There is good news and bad news about the Windows 10 release on July 29. The good news is that you will have an entire year to upgrade your Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 system for free. The bad news is you should probably wait until the last minute to make the upgrade because of numerous problems everyone has found with Windows 10.

Microsoft has become very cavalier about many of the issues people have with its desktop strategies. It wouldn’t be so bad if the difficulties were not so obvious and seemingly mundane to fix. The banality is as representative of the new regime at Microsoft; they’re laid back in such a way that they cannot be bothered with doing anything with urgency. That “strategy” probably serves a bigger purpose.

This was expressed at the various Microsoft dev conferences, where the company claimed(Opens in a new window) it will eventually fix the 20,000 files limit on the free OneDrive cloud service that is sold as either a terabyte or “unlimited” space for users of Office 365. I probably have 100,000 files on my machine alone, it’s not that hard a number to reach.

For example, for any given year my photo collection averages 4,000 images, taking up between 20-25GB. This means I can only store five years of images before OneDrive fails. My data usage on the virtual terabyte drive would be around 120GB. Someone is obviously playing games here. Where is my terabyte?

Two can play at that game. I merely zip a whole year of photos and store one lone 25GB file, thus using a single file rather than 4,000 files. I have not tried doing this yet. I’m sure the upload would be painful and possibly fail. But it’s a possible workaround if I want to back up years’ worth of files. Of course the limit on a single file is 10GB. Oops. I guess Microsoft already thought of that possibility.

Plus, according to Microsoft watchdogs, this trick may not work unless the zip files and all the other data I want to store in the cloud are mirrored on my Windows 10 machine.

Here is a good summary from Woody Leonard writing in InfoWorld(Opens in a new window): “In Windows 8.1, File Explorer shows you all of the files in OneDrive. In Windows 10, you’ll see only the files that have been synced to your machine. The demise of this ‘smart files’ feature means that, until Microsoft fixes the problem, you will have files inside OneDrive that don’t show up in File Explorer or in many apps that access OneDrive.”

This totally blows. With my Word documents, as they accumulate, I back them up to portable backup drives and move the originals to OneDrive as an active archive. Now I have to keep them synced at all times on my machine? I thought the idea of OneDrive was for it to be the repository, not a sync center.

We’ll see what actually happens with Windows 10. I’m hoping that this gets resolved so I can use OneDrive the way I want to use it.

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Someone at Microsoft is doing the math on this cloud nonsense. Right now there are approximately 1 billion users of Microsoft Office. There are far fewer using Office 365, but that will change and eventually there will be a billion of those folks. Disregarding the idea of unlimited storage (which implies over a terabyte a person), merely multiply the free terabyte of storage by one billion users—you have the potential storage requirement beyond a petabyte, beyond Exabyte. It’s the mythical zettabyte(Opens in a new window) with 21 zeros after it in bytes.

Considering that all Internet traffic is set to reach 1.3 zettabytes by 2016, it is hard to imagine how Microsoft Office traffic, with all the back and forth movement of files, will manage its own zettabyte. On 100 million 10TB drives? Where is this zettabyte server farm going to be placed? How much energy will it consume?

Now you can see why there are these limitations. Especially to what Microsoft promises. The company has no intention of anyone getting a real terabyte or anything “unlimited.” This false advertising needs a government investigation. Is anyone at the FTC paying attention?

As for new shenanigans to be introduced by Windows 10…wait 11 months to let it all shake out before you upgrade. Then hope for the best.