As a result of an infringement suit with BSkyB, Microsoft was recently forced to change the name of its SkyDrive service to OneDrive. With this new branding, Microsoft has been on the campaign trail of promotion, and today, has offered what looks, at least initially, to be a pretty sweet deal. OneDrive users can capitalize on the opportunity to grab 100GB of cloud storage space for free, but there are, as ever, a couple of conditions to the offer, which we shall reveal after the jump.
As standard, OneDrive users get 7GB of space, which certainly isn’t bad. However, even if we don’t plan on using vast amounts of storage, it’s always nice to have it there just incase, and let’s be honest – 100 GB is a pretty appealing amount of real estate.
But the first thing to note about this deal, is that your 100 gigs will only last for one year, after which, you will have to pay if you want to retain all of those lovely bytes. Moreover, you will have to spend 100 Bing Rewards points to get your 100GB, although since these are fairly easily obtained, it’s not such a huge deal.
You can accrue Bing Rewards points for performing Bing Web searches and inviting friends to Bing Rewards, and since the latter, for example, will get you 200 points, you won’t really need to put in much work to get this 100GB.
The rationale is to get you using Bing and OneDrive, and moreover, paying for OneDrive once your year is up. By offering such a large amount, it lures people into adding swathes of important information to the Microsoft servers, and when that free year is finally up, you end up paying to continue using a service that you’ve accustomed yourself to.
Of course, you could easily push your data to a hard drive once the year is up, but then, in essence, you could just do that anyway. The cost of 100GB for a year is $50, which isn’t bad given that OneDrive is, in my experience, pretty darned good, but if you can’t see yourself as using Microsoft’s cloud service for the long haul, then perhaps you’re better off spending your Bing Rewards points on other things, like gift vouchers.
Initially, Microsoft offered free 100GB of storage to the first 100,000 users who signed up for OneDrive. If you missed out on that offer, then this could be your best bet, but then again, it’s for a year only, which quite frankly, isn’t that bad.
To redeem the OneDrive storage through Bing Rewards, click this link. Currently, this offer is U.S.-only.
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the Web.
