Microsoft boosts OneDrive storage space

Microsoft has announced that it is boosting the storage space available to its OneDrive users, effective immediately, as high as 1TB, even as it fights to keep its foreign data centres safe from US intrusion.

The company telegraphed plans to increase the storage capacity available to users on its OneDrive service last month, and today has sent the new figures live. Both existing accounts and new sign-ups can benefit from a boost to 15GB of free storage from the previous 7GB limit, while monthly prices for additional storage have dropped to £1.99 for 100GB and £3.99 for 200GB - cheap, but an unfortunately literal symbol-translation of the $1.99 and $3.99 storage tiers available to US customers.

The biggest bonus comes for users who pay for a subscription to Office 365, Microsoft's browser-based and cloud-powered productivity suite. For the standard fee of £7.99 a month, users will see their storage space boost from 20GB to a whopping 1TB. The upgrade applies to all accounts, including Office 365 for Business users, who jump from 25GB to the new 1TB tier.

While the company has been slowly rolling out the increases since its announcement last month, the new space is available to all from today thanks to the company's addition of a claimed 10 petabytes (PB) of storage capacity to its Azure cloud platform.