News of Microsoft reneging on its earlier policy on OneDrive first emerged in early November 2015. Sparking off anger and condemnation among Windows users, some of whom felt baited into using Windows 10 that comes with OneDrive cloud storage baked inside the operating system.
Come July 27, 2016 Microsoft will scale down the free 15GB storage offered to OneDrive users by default to a mere 5GB. The company is also going to do away with the 15GB camera roll, which combined availed 30GB free storage to OneDrive users by default.
The justification given by Microsoft for reneging on its earlier policy was covered in our earlier article, available here.
Due to the clumsy manner in which Microsoft handled the breaking of the news of reduction of the free storage on OneDrive, the company gave then current users the opportunity to apply for and have their free 15GB Camera Roll and an additional 10GB standard storage retained.
The then current users got an email from Microsoft’s OneDrive division that read as follows:
Users who had applied to have their 15GB Camera Roll and the additional 10 GB standard storage will not be affected by the upcoming July 27th changes in OneDrive. However, those that did not apply and users who joined OneDrive post the email above, will have to make do with just 5GB free storage.
Those users whose account will be affected by the downsizing of their OneDrive free storage allotment and whose storage have exceeded 5GB, are asked to seek alternative storage for their extra files. Microsoft says it will give such users 90-day notice before making the extra files read-only. They will be able to view and download those files, but will not be able to add new files to OneDrive.
After nine months, the files could possibly be deleted by Microsoft from OneDrive. As a OneDrive user who did not apply for the extension of the 15GB Camera Roll and an additional 10GB standard storage, this news should serve as an official notice from Microsoft to reduce your OneDrive storage to below 5GB. Anything above 5GB will soon become just read only and after nine months they could possibly be deleted.
