Microsoft is removing a very popular feature from OneDrive

It’s official, Microsoft has just confirmed the withdrawal of a feature present since 2021 within OneDrive. And this will be effective from the end of March. We tell you everything.

For more than 15 years now (and yes), Microsoft has allowed OneDrive users to have online storage space. Like Google Drive, the Microsoft service offers a free offer (5 GB), but only a paid subscription allows you to have storage worthy of the name, with in particular 1 TB available with the Microsoft offer. 365 Staff (69 €/year).

The end of import via URL

It was in 2021, as part of its Preview program, Microsoft launched a new feature for OneDrive. This then allowed users to save a file from a website on their space, without having to download the latter upstream.

To do this, all you had to do was copy the URL in question to the OneDrive platform, so that the latter automatically downloads the desired file, before storing it. Simple, practical and effective… but obviously not popular enough.

An unpopular function… and too expensive

Indeed, according to the American giant, this functionality has never really managed to find its audience among OneDrive users. In addition, it imposed maintenance costs that were clearly too high for Microsoft, which decided to remove it as of March 29.

Patrick Rodgers, Product Manager at Microsoft, states in particular “ We found that this feature has low usage and high maintenance costs. It doesn’t align with our vision of OneDrive, as a cloud storage service that syncs your files across all your devices “.

Obviously, as of March 29, if uploading files from a URL will no longer be available, files uploaded this way will not be affected, and will remain stored by the service.

Remember that the OneDrive service recently made significant changes, including in particular a complete overhaul of its interface, called New OneDrive by Microsoft.

Source : Neowin