Be warned: Microsoft's big OneDrive storage cull has started

Microsoft has begun culling OneDrive consumer accounts, reducing free storage limits from 15GB to 5GB – or from 30GB to 5GB for those who had the 15GB camera roll bonus, too – so be warned, you should waste no time in backing up your stored files if you don't want to lose them (or most of them, rather).

Indeed, the reduction has already begun, and as the Register reports, the process will run through to July 27.

Although it was possible to opt out of this cull as we reported at the end of last year, and back at the time, those who followed the link to preserve their free storage have nothing to worry about.

If you missed out on saving your 15GB (or 30GB) allowance, we can't stress that you really need to act fast – although if files are being stripped away from your OneDrive storage, you should receive a notification from Microsoft to tell you that this is happening (though it's possible to miss these things – just as some folks doubtless missed the option to opt out of this storage slashing measure in the first place).

Movie maniacs

All this first kicked off last November when some OneDrive users who had unlimited storage (thanks to Office 365) were accused of abusing this privilege and storing things like entire movie collections online, with some individuals apparently taking up as much as 75TB.

As ever, it turned out that unlimited didn't really mean unlimited…

At any rate, while dealing with those 'fair-usage-flaunters' Microsoft further decided that the free storage limit should also be reduced from 15GB, which unsurprisingly caused quite the backlash – and prompted Redmond to give folks the opportunity to opt out of this cut, as mentioned.

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