Get 3GB of extra OneDrive space by enabling Camera backup

Microsoft announced a storage upgrade for all SkyDrive OneDrive customers recently. Free customers who signed up recently for the service get a bump to 15 Gigabyte from the previous 7 Gigabyte, while paying customers one to 1 Terabyte of storage space in the cloud.

While that is still no where near the 25 Gigabyte that old SkyDrive users received back in the days when OneDrive was still named SkyDrive, it is a step in the right direction.

If the storage increase is not enough for your needs, then you can increase the space further for free. One option to do so is to install the OneDrive application for Android and enable its Camera backup feature on it.

If you do that, you get three Gigabytes of additional -- permanent -- storage space in the cloud.

Before you do, you are probably wondering what camera upload does. It basically ships all photos and videos that you take with your device's camera to the cloud, or more precisely, to OneDrive so that they are available on the Internet and also on devices that you sync the data to as well.

Comparable services such as Dropbox or Google Drive are offering similar camera upload options.

Note that video uploads have been integrated in a recent version of the OneDrive application that got updated just days ago.

The OneDrive application should display a prompt to you on first start after the update that informs you about the 3 Gigabyte promotion.

To get the extra storage, tap on the "turn on" button. Please note that this is only awarded to you if you have not received extra storage previously for doing so.

Videos and photos are only uploaded to the cloud when the device is connected to Wi-Fi. You can change the behavior in the camera backup settings.

Here you can enable uploads while connected to a mobile network, and disable video uploads as well by disabling the include videos option in the settings.

You can check the Manage Storage page on the OneDrive website which details whether you have received the camera roll bonus already.

Another option to get more storage on OneDrive is to refer other users to it. You get 0.5 Gigabyte for every referred user up to a maximum of 5 Gigabyte.