How to get 30GB of free storage with OneDrive right now

I’m positively elated to tell you something amazing today; I tried it out and proved it actually works.

Here’s the deal:

Google Drive currently gives you a 15GB of free space.  Which, honestly I thought was copious space.

OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) also gives you 15GB by default but this morning I’m going to show you how to instantly double your OneDrive cloud storage from 15GB to 30GB for free.

But you have to hurry because Microsoft will purportedly pull this offer by the end of the month.

Check this out:

On September 19th, Douglas Pearce, Group Program Manager for OneDrive, posted a concise and candid article on the OneDrive blog about getting a storage bump.

In the post Pearce says:

[W]e’ve been listening to the commentary about storage on the new iPhones released today and we wanted to get you more storage right away. We think you’ll appreciate having more free storage while setting up your iPhone 6 or upgrading to iOS 8.

But then he adds the qualifier that the offer will expire by “the end of September”.

So how do you get on board?

Here’s how to double your OneDrive storage in less than 5 minutes.

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First, login to your OneDrive account, or if you don’t have one quickly signup, and click Get more storage in the lower left corner of the main page.

You’ll get whisked away to a screen that shows the standard 15GB of storage everyone gets.

Yawn… boring

To get extra 15GB we need to claim our Camera roll bonus.

And it all starts with the OneDrive app.

Android, iOS and Windows Phones are supported but I’ll show you how I got it working on my Samsung Galaxy S4.  Here are the direct links to download the app to your phone:

• OneDrive for Android
• OneDrive for iOS 8
• OneDrive for Windows Phone 8.1

I quickly grabbed mine from the Google Play store.

Once you click one of those three links, tap open the app on your phone and sign-in with your OneDrive username and password.

After you login, you’ll see an option to Turn on Camera Backup.

We want to do this for now so tap Turn on.

I know the screenshot says you’ll only get a paltry 3GB backup boost by enabling Camera Backup.  If you see this, just ignore it because you’re about to find out it’s actually 15GB not 3GB.

Now you’re good to go.

But just to make sure you can hit the menu key on your phone and tap Settings.

You should see Camera backup is set to On.

Great! Now go back to your browser and refresh that OneDrive storage page in your browser.

You should see your storage capacity instantly jump from 15GB to 30GB.

Also notice the Camera Roll bonus section near the bottom shows 15GB.

That’s it.

But one more thing…

If you look at your phone you’ll see it’s currently uploading all your photos to OneDrive.  Now, if you actually want to cache all your photos in the cloud – then great – you’re good to go but I didn’t want to fill my bonus storage space with photos.

I’d rather use it for other things like my massive video and eBooks collection.

So, on my phone, I went back to Settings, tapped the Camera Backup on option and then swiped Camera backup to off.

Then I went back to the browser and refreshed OneDrive to make sure it didn’t shrink my storage back to 15GB.

Thank God it didn’t!

30GB of free storage never felt so good!

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Incidentally, if 30GB of storage isn’t enough for you, you can always jump to 115GB total for $2 per month or 200GB for just $4 per month.

And for the users with the most rapacious data appetites, Microsoft offers a banquet of 1TB for about $10 per month.

If this helped you please rejoice in the comments below!  And join my team by dropping your name in the sign-up form in the right rail.  I’ll keep hooking you up with cool stuff like this.

Thanks!