Get 3GB of extra OneDrive space by enabling Camera backup
Microsoft announced a storage upgrade for all SkyDrive OneDrive customers recently. Free customers who signed up recently for the service get a bump to 15 Gigabyte from the previous 7 Gigabyte, while paying customers one to 1 Terabyte of storage space in the cloud.
While that is still no where near the 25 Gigabyte that old SkyDrive users received back in the days when OneDrive was still named SkyDrive, it is a step in the right direction.
If the storage increase is not enough for your needs, then you can increase the space further for free. One option to do so is to install the OneDrive application for Android and enable its Camera backup feature on it.
If you do that, you get three Gigabytes of additional -- permanent -- storage space in the cloud.
Before you do, you are probably wondering what camera upload does. It basically ships all photos and videos that you take with your device's camera to the cloud, or more precisely, to OneDrive so that they are available on the Internet and also on devices that you sync the data to as well.
Comparable services such as Dropbox or Google Drive are offering similar camera upload options.
Note that video uploads have been integrated in a recent version of the OneDrive application that got updated just days ago.
The OneDrive application should display a prompt to you on first start after the update that informs you about the 3 Gigabyte promotion.
To get the extra storage, tap on the "turn on" button. Please note that this is only awarded to you if you have not received extra storage previously for doing so.
Videos and photos are only uploaded to the cloud when the device is connected to Wi-Fi. You can change the behavior in the camera backup settings.
Here you can enable uploads while connected to a mobile network, and disable video uploads as well by disabling the include videos option in the settings.
You can check the Manage Storage page on the OneDrive website which details whether you have received the camera roll bonus already.
Another option to get more storage on OneDrive is to refer other users to it. You get 0.5 Gigabyte for every referred user up to a maximum of 5 Gigabyte.
Plus you don’t have to keep the camera backup on/active, you can turn it off later and still keep the extra 3gb.
Thanks for sharing, going to do this now!
i’m still waiting for the day more services just offer 50+gb of cloud storage for free. 15gb might be nice for a couple of photos and documents, but for backups that’s a bit scarce. that’s why i’ve backed up about 40gb of my photos to mega and don’t even bother anymore with other services.
other people may have other uses and with the recent price drops even paying a couple of bucks to get 100gb seems affordable, but keeping my photos safe is the most important of my backup jobs and until now mega is the best choice for that.
edit: and giving users just 500mb for recommending the service is a bit of a joke, to be honest.
I personally wouldn’t rely on a free service for backups, especially if it’s personal data. If you are serious about offsite backing up, and care about security, you should invest in crashplan imo.
But besides that, there are a lot of services that are pretty damn cheap for the space they give you, like Google Drive 1TB for $10/mo
Every time someone mentions how cheap something per month is it seems like they have this inclination to believe that everyone else has the same budget they do. $120 a year may be nothing to you but for others it could be a really big expense.
No, I wasn’t saying $10/month is cheap, i’m saying it’s cheap in COMPARISON to other services out there.
MEGA offer 50GB for free and you can sync your camera, gallery anything plus 2048 bit encryption, desktop and Android app…
For me this is more than fair.
I have 25GB’s free storage that I got when Microsoft was offering new users 7GB’s, while old users got bumped to 25GB’s so along as they logged in, witch I did along time ago. Oh and don’t use Smart phones because I hate them.
PhoneyVirus