Microsoft announced additional OneDrive storage plans for Office 365 subscribers today, along with an upcoming new security feature called OneDrive Personal Vault. The additional storage plans have been a much requested feature from OneDrive users, especially since Dropbox, Google Drive, and Apple iCloud have been offering more than 1TB of cloud storage for quite some time now.
First of all, Microsoft is still offering 5G of cloud storage with its free OneDrive Basic tier, but the first paid tier at $1.99/month will now offer 100GB of storage instead of 50GB. This new plan will roll out “soon” and current subscribers will automatically get 50GB of additional storage for free.
For Office 365 subscribers who’d like to get more than 1TB of storage, Microsoft will also make it possible to add storage in 200 GB increments starting at $1.99 per month, to a maximum of 2TB for an additional $9.99/month (that’s on top of an Office 365 subscription). “OneDrive additional storage will be available in the coming months wherever Office 365 is available,” the company said today.
Update: For Office 365 Home users, Microsoft clarified in a statement to Neowin that “Only the primary account holder can purchase additional storage, and the additional storage will only be available to the primary account holder to use.”
If you’d like to have additional protections for your most important files stored in OneDrive, the upcoming Personal Vault feature will be able lock files with a PIN, biometric authentication, or an SMS or email. The feature will also work with Microsoft’s Authenticator app for two-step verification.
The OneDrive mobile apps on iOS and Android will make it possible to shoot pictures and scan documents directly into Personal Vault, and all files will be protected in a BitLocker-encrypted area on a Windows 10 PC. Users with a free OneDrive Basic account will only be able to store a limited number of files in Personal Vault, and an Office 365 subscription will be required for unrestricted access.
“Personal Vault adds to the robust privacy and security that OneDrive currently offers, including file encryption at rest and in transit, suspicious activity monitoring, ransomware detection and recovery, mass file deletion notification and recovery, virus scanning on download for known threats, and version history for all file types,” the company said today. OneDrive Personal Vault will roll out “soon” in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and it should become available for all OneDrive users before the end of the year.
