For customers of our free service who have over 5 GB of content and who are directly impacted by the storage change, we will offer one free year of Office 365 Personal, which includes 1 TB of storage.
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If you’re a current customer, you need to opt-in on Microsoft’s website before the end of January or you won’t get the free 15GB of storage.
When Microsoft formally announced it was backtracking, it blamed customer abuse, saying a few people were storing too much stuff in their unlimited OneDrive accounts.
Note: Be sure to follow these steps for each OneDrive account you have so that all of them retain their free storage.
“We’ve heard clearly from our Windows and OneDrive fans about the frustration and disappointment we have caused”, the statement from a Microsoft spokesperson reads. “For this, we are truly sorry and would like to apologize to the community”, says Douglas Pearce, Group Program Manager. While Microsoft stays confident that it needs to limit the free storage that it hands out from now on, it realizes that it can’t afford to make so many of its users so upset.
It’s rare to see Microsoft communicate customer changes so badly, but it’s clear the company has listened to the feedback here.
Microsoft irked a lot of people last month when it announced plans to ditch unlimited OneDrive storage for Office 365 subscribers and downgrade the free limit from 15GB to just 5GB. Microsoft claims it will email customers about this offer early next year.
The unlimited tier will remain banished, due to folks taking liberties (one particular user uploaded 75GB of data), but at least free storage will remain untouched.
Despite the offer, Microsoft is not changing its mind about unlimited storage.
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Users enrolled in OneDrive’s camera roll bonus will also be able to keep their storage when it’s killed next year by following this link. When it comes to giving away Office 365 Personal, however, the company is going to be proactive and reach out to users to tell them the offer is on the table. But if you already have 15GB, you can visit preview.onedrive.com/bonus/ and click the “keep your free storage” button to hang onto what you’ve already got.
