliability limit somewhere which is unknown and unpublished or a synchronisation bug.

2. You're unaware of a process or a false positive.

I should have opened another account to test this against with the same file but to be honest if I found a bug, windows live support has been abysmal. Hell they couldn't even work out how to close my account when the close account page refused to work...

rlu3• 12 years ago

Do you ever close an MSA after X amount of takedowns? Whether it be for DMCA notices or otherwise?

vonuebelgarten3• 12 years ago

Last year a friend couple uploaded photos of their one-year son (I understand it were those "bathtub photos" parents like taking to embarrass the children when they grow up) just to get their paid account blocked. They panicked because they used Skydrive to "securely" store lot of pictures, including their travels, honeymoon, etc. The husband was a bit tech-savvy, but I failed to convince him to always PGP-encrypt the files and rename them to non-significative names before uploading. At least, I made them never trust these services again.

I, personally, never use these file storage services to hold anything but encrypted data assuming that such data can disappear overnight without any warning.

r00fus• 12 years ago

Do you use a product like Boxcryptor or the like? I've always had problems getting these kind of tools to work across OSs (mainly mobile).

If you roll your own solution, do you limit to desktop usage, or how do you get mobile support as well?

Infinitesimus• 12 years ago

Hmm what you describe conflicts with what u/m0dest mentioned above. I'd like to hear word from him/her about the matter. If your friend's content wasn't shared, the the image must have been someone processed for known nudity patterns

cabbeer2• 12 years ago

Was the ISO larger than 2gb?

pling7• 12 years ago

It was 600Mb

esbonsa2• 12 years ago

if it was not legit, it probably would have been a lot faster since they have it in their cache...

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

Shameless plug for my product, ExpanDrive. Version 4 came out a week and a half ago and adds support for OneDrive along with a ton of other cloud storage providers.

http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive

Right now the best Cloud-storage desktop clients: Dropbox/Google Drive/Box/Copy/OneDrive, all do sync of the entire repository (unless you're willing to do the work of selective sync). Apart from that you're not left with many options, other than the web, for moving data to and from your giant 1TB account. ExpanDrive bridges that gap by providing access as a network drive. You connect and interact with the data without needing to bring it all in. We keep a big local cache, and do writes in the background so your saves feel instant, like Dropbox. If you've not checked out the software recently, take another look.

ghshephard5• 12 years ago

Very cool - somehow I hadn't seen this before, and you've been around for 10 Years, and I try and follow all things storage. Not sure how I missed your product.

I know AWS is fine with this sort of usage (they charge for storage + data access) - any sense as to whether Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive are okay with applications being written on top of their cloud storage?

I.E. is this a hack, or something I should feel comfortable using as a storage option. And, other than AWS, are there any vendors you feel are most likely to be okay with using their service in this way?

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

If they didn't want this kind of thing they wouldn't/shouldn't make an API, like Amazon Cloud Drive [no API]. It's not a hack :)

fulafel• 12 years ago

Any plans for a Linux version?

Edit: to answer my own question, the web page says "Linux version coming mid-2014" :)

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

ping jmancuso@expandrive.com if you want to jump on the beta

kator• 12 years ago

"Linux version coming mid-2014" .. So can we expect the linux version soon?

What is the difference between ExpandDrive and Strongsync?

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

Linux version is in private beta now.

Strongsync is a hot folder, like Dropbox. Works directly atop S3 with no server needed. Full conflict resolution, etc.

ExpanDrive is a network drive.

cwyers• 12 years ago

Hrm. I used to be a very frequent user of ExpanDrive, then I changed jobs and I haven't needed it for what I was using it before. I may take a look at it for personal use now, though.

jhgg• 12 years ago

Browsed around your site - how do you guys handle encryption of data? Or do you even? I'd look into using this with S3, but only if client side encryption is somehow offered.

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

No client side encryption, yet.

Coming in the fall in v4.5

msh• 12 years ago

Could you please put your price on the landing page?

I just got a download link and further down the page the price of a upgrade from a older version.

Before I download I am more interested in what I am downloading (is it a time limited demo?) and what the price is if I want a license. Otherwise its not worth my time to try the demo download.

spartango• 12 years ago

Excellent product; I've used ExpanDrive in the past and it works remarkably well.

Curious--any chance you can put together support for OneDrive for Business? Microsoft currently lacks a proper client for that service on the Mac, and it's a minor pain.

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

Just finished support for Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage [coming in 4.1 update, this week]. OneDrive for business is next on the list.

m0dest5• 12 years ago

I love ExpanDrive and use it every day. Thanks for adding OneDrive support in v4 :)

ExpanDrive's WebDAV performance has been kind of rocky, though. From what I can tell, it doesn't appear to support byte range seeking. To get to the middle of a 2 GB file, it tries to download the first 1 GB. Is that something addressed in the v4 update?

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

Definitely support it. Perhaps a server incompatibility? Can you re-ping support@expandrive.com ? If you have some temporary credentials for us to test with, it would be super-helpful

lingben2• 12 years ago

so this is like duplicati? does it have encryption?

localhost• 12 years ago

OneDrive in Windows 8.1 is built into the OS - it shows up as a folder in Explorer. After reading your site, I'm still confused; how is ExpanDrive different / better than the OneDrive OS integration? Can you describe a scenario where ExpanDrive is superior to OneDrive + Windows 8.1? Also, once you've done that here, it would be great to add that to your advertising copy on your site - perhaps with a walk-through of the product to show how it's better than the built-in OS support :)

cdh• 12 years ago

A major frustration for me is that OneDrive does not show up as a folder in Windows 8.1, unless you link your Windows account with a Microsoft account. I absolutely won't be logging into my computers with my Microsoft account, which has made OneDrive much more difficult to use. It works well from Office, but nothing else. I've tried installing the old version of the client, and it fails with an error that I already have a newer version.

It sounds like ExpanDrive would probably solve this issue for me. (At least until Microsoft hopefully adds back support for using OneDrive with local accounts at some point.)

voltagex_3• 12 years ago

OneDrive in Win8 breaks quite a few applications that measure disk space or read files without knowing about the new weird symlinky stuff that OneDrive uses.

e.g. https://bitbucket.org/windirstat/windirstat/issue/53/support...

https://github.com/FauxFaux/PuTTYTray/issues/125

praseodym• 12 years ago

I'm a bit disappointed about the paid upgrade, it really feels like ExpanDrive is only working properly since this last version. For me, v3 has always been dirt slow with cloud storage.

voltagex_3• 12 years ago

Hey, I'm just about to buy the upgrade from 3 to 4 but I'm wondering if you're going to make it behave more like a native Windows app? The panel that pops up from the system tray has some weird webview-like behaviour on right-click.

I also managed to bring down Explorer when opening Google Drive but I'll get a better bug report to you soon.

The only thing that makes me sad is that CBFS (what ExpanDrive uses as its backend) is really the only solution for doing filesystem stuff on Windows. Dokan just needs some love and a code signing certificate or two.

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

Ping us with some more detailed thoughts. Happy to listen.

CBFS is good. We wrote our own for v1&2. Better to let somebody else focus on that and we can focus on the rest.

boh• 12 years ago

Too bad Onedrive is known for altering files, scanning your photos for nudity (or partial nudity) and deleting/restricting content it deems "questionable". Otherwise it might seem like a good deal.

ghshephard5• 12 years ago

The restriction are on the content you share: http://microsoft-news.com/its-okay-to-put-your-nude-photos-o...

m0dest5• 12 years ago

Altering text files is sometimes an issue in OneDrive for Business, which is a totally separate service based on SharePoint. Consumer OneDrive never alters your text or binary data.

Photos are only scanned for nudity if they're broadly shared. The definition of "broadly" is changing. It's designed so that content isn't scanned if it's unshared or if it's only shared with a small number of people. The goal is just to make sure that people aren't using the service to host massive public porn collections.

0x0• 12 years ago

Why call both products OneDrive then? The only thing I care to remember from the discussion earlier is "OneDrive == data files are modified" aka stay the heck away. By sharing the name, surely you want us to think it is the same product?

Would you trust a sync service called "File Destroyer for Consumers"?

esbonsa2• 12 years ago

That is not as bad as what you described, but it also corrupted one file in my multi-volume archive that is now not recoverable

josefresco• 12 years ago

Question, does OneDrive handle large amounts of files/data? Google's Windows software has issues due to it's 32bit/memory limiting nature which makes it almost unusable for me for backing up client files.

Can anyone with OneDrive exp chime in?

nextweek23• 12 years ago

Have you tried Insync which is a cross platform gdrive alternative. I believe its using python, so it might not suffer from 32bit issues.

dy2• 12 years ago

I'm currently using Dropbox and sync all my coding folders (mostly Rails/Node.js/Go/C#). I'd be willing to switch if one of the other providers would have smarter folder exclusion (something like .gitignore or I would even take having to make a sentinel file like .nosync in every folder).

I'd like to exclude things like node_modules, build folders etc. It's gotten to a point where I have to disable Dropbox during development and let it catch up later otherwise it chokes up CPU at 100% doing it's hashing.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

nextweek23• 12 years ago

Best advice I can give is don't do that. Dropbox is not a good version control system. You'll get burned at some point.

Use git with one of the free providers like github or bitbucket. You will find it so much easier.

benologist• 12 years ago

Dropbox does realtime, automatic backup of your work with file version history in case you accidentally deleted or overwrote something. Git solves other problems.

dy2• 12 years ago

I started doing it primarily so that I could leave my work computer and start working almost instantaneously on my home computer. Since the Retina, I've been using the same machine for both but it's been less of an issue but it's still nice to know that you could lose the machine and not lose any work in any repo in your ~/dev folder.

Sounds like the only way to do it right now is via the Seadrive client proposed below - will definitely move to the first major provider that offers this service.

stinos• 12 years ago

SeaFile has a .ignore file with pretty much the same syntax as a .gitignore. And it can also operate on multiple independent directories, has client-side encryption, it's open source and you can host it yourself. So you could actually still use dropbox as backend for the storage, and run both client and server on your machine if you wish. Link: http://seafile.com/en/home/

hnha2• 12 years ago

I've been using seafile for 7 months now and cannot praise it enough. A really nice piece of free software. Hopefully some smart people will do code reviews and improvements in the background to ensure behind the scenes everything is just as nice.

mkal_tsr• 12 years ago

Does it come with improved "sharing" abilities as well? http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344633/leaked-nsa-docum...

baudehlo2• 12 years ago

I wish they would fix their API along with these improvements. Currently there's no way to upload a file to OneDrive without knowing the file size. Google and DropBox support that with their APIs (via slightly different forms of chunked uploads).

This is relevant to me for http://emailitin.com/ because with email attachments there's no content-length. Since I don't want to store attachments on my end (even temporarily) I'd rather just pipe them directly to OneDrive (as I do with GDrive and DropBox). With the current API limitation I have to pipe to a temporary file, stat the file, and then upload. Really annoying.

hemancuso10• 12 years ago

It's a multipart upload. You don't need to know the content-length.

baudehlo2• 12 years ago

Maybe they added that feature recently. I'll look into it.

matdrewin• 12 years ago

If they fix their synching issues, I'm in.

madoublet• 12 years ago

If the Skydrive team is listening, I love the All Photos feed, but can we get something like that for non-photos? I would like to see everything else that has been synced recently. I am not sure what Recent Docs does, but it is definitely not what I expect.

cabbeer2• 12 years ago

I won't consider skydrive until they fix this issue: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/forum/sdfiles/sk...

tgeorge• 12 years ago

Just go build one for yourself. >.> https://owncloud.org/

Dylan168072• 12 years ago

Call me back when it can sync more than one file per second.

hnha2• 12 years ago

Try seafile, it is very perfomant for me.

RexRollman• 12 years ago

I really like where the online storage space is going but why don't they offer support for standard transfer protocols? Things like ftp, sftp, rsync, etc. I don't want to install a custom client and uploading via a web browser is tedious.

lstamour• 12 years ago

Accuracy note: SkyDrive launched with 25 GB free, then reduced that to 7 GB unless you knew to click a link to be "grandfathered". So now they're at a fashionable 15 GB free. Good, but not as good as it once was ;-)

Either way, paying for the 100GB if you need the storage is a no-brainer. And OneDrive is still one of the few truly cross-platform storage services that's also ships natively with an OS. Now that Apple's offering additional cloud options on iPad, I could see myself picking one cloud provider and sticking with it ....

owenversteeg• 12 years ago

Aww :( I have two grandfathered 25gb free accounts and I was hoping they'd get more storage.

Massive increase to Onedrive storage plans

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