Here's what happens to your OneDrive when Microsoft ends unlimited storage in a month

Back in October 2014, Microsoft made a bold promise, that anyone with an Office 365 subscription would get unlimited OneDrive storage, rather than the 1TB that users were already being offered. A year later, the company officially broke that promise, saying that anyone that had been upgraded to either unlimited or 10TB of storage would be downgraded after a year.

The cutoff date is March 1, which is one month from today. If you still haven't moved some data out of your OneDrive and you're still over 1TB, you might be wondering what will happen to your account, and what will happen to all of your stored data.

According to a statement that a Microsoft spokesperson provided to Neowin, this is what will happen. First, you'll have three months of "over quota mode", where you'll be allowed to take any action on your account that will reduce the amount of data stored, but you won't be able to do anything that will increase it.

If you're still not down to 1TB of storage after your three months are up (June 1), your account will be in a locked state for at least six months. This means that you won't even be able to touch your files.

Here's where it gets just a bit confusing. While your account is in that locked state, you'll have the opportunity to unlock it for a period of 30 days, which is something that you'll only be able to do once. During this period of time, you'll be expected to move your data out of OneDrive and get it down to 1TB, or else it will return to a locked state after that period of time.

Throughout this process, users will be given warnings and told how much time they'll have in the locked state. Hopefully, you won't have to let it get that far, as we've written up some tips to help you to get through it.