Why Is Storage Changing?  

Over the past several years, Microsoft has provided the university with relatively unlimited storage: over 12,000 terabytes, which is similar to if you downloaded an audio file of the Ball State Fight Song a little under 7 million times. However, over the past couple of years, Microsoft has changed the licensing for universities, and, in Ball State’s case, the provided storage has been limited to 375 TB of storage for the entire campus as of August 2025. At the time of this change, Ball State was only utilizing 1,120 TB total of the 12,000 TB limit, but downsizing to 375 TB required massive cleanup and migration.  

Due to the drastic change and short timeframe, Microsoft offered storage packs, in increments of 10 TB of additional storage, and the university bought 70 packs. While this was not a sustainable tactic, it provided time to meet the 375 TB limit and moved the deadline back a year to August 2026.   

A transition of this size will inevitably hit some hurdles, and the IT transition team has been working through all those obstacles as they pop up. 

IT’s Current Strategy  

Since being informed of the storage change, Ball State has done several things to manage the storage issue without disrupting work:  

  • All standard accounts now have a 3 GB storage limit compared to the original 5 TB limit. This is just under 6% of the original quota. This limit has been placed on over 50,000 accounts. 
  • Active files are being transitioned over to Box.com, a platform similar to OneDrive in terms of sharing and collaboration abilities. All university employees will automatically receive accounts on Box, but students only gain access by putting in a request to the Tech Center. 
  • The limited number of accounts using over 1TB of space will be migrated over to an on-premises solution. The on-premises solution is not accessible from off campus (without a VPN connection). Additionally, departments can use the storage at no cost until July of 2027 
  • Ball State has partnered with Amazon to leverage Amazon’s Web Service (AWS) called Glacier for archival storage. This is for content that needs to be preserved but is accessed infrequently. 

The Migration Process 

IT is actively managing migrations in small batches to ensure a smooth transition. Users with more than 10 GB but less than 1TB of data in OneDrive are being systematically moved to Box.com or to on-premises storage for those with over 1TB of data. Users who meet the criteria will receive an advance notification of the transition. IT then copies the data over to the new platform in the background. Then, the old OneDrive account is placed in “read-only” mode. Finally, IT runs a final sync, verifies the files, and removes the old data from OneDrive 1-2 weeks after the final synchronization. 

So far, IT has already migrated around 2,700 accounts, accounting for over 495 TB of data. As a result, OneDrive usage is down to 418 TB of data.  

Remember… 

OneDrive isn’t going away. Everyone will still have access to their personal OneDrive accounts, but the level of storage will be strictly capped at 3 GB.  

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to the IT Help Desk.