Is Microsoft OneDrive free?
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So this turns out to be a surprisingly
common question with a surprisingly not-so-bvious answer.
It's not a yes or a no.
The answer is yes.
But to a point, let's dive in.
Microsoft OneDrive is, in fact, free.
You can, with any Microsoft account,
access Microsoft OneDrive and begin using it today.
It's their cloud storage service, and with a free account, you get 5GB of storage.
That means that as soon as you try
and upload more than 5GB, it will start to fail.
Things won't synchronize, and so forth.
But the idea is that you have, just by virtue of having a Microsoft
account, 5GB of free OneDrive online storage.
And for the record, Microsoft account.
If you've got a Hotmail address, that's a Microsoft account.
If you've got an Outlook.com address, that's a Microsoft account.
If you're using it to log into your PC, that's a Microsoft account.
You get the idea.
Microsoft accounts are easy to get.
Anybody can go create an Outlook.com account for free.
And 5GB of OneDrive storage is yours right then and there.
Now, there are, of course, paid plans.
There are two families of paid plans.
One is what they call OneDrive,
Standalone for a certain amount, a month or a year.
You get 100GB, in other words, 20 times the storage.
And that's all you get.
You just get more storage. So that's if you
don't want the other plan I'm about to talk about, all you need is more storage.
Now, I'm not mentioning prices here only
because the prices specifically, they change.
They change often, they change occasionally.
Whatever I tell you today is probably
going to be wrong by the time you see this.
Bottom line, though,
is that I do have a link, either in the notes below or
on the article from which this video is based that will take you to the current
Microsoft OneDrive pricing page and you can see what the numbers are.
But like I said, OneDrive Stand alone is conceptually the simplest.
You get 100GB of storage for a certain amount of additional money every month.
The other category is one that's not as obvious.
And honestly, because of what it is, a lot of people hesitate.
And that is Microsoft 365.
When you sign up for the Microsoft 365
subscription, you get at least a terabyte of OneDrive storage.
Now, there are two plans within Microsoft 365 that make sense.
One is Microsoft 365 personal.
You get to install Microsoft Office on your machine.
You get all the storage.
You get a bunch of other services.
It's fairly cost effective.
It's fairly inexpensive.
All things considered, I know of individuals who have signed up
for Microsoft 365 not for Microsoft Office,
but because it is such a cost effective way of getting a terabyte worth of ondrive
storage, the other is Microsoft 365 family.
With that subscription, which is not a bunch more,
you actually have the opportunity to share Microsoft 365 subscriptions with,
I think up to five additional people in your family, so to speak.
Each one of them gets a terabyte of storage.
Another way to look at that is if you were
to create those five family accounts for yourself, you could have a total
of six terabytes of storage, again for not a lot of money.
So my recommendation,
if you're on the fence at all about Microsoft OneDrive or even
Microsoft Office is to really take a close look at these subscription plans
and understand just how much value you're getting for the money.
Like I said, the amount of storage alone, honestly, is worth the price.
But even if it's not, considering you're getting all
of Microsoft office in the package on multiple machines and potentially
for multiple family members, it's really a hard deal to say no to.
So what's right for you?
Well, obviously I'm a little bit biased because if you use Microsoft office,
if you were to use Microsoft OneDrive and in need of 5GB of storage
and the Microsoft 365 plans, to me it's a Slam dunk.
To me, it's a no brainer. It's one of those things where it just
makes so much financial sense for what you get.
On the other hand, if you don't use office,
say you're all about open office or you're all about Google drive and Google docs
and those kinds of things, maybe you don't need them.
Maybe you're using other services.
Maybe you use Dropbox, maybe you use Google drive.
The bottom line there is that if you already got a Microsoft account,
which you may very well do since Microsoft has pushed it so strongly for logging
into windows ten and windows eleven, you've already got 5GB free no money.
That could easily be enough if you've got other resources or if it's just not your
thing to try and store things in the cloud.
But my recommendation that you seriously consider using OneDrive or maybe one
of the others for some what I call near real time backup into the cloud.
Remember, anything you put in your
OneDrive is automatically almost instantly uploaded to the cloud.
That's real time backup.
I find that really lucrative.
Every time I hit save on a document,
if it's in my OneDrive folder up to the cloud, it goes.
So no matter what happens to my PC, it's backed up.
Consider it.
Hopefully I've given you some things to think about.
At least you kind of get my opinion on it.
Microsoft 365 is, in my opinion, well worth the money.
But now you know.
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