In late August 2023, Microsoft announced a novelty important for users OneDrive. This is a change in the behavior of online storage services which affects the ways in which it is managed storage space available on Microsoft cloud servers.
Photos stored in the Galleria of OneDrive now point to those stored in the album photographic. The Redmond company had communicated that from 16 October 2023, it would also consider it occupied space in the gallery. Result? Photos stored on OneDrive would have risked consuming the double the space. Indeed, if the same photo were inserted into multiple different albums, it would have taken up even more cloud space.
Microsoft had committed to granting a amount of storage bonuses to allow users to manage the situation, fall within the purchased “threshold” or buy a more generous cloud storage plan in terms of space.
OneDrive: Microsoft backtracks and no longer applies the change
With a real U-turn, Microsoft announces that the changes that should have come into force starting from October 16th are cancelled. “On August 31, 2023, we began communicating an upcoming update to our cloud storage infrastructure that would result in a change to how OneDrive photo and photo album data is counted against your overall cloud storage quota“, writes Microsoft. “This change was scheduled to be implemented on October 16, 2023. Based on the feedback we received, we have changed our approach and will no longer be implementing this update. We will keep the current photo album experience as it is today“.
In other words, from the middle of October nothing will change in managing photos in the Galleria and OneDrive albums. Images saved through these tools will continue to be counted only once and there is no double or even multiple counting.
Experience teaches us: counting the size of Outlook attachments had caused quite a few problems
In February 2023, Microsoft made a rather incisive change to its management policy storage quota OneDrive. The surgery caused quite a few problems. In fact, we know that it is available space on OneDrive it is also used to manage Outlook attachments and email message content. In November 2022, anticipating Microsoft’s “move”, we reported that Outlook.com attachments would reduce OneDrive space.
Since Microsoft has started calculating the weight of attachments of Outlook by deducting the amount of space occupied from the OneDrive storage quota, many users suddenly found themselves exceeding this threshold. Result? Inability to send and receive emails due to the temporary deactivation of the service.
Thus, adopting the comments of many users, Microsoft has decided to no longer implement the new change on OneDrive. The objective is evidently to avoid situations similar to the one that arose from February onwards.