Data Backup Digest

Cloud storage services have to be competitive simply because there are so many of them. In fact, it can be hard to differentiate between some of them because the features they offer are all pretty similar. That’s why you see a lot of them try and beat each other in two main factors: price and storage.

The latest move comes from Microsoft and OneDrive, who are now offering users of Bing Rewards the chance to get 100GB of free storage for the cloud service for 2 years.

For those who don’t know, {{https://www.bing.com/explore/rewards|Bing Rewards}} is a service that Microsoft runs in order to get people using their search engine. Users would normally earn points by performing searches; these points can then be traded in for things like gift cards. This time, however, the free storage comes simply by signing up to the service.

Of course, those who use Office 365 won’t be enticed by such an offer. This is because they already have unlimited OneDrive storage as part of their package. For everyone else, though, this is a great offer.

100GB of storage would normally cost $2 a month on OneDrive. Although that’s not an expensive amount, over the course of 2 years you’d make a saving of $48. That’s certainly nothing to sniff at, especially when it’s coming at you for the grand price of nothing.

The free storage amount will only be with you for 2 years from the date that you claim the offer. It’s not quite clear what will happen after that date. Currently, going over your free storage limit on OneDrive will turn your files read-only and syncing stops. As such, Microsoft may require you to remove the necessary amount of files in two years to regain your free limits – or, as they’ll be hoping, you’ll begin paying the fees to keep everything the same.

In order to claim the free storage offer from Bing Rewards you’ll need to agree to receive promotional emails, but these can be cancelled at any time. As Bing Rewards is only open to those within the United States, this offer is sadly only limited to those within the country too, though users with access to VPN services may find luck using them.

If that applies to you, just head to Bing Rewards, navigate to your dashboard and then click the “100 GB free link” in order to claim and activate your new OneDrive capacity.

Microsoft has previously offered a similar deal where you could get 100GB of OneDrive storage for one year, providing you traded in 100 Bing Rewards points. Considering you get double the amount of storage this time round, plus you don’t even need to earn any points, makes this a much juicier deal.

No-one can truly know what the cloud storage market will look like in 2 years’ time. Things have changed so quickly already, it might be that all services offer 100GB of free storage by that point anyway. Until then, sign up to Bing Rewards and grab the free offer while it’s available.