Microsoft admits defeat on its controversial OneDrive change

By Fionna Agomuoh October 10, 2023

Microsoft has canceled plans to update how photos are stored on OneDrive after heavy criticism from its users.

The changes, which were set to go into place on October 16, would have made it so photos uploaded to your OneDrive account would count toward your data quota for every location they existed in your account, according to Neowin.

Microsoft OneDrive files can sync between a PC and a phone — Microsoft

Say you uploaded a photo and then moved it to a new album, OneDrive would deduct it from your storage quota twice. Once for the initial upload and again for the album where it is now hosted. TechRadar noted if you were to host the same photo in more than one album, it would be likely that storage would be deducted for each folder the image is located.

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Microsoft announced the planned changes earlier this year; however, it was met with an understanding amount of backlash from OneDrive users. This could especially affect those who host a large number of photos on OneDrive, quickly eating up their storage quota without intent, regardless of whether you’re a free or paid user. With insufficient space on your account, you can find other Microsoft services that can be affected, such as the inability to send emails or save documents.

This follows the changes Microsoft made to the free tier of its Outlook email service, in which the brand put a size limit on attachments and images sent through Outlook. Microsoft also had to establish workarounds to make things easier for users amid the new rules.

Microsoft attempted to appease users to the change with a one-year Outlook storage bonus that was activated when the data change was added to accounts and could only be used once. However, this wasn’t enough, and the brand eventually succumbed to rolling back its plans.

“Based on the feedback we received, we have adjusted our approach, we will no longer roll out this update. We will maintain the current photo album experience, as it is today,” Microsoft said on its support website.

Brands are known for their tactics to encourage users to buy into their ecosystem. Because of this many are speaking out when seemingly unnecessary changes are made to systems that they are investing in financially.

Google had a similar issue in April when it had to roll back changes it made to its Drive storage that limited the number of files you could create per account to 5 million. This especially affected enterprise users who could easily create and support way more than 5 million files on their accounts. A number of publications noted that their systems accounted for several billion files.

The Microsoft 365 paid subscription is especially popular because it starts with 1TB of storage as one of its perks. If Microsoft had enabled this change, it would have carved hefty storage quotas for countless users.

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Computing Writer

Fionna Agomuoh is a Computing Writer at Digital Trends. She covers a range of topics in the computing space, including…

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