Tell me if you have heard this one before, “I need more than one terabyte of cloud storage”? It’s not a crazy idea that you have a lot of data and want to back it up to cloud but Microsoft is leaving money on the table with OneDrive.

More than leaving money on the table, they are leaving an open door for competitors to come in and take away users from the platform. And this is a problem as I have reached my OneDrive storage limit and will be forced to move my data elsewhere.

There are a couple problems here which, on the outside, seem incredibly simple to fix. Right now, I have an Office 365 Home subscription as well as a work Office 365 subscription but my personal drive is limited to the one terabyte ceiling. Currently, I have about 900 gigabytes of photos and videos and a bunch of other content that I need for podcasting which puts me at the limit of what OneDrive will support; so what do I do now?

The obvious option is to delete some content but a lot of it is photos and videos of my daughter growing up and I’m not going to remove that content. In fact, I want multiple copies of it backed up and the other option is deleting or more likely move work-related items to the company OneDrive but then I have two separate accounts to manage and it becomes a pain in the butt to know where files are stored.

The logical solution is to let me buy more storage from Microsoft, I’d happily pay $10-20 a year for additional capacity but that is not possible. What I think I will have to do is move all my photos to Google Photos for backup and then keep the higher resolution files locally on a separate drive and remove my current photos from OneDrive.

Another oddity is that if you don’t have Office 365, Microsoft says that your OneDrive data is stored in a way that does not support advanced security. I understand that Office 365 offers more functionality but in practice, this is bad marketing as it sounds like your data is less secure than if you are paying for the higher tiers; Microsoft should be stating that they protect all data with the highest levels of security.

Unfortunately for me, I quite like OneDrive which means I’m not moving to DropBox but this lack of basic functionality of being able to expand your storage capacity is a frustrating barrier. Hopefully, Microsoft will figure out that consumers will pay for more storage but until then, I’m forced to give Google my photos and Microsoft my data so that I can stay properly replicated in the cloud.

Tagged with OneDrive