Microsoft doubles OneDrive storage to match Google Drive, ups Office 365 to 1TB

OneDrive
OneDrive, now bigger

Microsoft announced today that it will be increasing OneDrive storage plans to match Google's for everyone, including free users.

They will see their allowance more than doubled from 7GB to 15GB from next month, although whether legacy users who received 25GB of free storage will see any sizable increase remains to be seen.

In addition, all versions of Office 365 will come with 1TB of OneDrive storage per user, in line with what it offered business users: that's 5TB for £7.99 ($9.99, AUD10.99) for the five-seat Office 365 Home and £5.99 ($6.99, AUD7.99) for the personal edition.

Two 4TB HDDs (one used as backup) would cost you roughly £200 (about $320, AUD350) or just about the same monthly outlay over two years.

Cheap cloud storage

The price of storage blocks also drops considerably as competition from other cloud vendors heats up. 100GB now costs £1.99 per month ($1.99, AUD2.19) while a 200GB slice will cost twice that amount.

Writing on Microsoft's OneDrive blog, Omar Shahine, the company's Group Program Manager, revealed that 75% of computer users tend to have less than 15GB of files stored on their PCs.

Users can receive up to 5GB for free for 10 successful referrals as well as an extra 3GB for using the camera backup feature.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.