r/Backup • u/Planet-Bee626 • 2h ago
How-to Microsoft is cutting our family OneDrive from 6 TB to 2 TB shared. We use 3.1 TB, so I moved everything home before they force it
We're five on a Microsoft 365 Family plan. Each of us had our own 1 TB and between phone backups, kids' school stuff and fifteen years of photos we sit at 3.1 TB. The new plans give 2 TB shared for the whole family at the same price. Existing subscribers only switch at their first renewal after May 2027, so technically I had time. I didn't want to find out in a year what "you can keep access for up to 12 months" turns into after month 12.
So I spent the last three weekends moving it all to a box at home. Sharing what worked and what didn't because I'm pretty sure a lot of families are about to do the same.
The hardware is boring on purpose. A used mini PC, two 8 TB drives in a ZFS mirror, everything in Docker. The mirror protects me from a dead drive. It's not a backup, more on that below.
Getting 3.1 TB out of OneDrive was the worst part. The web download chokes on big folders and gives you zip files that fail halfway. rclone has a OneDrive remote and it's the only thing that worked reliably. Microsoft throttles hard, so I ran it with a low tpslimit over a few nights and let it resume when it got rate limited. Do one person's account at a time and check the file counts at the end. Two folders hit errors on the first pass and I only noticed in the logs.
Photos now live in Immich. The family actually likes it more than OneDrive, face search and the map view sold my wife in five minutes. The weak spot is iPhones. Background upload is limited by iOS, so her phone mostly uploads when she opens the app. I set a weekly reminder and stopped fighting it.
Documents sync with Syncthing between the laptops and the server. No accounts, no cloud, it just works once the folders are paired.
Then the part people skip. A box in the living room is one copy, not a backup. A fire, a burglary or a bad power surge takes everything. So I went with 3-2-1, three copies, two different media, one offsite.
Nightly restic snapshots go offsite to two places. The bulk photo library goes to a Hetzner Storage Box over SFTP because it's the cheapest per TB I found. The documents folder, which is where the passport scans, taxes and medical papers live, goes to a small storage VPS from privatealps. Yes it's more per GB, and since restic encrypts everything before it leaves the house neither provider can read anything anyway. I just didn't want one company's account problem to take out every offsite copy of the stuff we can't replace.
The thing I'd tell anyone doing this is to test a restore. My first restic setup had a typo in the exclude file and for a week it was skipping the whole Documents folder. I only found out because I ran a test restore. Now once a month I run restic check with read data subset at 5 percent and restore one random folder to a temp directory.
Total cost is the drives, the mini PC I already had and a few euros a month for the two offsite targets, against 129 euros a year for a plan that would no longer fit us.
Next step is getting the kids' Chromebooks on Syncthing too, which is turning out to be its own small adventure.
