What can I do when my 25GB of OneDrive cloud storage is cut to 5GB?

Andrew has 23.5GB of photos and documents in OneDrive. Next month, Microsoft is reducing the free storage allowance to 5GB. What should he do?

Cloud services are like lobster pots: much easier to get into than out of.
Cloud services are like lobster pots: much easier to get into than out of. Photograph: Jack Schofield/The Guardian

I have 23.5GB of photos and documents in OneDrive. In July, OneDrive’s free storage ceiling will be reduced to just 5GB. Will I just lose a lot of data in July or does Microsoft have a duty to retain it for a period of time?

How easy is it to transfer all my data to another service? What options might be best? Andrew

Microsoft used to offer 15GB of free storage in OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), and a bonus offer added an extra 15GB for a camera roll. Microsoft did announce that it would be reducing the free storage to 5GB, but after protests, it allowed users to keep the storage they had.

To keep your storage, you had to click a link in a Microsoft email, then click a button to take up the offer. It was quick and easy, so I can’t imagine why anybody wouldn’t do it. I can only assume you missed the offer, which closed on January 31.

People who were actually using more than 5GB of storage – which is a very small minority – should also have had an email offering a free one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Personal, which includes 1TB of storage. This normally costs £59.99 a year, and is good value if you need that much storage. (Office 365 includes Microsoft Office software as well.) Alternatively, you could buy 50GB of OneDrive storage for $1.99 a month.

Saving your data

Hundreds of millions of OneDrive accounts are involved, so it will take weeks to roll out the new system. However, when it happens, users who are over quota will be notified by email that they have one year to download their data. After that, there are four stages.

1. Your account will function normally for 90 days, to give you plenty of time to download any data that you don’t already have backed up.

2. If you are still over quota after 90 days, you will no longer be able to upload any files. However, you will still have nine months to download your files.

3. If you are still over quota after another nine months, your OneDrive account will be locked. Microsoft says: “That means that you will not be able to access the content in your OneDrive until you take action.” It doesn’t say what action you have to take, but I’d guess it involves selecting which files or folders to delete.

4. If you still haven’t done anything, Microsoft says “your content may be deleted”. (Note that Microsoft says “may” not “will”. However, if you’ve ignored the problem for a year, you can’t really complain if the worst happens.)

Alternative cloud stores

“Cloud storage” just means somebody else’s hard drive, accessible via the internet at much slower speeds than a local hard drive. Hard drives are cheap, so there are dozens of cloud storage services. Alas, they are not all reliable, and they quite often change their terms of service, or leave the business, voluntarily or not. (For example, I used Copy, which closed on May 1.)

Most people use cloud storage that’s bundled with other services. This includes Microsoft’s OneDrive, Amazon Drive, Google Drive, and Apple’s iCloud. In theory, you could just open lots of email accounts and get free storage with each one. However, you’d lose the main attraction, which is storing and sharing files associated with your main email account, and/or documents created with the associated online word processors, spreadsheets etc.

You already have OneDrive, and Amazon would be a good addition. Amazon customers get 5GB of free online storage, or 20GB for £6 per year, while Amazon Prime “now includes free storage in Amazon Drive for your entire photo collection”.

Google Drive may be less useful because the free 15GB includes your Gmail (and I have 14GB of that), and because it’s easy to lose files. Google Photos, like Facebook, also offers unlimited photo storage, but only at reduced resolutions: original photos count against your storage quota. Upgrading Google Drive to 100GB costs $1.99 per month, while 1TB costs $9.99 per month.

Dropbox is by far the best standalone online storage service, but only offers 2GB of free space. Upgrading to 1TB costs £7.99 per month or £79 per year. It’s the best choice if you’re willing to pay for storage.

Since you are mainly storing photos, it would be worth considering a more specialised service. Flickr offers a free 1TB of photo storage, which is more than 500,000 images. The main drawback, for serious photographers, is that it won’t store RAW files.

However, be very careful before using image hosting services, which are oriented towards showing low-resolution images on the web. Most of them are not designed for storing original images for backup purposes.

Moving between clouds

Cloud services are like lobster pots: much easier to get into than out of. In a better world, it would be easy to move files between different cloud drives at terabit per second speeds. As it is, the usual method is to painfully download all your data from one cloud and then even more painfully re-upload it to another cloud.

You only have 25GB of data, so you should be able to upload it all overnight. Ideally, this could be as simple as dragging a collection of files from the OneDrive folder on your PC to your Dropbox folder, or whatever.

But this is such an obvious pain-point, that there are plenty of services that will help you to move data between popular cloud services. Examples include Mover, Odrive, MultCloud, CloudFuze and Cloudsfer. Obviously, you have to trust these services with your data.

Most of these are paid-for services, or charge for larger data transfers. For example, MultCloud is free for up to 2TB of traffic, and it supports most popular services, including OneDrive, Amazon Drive, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and Flickr.

Odrive is designed to “aggregate all your accounts into one system. One password, one application,” which sounds like a good idea. CloudFuze seems to work the same way

Several “cloud managers” are available as apps, usually for Apple’s iOS and Android, because smartphones don’t have enough storage for a download/re-upload solution to work. Examples include Primadesk, Cloudii, Otixo and ZeroPC.

Search for a few reviews and comparisons of cloud storage managers to find one that meets your needs. This will include supporting your chosen cloud services (OneDrive, Flickr etc), platforms (web, iOS, Android), pricing and, if you have privacy concerns, encryption.

Make backups!

Bear in mind Schofield’s Second Law of Computing, which asserts that data doesn’t really exist unless you have at least two copies of it. If your files are only stored in one cloud drive, you don’t have a backup, and you could lose your data at any time. Never assume your data is safe, even if it’s online. Especially if it’s online.

Perhaps the correct answer to your question is: “Who cares what Microsoft does with OneDrive? I already have all my files stored safely offline.”

