As if a pilot move on the internet chessboard or more specifically challenging existing cloud drive services, Microsoft new CEO Satya Nadella is wasting no time to roll out the rebranded OneDrive following a naming lawsuit in UK. With dominant services such as Dropbox, box.net(now box.com) and Google Drive, how will Microsoft’s revamped OneDrive attract users to switch? Interestingly OneDrive (SkyDrive) isn’t a new kid on the block though, and had been around as Windows Live Folders since 2007.
[[perfectpullquote]]Microsoft is giving away up to 15GB free space for OneDrive[/[perfectpullquote]]We won’t go into the technical details of OneDrive’s limitations previously, you can read about those in more details elsewhere from more reputable tech sites. What we are more interested is Microsoft is giving away up to 15GB free space for OneDrive when you use the following features:
- Backing up photos via your iPhone or Android smartphone entitles 3GB free space
- Each referral gives you additional 500MB free space up to 5GB in maximum
- OneDrive base free space is 7GB
OneDrive is available for your PC, Mac and mobile smartphones and syncs to all your devices, a feature similar to Dropbox. We downloaded OneDrive and gave it a test drive and found the new app to be faster and syncing works just as well as Dropbox, although we notice there wasn’t a sharing shortcut on Mac OS like Dropbox’s – a small inconvenience which should be fixed in future updates.
If you are running out of free space on Dropbox, you might want to consider re-organising your cloud backup strategy such as using Dropbox for daily files usage and OneDrive as a photo backup tool.
