This whole saga has been terribly embarrassing for anyone who was evangelizing for onedrive, whether they were employees or just excited fans.
They now have to go back on their word and explain that 30gb is actually somehow 5gb unless you provide a credit card # then it's 1tb for a year for free and after that if you don't remember to opt out $100/year or something. Why not leave everything as it was for current customers and just limit new ones. They've done it before when they had skydrive/windows live mesh/windows live folders/office live workspaces which each offered an independant amount of free data (usually somewhere between 5-25gb) when they eventually consolidated them all anyone who had previously used the services got 25gb while OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) offered 15gb.
And in general grandfathered deals aren't unprecedented, nearly every credit card/cell phone plan/[any service with long term agreements] that changes lets people who had the original keep what they had and just changes things for new customers.
I don't evangelise exactly, but I do try to raise the issue of backups generally with the teenagers I teach. Sync to online storage is relatively easy to do and hard to forget to do (if you see what I mean). College work is relatively small in file size. The 'stuff' can be larger (into 10s of Gb).
They should just add a cap at 1 TB (plus maybe a pay option for more) and leave Onedrive as it was. And by that I mean: Onedrive like it was on Windows 8.1, with file representations. I convertet many people to their ecosystem in the Win8 days, but now my advice is a bit embarassing in retrospect as they do not prove to be reliable.
Its seems so silly. Like they give out unlimited storage and market the crap out of it. Then what do they expect consumers to do be stoked on having it but politely not use it? Then cutting storage down for it free tier... I don't know man I mean how much money do you really think they could be losing?
Seen from very far away and totally outside, this looks like an internal push-and-shove, with the (new ?) head of OneDrive saying "screw it, we're not paying out of our budget for the prizes that the hardware teams are handing out to their customers".
The worrisome part is that it took one month to sort this out. Sort of.
Microsoft made a decision to move away from the SharePoint/Groove "OneDrive for Business", mostly because of the broken sync engine.
I thought the OneDrive changes were driven by the enterprise considerations. Stubbing would be very useful to VDI and an uptick in solutions like VDI that commoditizes the Windows experience in a manner that isn't complimentary to Windows.
tldr; Use link below and your account will not be affected when the amount of free storage changes from 15 GB to 5 GB and the +15 GB camera roll bonus is discontinued.*
Anecdotally I think that products like OneDrive are mostly in competition with USB hard drives rather than other online services for consumers. The massive free account is a very good deal, but the recurring payment certainly is not compared to just buying a $100 drive.
Why not offer a product for $100+ that lasts for 5 years. This is what people wanted with the free product, so maybe they would actually pay for it.
They now have to go back on their word and explain that 30gb is actually somehow 5gb unless you provide a credit card # then it's 1tb for a year for free and after that if you don't remember to opt out $100/year or something. Why not leave everything as it was for current customers and just limit new ones. They've done it before when they had skydrive/windows live mesh/windows live folders/office live workspaces which each offered an independant amount of free data (usually somewhere between 5-25gb) when they eventually consolidated them all anyone who had previously used the services got 25gb while OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) offered 15gb.
And in general grandfathered deals aren't unprecedented, nearly every credit card/cell phone plan/[any service with long term agreements] that changes lets people who had the original keep what they had and just changes things for new customers.