How To: Get 1 TB of OneDrive Storage & Office 365 for Free from Microsoft

Just last month, Microsoft announced plans to take away a huge chunk of storage from the free tier of their OneDrive cloud service, and users are understandably quite upset. At the same time, they reneged on an offer to give Office365 users unlimited OneDrive storage, and instead, will only be offering 1 TB of storage.

After the uproar this caused, Microsoft had a slight change of heart today. They're still sticking to their guns about the storage options going forward, but if you're already using additional storage as part of the Office365 promotion, you'll be able to keep it for 12 months. On top of that, there are two additional consolation offers, which I'll go over in more detail below.

Get a Free Year of Office 365 & 1 TB of Storage

None of these changes will take place until "early next year," so for the next month or so, everything will stay the same. But when the switch eventually happens, users that were on the free tier of OneDrive will see their maximum storage capacity drop from 15 GB down to just 5 GB.

To smooth out this transition, Microsoft will offer to bump any user who is over the new 5-gigabyte storage cap up to a 1-terabyte storage limit for one year. At the same time, they'll also be throwing in a free 12 month subscription to Office 365—all because you were over the new storage cap.

What this all boils down to is that if you want to get a terabyte of OneDrive storage and an Office 365 subscription for free, all you need to do is make sure you have over 5 GB of files stored on your OneDrive account. If you meet this requirement, you'll receive an email early next year with instructions on how to upgrade your account for the next 12 months.

Keep Your 15 GB OneDrive Storage Limit Indefinitely

If you'd rather just keep your 15 gigabyte storage limit indefinitely and skip the temporary Office 365 stuff, Microsoft has a second peace offering that will also allow you to keep any camera roll bonuses. Just head to the following link at any point before January 31, 2016, then click the "Keep your free storage" button:

• Click here to keep your free 15 GB OneDrive storage tier indefinitely

Understand, though, that using this second offer will automatically preclude you from being able to take advantage of the first offer. The free year of Office 365 only applies to users who would have lost files due to the change to a 5-gigabyte storage tier in OneDrive, and since you're upgrading to 15 GB, this would no longer be the case.

Which offer did you take advantage of—free Office 365 for a year or 15 GB of OneDrive storage indefinitely? Tell us about it in the comment section below.