One of the biggest business cloud file storage services, Dropbox, won"t be giving its business customers unlimited storage space anymore. The Dropbox Advanced plans will slowly move away from that generous amount of storage, and it"s all due to some bad actors.
In a blog post, Dropbox stated that some people were getting the unlimited Advance plans not to store files but for other purposes. Some used it to mine cryptocurrency, and others got it so a number of "unrelated individuals" could access it for personal use. Dropbox stated some users even tried to sell their storage amounts.
The company added:
In recent months, we’ve seen a surge of this behavior in the wake of other services making similar policy changes. We’ve observed that customers like these frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers.
Dropbox stated it would also be hard to enforce its policies to keep these kinds of users from exploiting the unlimited space it provided.
Starting today, new Dropbox Advanced customers will get 15TB of shared storage for three licenses. Each additional license will get 5TB of additional storage.
Current customers who use less than 35TB of storage per license will be able to keep that amount plus 5TB of additional pooled cloud storage, for at least five years at the same price. Dropbox says that represents over 99 percent of its Advanced subscribers.
For those subscribers who use more than 35TB of storage per license, Dropbox will allow them to keep that amount, plus 5TB of additional pooled cloud storage, for up to one year at no additional cost. The company will offer advice to help transition those customers to lower storage space options.
This news comes a few months after Dropbox announced a large number of layoffs at the company that affected 16 percent of its total workforce.