A few years back, Samsung discontinued gallery backups to their own servers and transitioned them to Microsoft OneDrive as part of their continuing efforts to integrate services with Microsoft Products and reduce the storage requirements for customer phone backups on their own Samsung Cloud server storage.
Initially and for several years, that gallery storage didn’t count against the 5 GB free storage quota that Microsoft provides with OneDrive. However, recently Microsoft has sent out an email to OneDrive customers that photo storage would now count against your OneDrive storage quota, meaning that if you have more than 5 GB of gallery backups stored on OneDrive, you would now have to subscribe to Microsoft 365 to increase that storage from 5 GB to either 100 GB or 1 TB.
You may recall that a few years back, Google made a similar move in regard to Google Photos backups to the cloud counting against your storage quota in their ecosystem as well.
At the time of this article, Microsoft’s rates for 100 GB of storage are comparable to Google One at $19.95/yr for Microsoft 365 Basic, which includes access to the full web and app versions of Microsoft Office tools or $69.95/yr ($6.95/mo) for Microsoft 365 Personal & $99.95/yr ($9.95/mo) for Microsoft 365 Family which includes not only the full versions of the web and app Microsoft Office tools, but also the full desktop suite of Microsoft Office tools which can be activated on up to 5 devices plus 1 TB of cloud storage. The family plan,, unlike the Google One Family equivalent however which shares storage among all 5 family members, allows you to share your Microsoft 365 subscription with up to 5 other people who can also install Office on up to 5 devices and each gets their own personal 1 TB of cloud storage, which makes Microsoft 365 a bit more attractive as a storage option.
