People have been touting the advantages of The Cloud for months. It became one of this year’s hottest buzzwords. In particular, cloud-based storage really came into its own, and literally millions of people began taking advantage of the generous storage offers put forth by the industry’s major players. Companies like Microsoft and others were giving away gigabytes of storage for free. If you were willing to pay for additional storage you could scale your cloud-based storage to any size you liked. Some companies, Microsoft included, even offered unlimited storage for a nominal fee.
Those days are coming to an end.
Microsoft has discontinued its unlimited offer, and it’s not coming back. Their amount of free storage offered is being reduced from 15 gigabytes down to just five, and they’re rearranging their paid tiers. If your OneDrive storage is maxed out of space, or close to it, you’re going to want to take action before you lose your data. Note that if you took advantage of Microsoft’s 15 gigabyte “Camera Roll” bonus, you can hold onto it but only if you act quickly and opt-in through this link: https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus/
This reveals the fatal flaw in an overreliance on cloud-based storage. If a cloud company suddenly decides to change their offer, or alter the terms of the deal, you could be left in a bit of a tricky spot, and have to scramble to make other storage arrangements.
This is in no way an argument against cloud-based storage. This is simply recognition of the fact that when you rely on others for a service, the day may come when that service is no longer available. Some services are obviously more mission critical than others, and unless you’ve already got a Plan B in place, you could find yourself in serious trouble. Consider having an onsite as well as a cloud storage option to create redundancy in your own data. This will help to provide additional protection.
If you personally have or use a OneDrive account, especially if it’s free or unlimited, check your usage and free space, and begin moving your data to a local machine as well as to another provider before you lose it. If all of this is confusing, feel free to reach out to us for help and we can ensure that you maintain all of your information and set you up with the right solutions.
