For something completely different from my usual gaming related posts, let me shift gears to OneDrive cloud storage. I have for several years now subscribed to Office365 as a family plan, which not only allows me to use Office software on several computers, but also allows me a different OneDrive account with 1 TB of storage for each family member. If anything, this has always been a bit of overkill for most of the family – my kids are simply too young to really generate any data other than video game save files, and my wife really doesn’t create much data regardless. In my case however, I have always been pushing up to the limit, mainly due to various collections and files, which I want to save, but don’t have enough local space (or a backup strategy).
However, I wanted to push this a bit further, so I did a bit of research, and fairly quickly found a nice loophole in the system. Since the Office365 subscription provides 5 accounts, and I only use 4 for the family, that leaves me a spare account. A quick configuration of a new account, and I have a 5th “family” member, which otherwise has no use for storage. However, I can create a OneDrive share, link it to my primary account, and then move files over into the shared link. This way I can access the full 2nd TB of storage, and still be able to get to all the files from the primary account. If I need the space, I can also do a similar link from the kid’s accounts, to add a 3rd and 4th TB.
Overall, a fairly elegant solution, if possibly stretching (or maybe breaking, I haven’t checked) the terms of service of OneDrive. In general, I don’t see any reason why Microsoft would care, data is data, and I can assign the 5 accounts to whomever, but who knows these days. In the meantime, I am working on reorganizing files to use the new space. Ultimately, this is all what I would consider non-critical, so worse case it can go away, but if I have the space, I would prefer to keep the information.
