Grandfathered into the 25GB OneDrive plan? Microsoft has not reduced your storage

When Microsoft introduced SkyDrive, it provided every customer with 25GB of storage space for free. The company later reduced this to only 7GB, but existing users were grandfathered into their plans and allowed to retain the old amount of cloud space.

Now the company has quietly reduced that down to only 15GB -- sort of. No official announcement was made regarding this move -- users simply learn of it by checking available storage within their accounts. But all is not what it appears to be at first.

The move comes on the heels of Microsoft adding 1TB of extra "free" storage to the accounts of Office 365 subscribers and upping free accounts to 15GB. Customers also receive bits of added free space in other ways -- for instance a camera roll bonus adds 3GB, and a "loyalty bonus" adds another 10GB. The latter is where that space went. It's still a strange move, and can lend to initial confusion for some who will spot it.

BetaNews reached out to Microsoft for comment and clarification on this, and received the following official statement:

"Early OneDrive adopters who received 25GB of free storage will continue to enjoy their free 25GB of storage. However, it will be split into two tiers within the account: 15GB of free storage and 10GB of 'loyalty bonus' storage".

So, the good news is the space didn't go away, but only got reclassified. The change was spotted by Richard Hay, who is a long-time Microsoft writer and MVP.