OneDrive for Business is now 5 TB

If you’re an Office 365 Enterprise customer, there is news from Microsoft.  OneDrive for Business storage will be increased from 1 TB to 5 TB allocated storage per user.  This is some good news in the wake of Microsoft announcing it was not going to honor its claim of unlimited storage for OneDrive (personal not business). 

Who is getting this update?  Unfortunately this increased storage is only available to premium Office 365 Enterprise subscriptions.  If you are using the E1 plan, you are out of luck!

  • Office 365 Enterprise E3, E4 and E5
  • Office 365 Government E3, E4 and E5
  • Office 365 Education
  • OneDrive for Business Plan 2 and SharePoint Online Plan 2

 

If you’re not familiar with OneDrive for Business here is a quick overview.  OneDrive for Business is cloud-based storage included in all of the Office 365 Enterprise offerings (E1, E3, E4, E5).  Unlike the personal version of OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), OneDrive for Business uses SharePoint as it’s back-end storage.  The look and feel is very similar to the other cloud storage providers (DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.).  Accessing your files can be done using either the sync tool, or through the Office 365 web portal.

 

 

But wait, there is a new client too

Microsoft has also released an updated sync client for OneDrive for Business.  One of the big roadblocks previously in OneDrive for Business was the ability to only synchronize small files (under 2 GB), and a maximum of 20,000 files total.  The file size limitation has been increased to allow synchronization of 10 GB files with no limit on the number of files.

Before you jump to upgrade, there are some downsides.  It sounds like this isn’t just another version of the Groove sync client, but rather a complete rewrite of the software.  This is a new generation of synchronization clients for OneDrive for Business, and does not yet have all of the functionality you may be used to.  Here is additional information on the new sync client for OneDrive for Business.

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