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Microsoft Adds New OneDrive Restriction, Makes Google Drive Worth a Try

Redmond limits the amount of data users can share

Jun 26, 2016 06:29 GMT  ·  By
Microsoft is offering only 5GB of free storage to new users
   Microsoft is offering only 5GB of free storage to new users

Microsoft’s OneDrive is going through some pretty significant changes these days, and after the company lowered the amount of free storage offered to users from 15GB to 5GB, it now appears that another restriction has been quietly implemented.

Deskmodder writes that Microsoft has introduced a data sharing limitation in OneDrive, so users might get an error telling them that the threshold has been reached.

At this point, it’s not yet very clear what this threshold actually is, but the German site claims that users reaching it get a message saying that they have “reached the limit for approvals” and that they should “try to share with fewer people or sharing fewer large files.”

Furthermore, Microsoft gives them a second option should they want to share unlimited amounts of data, and this involves purchasing an Office 365 subscription that also comes with some other goodies, including access to Redmond’s cloud-based productivity suite.

Google Drive should really thank Microsoft

With a new limitation in place, there’s no doubt that Microsoft is making other cloud-based storage services more appealing, and the two benefiting the most from this are Google Drive and Dropbox.

An increasing number of users see Google Drive as a more appealing solution and replacement for OneDrive, especially because Microsoft is making changes that directly affect the way they work with their files and share content across the web. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Google Drive is so much better than OneDrive. Google offers 15 GB for free to all users, but it goes without saying that Drive is deeply connected to all Google services. And furthermore, Microsoft users switching to Google are losing the integration with Microsoft’s products, which is clearly a major drawback, given the fact that Redmond has baked the service into the majority of its apps, including in Windows itself.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft for more details about this OneDrive restriction to find out if it’s new and how exactly it works, and we will update the article when more information is offered.

Thanks for the tip, Jer!