Microsoft today announced some new features for OneDrive, such as Personal Vault. But probably more interesting is that there are some changes to storage plans. The paid $1.99 per month plan now gets you 100GB instead of 50GB, and you can now increase your Office 365 storage.
Office 365 subscribers get 1TB of OneDrive storage. Now, they"ll be able to increase their storage in 200GB increments at $1.99 per month each, going up to a terabyte. That means that in total, you can have up to 2TB, as there"s no option to allow users to pay for more than that.
What"s not included in the announcement is how this breaks down for Office 365 Home users. Office 365 Home lets you share the subscription between six people, each of which gets 1TB of OneDrive storage. It"s unclear if you"d have to pay $9.99 a month for the second terabyte for each user, or if it applies to the whole account.
Update: Microsoft has responded to our request for clarification on this. Regarding Office 365 Home, the company said, "Only the primary account holder can purchase additional storage, and the additional storage will only be available to the primary account holder to use." In other words, if you"re not the primary account holder for Office 365 Home, you"re still limited to 1TB.
As mentioned above, there"s a new security feature for OneDrive called Personal Vault. It"s a "protected area in OneDrive" that will require "strong authentication" to access. That means that it"s not just a password-protected folder. You"ll likely want to use two-factor authentication, so you can approve access from Microsoft Authenticator or you can use biometrics.
All of the content that"s stored in Personal Vault is encrypted in the cloud, in transit to your device, and if synced to your hard drive, encrypted with BitLocker. Microsoft also recommends that you enable encryption on your mobile phone for more protection.
OneDrive Personal Vault is coming soon to users in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and it will arrive for everyone by the end of the year.