If you are subscribed to Office 365 Home, Personal or University, your OneDrive storage recently got a big boost. Subscribers to Office 365 Business got access to an extra 1 TB of free OneDrive storage earlier this month, and now Personal and Home accounts are also getting a free terabyte in the consumer OneDrive.
Confirm your storage status
To check if your storage has been upgraded, sign in to OneDrive using the Microsoft account that is tied to your Office 365 subscription. At the lower left corner of the screen, you should be able to see your current available storage, which is the amount of total available storage minus the storage currently in use. Details about your storage size are available when you click the ‘Get More Storage’ link at the bottom left of the screen.
Getting extra storage from the Office 365 subscription depends on the type of subscription. For instance, the 1 TB of extra storage is only available for subscribers of Office 365 Personal. Whereas for an Office 365 Home subscription, which allows you to share your subscriber benefits with a maximum of four people in your household, every person with whom you share your account gets an extra 1 TB of storage in their OneDrive account.
Office 365 non-subscribers
It is possible to purchase OneDrive storage without an Office 365 subscription; however, it will cost significantly more than if it was part of the software subscription. Users can get 100GB of storage for $1.99 and 200 GB at $3.99. In addition, OneDrive users without Office 365 subscriptions will now get 15GB of storage for free, up from 7 GB.
Bear in mind that in case you do not renew your Office 365 subscription, any files added to OneDrive will still and always be available. However, the available storage will shrink below the amount of storage in use. When the storage in use exceeds your available storage, you will not be able to add new files without first deleting current files to increase the available storage to a positive number.
Benefits
The new Microsoft offer is designed to make this offering more competitive against other cloud-storage providers. It is especially advantageous because OneDrive storage does not need to be distributed between different apps, and users don’t need to do anything to get their 1 TB of extra storage.