Cloud - someone else's computer, and you dance to their tune...

Most of that 'dark' data though could be migrated to tape archive and consume no power, just with a 15 min or so wait if it is ever needed and has to be brought back to network access. Some storage systems allow that to happen automatically based on rules for last access times, etc, but presumably MS can't/won't do that, either due to stupid file indexing refreshing access, or since getting big users to pay more is a better route, and damn the environment!

Archived data is only unused until it is needed.

Data does not achieve worth through read- and write-cycles. Microsoft may not understand this, but there are a lot of other things that Microsof does not appear to understand as well.

"No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody,"

- Bill Gates (allegedly)

In the meantime, affected users have taken to social media to express their displeasure at the news. One noted that "the implications for research integrity are massive" thanks to retention requirements for research data that can't simply be stashed on a personal drive due, in part, to the aforementioned security risks.

Research students with retention requirements make up a very small percentage of college students, so I'm going to be like Bill and say the vast majority of students won't be affected by a 20GB limit on their OneDrive.

"Microsoft’s storage reduction is driven by security risks associated with large amounts of potentially forgotten confidential or sensitive information and data."

This is nonsense as a student's account is terminated after final exams or before graduation. If McGill University isn't doing this, they need to hire some new admins. There simply isn't a mountain of forgotten sensitive data out there

"This is nonsense as a student's account is terminated after final exams or before graduation."

Most schools now let former students keep their accounts for life. There's no reason not to.

"If McGill University isn't doing this, they need to hire some new admins."

And unfortunately it is not a decision often made by "admins" that one can simply replace to somehow fix this mentality, it's the upper bureaucracy.

The world ain't so simple.

Really? My uni deletes every account of former students 6 months after they've left, I assummed it was common practice.

I promise I'm not trying to start a "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch...

I worked for a university a few years ago, and erroneously got put on a "this person has left, begin $LIST_OF_IT_ACTIONS" list at one point.

Fortunately(!), the first of these actions was to tell me I had 48 hours to save any emails I wanted to since that was how long I had before BIG RED BUTTON time.

Afterwards, they said that part of it was ensuring that foo@[uni].ac.uk addresses weren't abused by folk pretending to be still academic-adjacent.

They allow email to be kept as an alumnus privilege, sometimes, but not storage.

Can you point me to a university that states they give free storage for life?

Important data should be stored on your own drives, not on somebody else's.

And claiming there's more of a "security risk" keeping data on local disk instead of somebody else's disk is absolutely idiotic. I'm thinking a 'researcher' needs their degree revoked.

Depends whose security and what kind of security we're considering. Maybe the M$ answer to these questions is really "the security of our revenue stream".

This could be legitimate as Microsoft has powerful retention, governance, access control, loss prevention, and other such data features. Not saying you can't implement this in a local netwotk (you can) but the buy-in for these features is real and they do work.

Maybe but most of the data in Student home folders and OneDrives is personal with a large amount consisting of pictures, videos and ripped DVDs.

I say this as someone who spent 10 years managing this.

The minority will keep some relevant material in OneDrive, mostly because it can be accessed across devices.

Whether it is on your own disks or a cloud drive there will not be any backup unless something has been implemented.

In terms of cloud drives that is not that common, even now.

How the hell do they know? Even if they monitor file accesses, who's to say a file that hasn't been accessed for a while is not some essential archive that could be needed in emergency (e.g. the master incident response plan)?

quote: How the hell do they know?

They don't. It's BS. Off the shelf justifications: Saving the planet, national security. They just want to reduce the freebies.

Corporates: Amateur evil. Governments: Professional evil.

That said, 20Gb should be enough for most students (excluding movie rips and porn), and most unis will close accounts when they go. Plus any sensible researcher will keep a few backup drives with their stuff on. Only idiots trust their data to Uni servers or the cloud.

But shepherding and herding other people's data turns out to be so ... boring ...

> "Stored files that are no longer in use, have an impact on our carbon footprint with over half of all data stored by organizations not serving a useful purpose."

True, but I reckon that once a student leaves university their account and files get deleted after some kind of grace period.

Are they implying that giving 1TB of data to each permanent scholar is too taxing in the long run?

Some universities grant student account access "forever" or some similar diminution. This pool of students may include applicants, not just enrolled or even accepted students. Regardless of whether or not this is the right thing to do, it certainly happens a lot.

So considering thousands of students register to every major university every semester, you can see how quickly this escalates into the ZB.

Source: I have worked at multiple universities and they all have had policies like this, with student accounts in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Uh, I see. My uni (University of Padua in Italy) deletes every former student's account six months after they've left.

This might explain why the associated Office 365 account comes with 1TB of space instead of 100GB.

Well McGill have ~40,000 students and 5000 staff according to Wikipedia.

100TB / 20GB per user = 5000 users

MS cost for additional storage = $300 per TB per month so they'll already be forking out a lot of extra money per month just to maintain 20GB per user.

When MS started offering MS Outlook365 for free to universities they promised that they wouldn't charge

Yeah right

A1 was free for an unlimited number of individual users last time I looked

A3 was $2.50 per month per student and $3.50(?) per month per staff member

Can't remember what A5 cost...

100TB for free is free. Can't moan really to have to pay beyond that. It's still a ~£300 / user / a year platform for almost nothing. And at least it's not Google Crapps - at least you will likely actually be using the experience in your future career.

You absolutely can moan when they are essentially picking yout pockets where they promised up and down they wouldn't. Just like VMware prices being jacked 300% or more when Broadcom promised there would be no major changes, corporations' promises are worthless, and contract renewals change on a whim.

DID they decide to go lower than Microsoft's limits? Doesn't seem like it to me. 100TB at 20GB per user is only 5000 users. From a quick Google, they have 35,000 students.

Was a thing even in the 1990s if not a lot earlier.

Basically LRU files migrated to ever slower, cheaper storage until a friendly tape robot (Marvin?) placed the tape containing your unloved files and its fellow travellers in a storage facility. Of course retrieval times were going to be glacial. :)

I certainly advocate data management awareness and policies in academia as I know from bitter experience the sheer quantity of crud (old core files, compiler object files (.o) and binaries for long gone architectures, plus the usual downloaded movie files etc etc) found in user's home directories and project areas. Still very difficult to get across the difference between backup and archive.

Some data such as observational data can be irreproducible and should be stored forever even though it might not have been accessed for decades. There are enough stories about researchers having trouble reading 1/2 inch open reel tapes* to recover decades old data for reprocessing in the light of newer techniques and theories to validate this assertion.

Experimental data while hopefully reproducible might well have originally been from extremely costly experiments to perform and remain so. In this case the data has a dollar value which would certainly exceed the archival costs.

Data generated from computer models while eminently reproducible might take weeks or months but that would decrease as technology advances. Still CPU-Core-hours costs in energy, cost of hardware etc (TCO) which ultimately can be rendered in dollars and assessed against storage costs.

Not that any of this has anything to do with Microsoft's penny pinching shenanigans. Seems to me that these monstrous US tech companies are really trying to kneecap tertiary education and research in their own nation. Not something the PRC for all its myriad faults is foolish enough to permit there.

* And a variety of defunct media types (zip drives, magnetoptical drives, 8" floppies, tape technologies and formats etc) which are largely a lost cause. Even reading a scsi-3 disk with from an old linux host with ext2 file systems can be near impossible. "You can't get the wood you know." (Henry Crun)

MS365 A3/A5 licences cover all age groups for schools and Universities. Uni's clearly have different reqiurements, but are treated like primary and secondary schools - it's a PITA always - Uni's miss out because some features are excluded for under 18s other things are foisted on us because that's how MS want a School to operate.

BTW, Storage licencing - basically a free lump + a per STAFF quota. So 5000 staff if licenced for A3 - gets 100TB + 50GB * 5000 = 350TB, or A5 - 100TB + 100GB * 5000 - so 600TB to cover pretty much all of MS365 storage. After that it's more ££££ for additional storage - yes be nice to do hierarchical storage into cheaper Azure etc options - but no tools to do that nicely at present :(

Just to clarify the MS storage calculation:

A tenant gets 100TB for free.

For every paid A3 or A5 license you get more storage quota. BUT, all the free licenses (Student, Alumni, A1) all count AGAINST your storage usage.

You can run an education Office 365 tenancy with no paid licenses, in which case you'll get just 100TB of storage for everything.

A couple of years back I was working in a boarding school, some of our kids managed to fill the 1TB OneDrive storage with whatever kids fill storage with, as a department we decided not to look too closely at their files.

It wasn't a problem until the school leadership and Governors decided we needed a robust backup stratergy, so we purchased sufficient storage at another cloud vendor and proceded to copy the data across. A fortnight later the backup was still running, and I don't think it had actually finished when I left at the end of the month...

When I was at Uni we had 100KB storage for each engineering student's project. Fortunately, each year the computer centre allocated 200 new accounts for that year's intake, but there were rarely more than 160 new students so the last 30-40 were unused. Since they conveniently used a simple algorithm-generated initial password, it wasn't difficult to grab a few spare accounts to store games, etc. in. Having more than 3 was considered to be greedy, though :-)

The article mentions A1 licenses - those are the bottom tier and would typically be used for school kids and undergraduates (and not all of them, necessarily). I would expect staff and postgrad students / researchers to have at least A3 and in some cases A5 licenses. Do the restrictions apply to them as well? Not clear from the article.

If it's just restricting the space provided to school kids and undergraduates, I don't really see the problem in most cases - those on courses which require more would no doubt be provided with it (e.g. video production courses and the like, which would need more).