OneDrive referrals may get you 10GB extra storage
Microsoft announced back in 2015 that it made the decision to downgrade OneDrive plans for paying and free users without revealing at that time why it made the decision.
The company came clean later by stating publicly that the economics of existing plans were unsustainable, and that it had to change them because of that.
The move did irritate users of the service and here especially free users who Microsoft wanted to restrict to 5 Gigabytes of storage.
That was a big downgrade from the 15 Gigabytes the company offered to free users (which does not even include free bonuses the company gave away to users such as the camera roll bonus which increased storage further).
While Microsoft plans to move forward with reducing available OneDrive storage space for free accounts down to 5 Gigabytes of storage, it has created an opt-in option for existing users that enables them to avoid the downgrade and keep the camera roll bonus on top of that
OneDrive Referrals
OneDrive users don't have that many options when it comes to adding extra free storage to their account. One of the better options is the referral system which users of OneDrive can make use of to get up to 10 Gigabytes of extra storage by referring friends, customers or complete strangers to OneDrive.
You get 500 Megabytes of storage for each referral, the same you get when you refer users to Dropbox.
For instance, if you'd sign up using this link, you and I would get an additional 500 Megabyte of storage.
Get your referral link
It is easy enough to grab your referral link on OneDrive:
- Load https://onedrive.live.com/?v=managestorage directly, or visit OneDrive first and select the cogwheel icon in the upper right corner and there options from the context menu.
- Locate the "Referral Bonus" listing on the page.
- Click on the "earn more" link next to it to display the referral link.
Microsoft displays the link directly and a handful of sharing options that you can make use of to spread it right away.
When others sign up to OneDrive using the link they will get 500MB of extra storage and so will you up to the maximum of 10 Gigabytes.
Closing Words
For existing users of OneDrive, it comes down to whether they trust Microsoft not to modify storage again in the future. While I think it is unlikely that Microsoft will do it again, trust in the company is certainly not at an all-time high in this regard.
Now You: Which online storage service do you use?
I’m glad they had the option to keep the 15GB (+15GB w/ camera roll) though I mostly use it to keep my resume for later editing and store my web cam motion detection pics. Besides that I never use it. I am really not a fan of cloud storage (regardless of privacy concerns).
Still, I wish excel online had some thing like the googlefinance function
yesterday i received a message from one drive. they shrink the space to 5gb…
That’s because you didn’t opt in to keep the old storage amounts. The offer ended on January 31.
Never trust Microsoft to keep giving you tomorrow what they promise to give you today. There is a track record of instability at Microsoft when it comes to the straight and narrow.
Yes, because Google doesn’t have a services Graveyard that’s quickly running out of space /s
Apple aren’t much better. Get real.
Cloud storage is nice but trusting is another story. To many things can happen as we have well seen. People look for free and convenient which is OK but you better have some other kind of back up off line that you know how to use and have tested. Don’t let the net be your only back up. Let it be another…
Am curious about your best practices about backups? Lately I have to fight with it… Using Qnaps and iDrive but am still not really relaxed
I agree that you cannot trust Microsoft. Not just in terms of privacy but in terms of long-term longevity.
Why don’t they just put everyone on this so called cloud?!
No matter how much data you give to these companies, it is never sufficient — if it was up to them, they would have installed a chip into humans to record their every moment. Oh, it’s already been happening with our smartphones, lol. But seriously, when are these data-hungry companies going to be satisfied? I guess never!
Good for the pirating guys, now we will see more movies stored into the cloud storage and the links be floating all over the Google. :D
So I need to make 20 fake accounts? Can someone make a service to do this for me please?
I’ve used it for Dropbox… were even 32, not just 20 :) Try on fiverr
Using Mega.nz here, working great, 50GB for free, no referral needed.
it was down once already, could happen again… or not, who knows? :)