Master 365: Get 6 TB of OneDrive Storage for $100 Per Year (Premium)

Office 365 Home---soon to be renamed as Microsoft 365 Family---is aimed at families, but it has one major advantage for individuals who need tons of online storage: If you don’t mind managing multiple Microsoft accounts (MSAs), you can effectively pool the 1 TB of OneDrive storage that each user in the subscription gets. And that means you can personally access up to 6 TB of OneDrive storage, all by yourself.

But this method isn’t just for individuals: Even if you subscribe to Office 365 Home and provide its benefits to your family members, there may be a few slots still open for you to use yourself, since this subscription supports up to 6 users. In my case, I have three other family members, so I could theoretically access up to 3 TB of OneDrive storage personally if I had the need (using my account plus two secondary MSAs).

I don’t do that. But I do have at least one secondary MSA that could be used in this capacity if needed. So let’s take a look at what doing so looks like. And how you can seamlessly access the additional storage you allot to secondary accounts.

Here are the basic steps.

Share your Office 365 Home subscription with your secondary MSA. Using your primary MSA, sign-in to Office.com and click the Install Office link in the header graphic. On the Microsoft account | Services & Subscriptions page that appears, click the Sharing link and then the Start sharing button. Invite via email or link and then accept the offer from your secondary account.

Share a folder. Using your secondary account, sign-in to OneDrive.com and locate a folder to share. Share it via a link or with specific people and be sure to configure the shared folder to allow editing.

Add the shared folder to your OneDrive. At this point, the folder you shared from your secondary account is only available in OneDrive on the web. To see it, sign-in to OneDrive.com with your primary account and navigate to Shared > Shared. Locate the secondary user in the list and the folder(s) they are sharing. To make a folder available from the desktop (Windows and Mac) and mobile (Android and iOS), select it and choose Add to my OneDrive from the toolbar. Click the Add folder button in the confirmation dialog.

That’s it. Now, the shared folder will appear in File Explorer in Windows 10 (among other places). You can sync it locally, access any files it contains normally, and copy/move files to and from it as desired. If you have multiple secondary accounts or multiple shared folders across whatever number of secondary accounts, just repeat these steps as needed.

To test this, I signed in to one of my secondary MSAs, an old Live.com account, on the OneDrive website and shared a top-level Videos folder with my primary MSA. After all, that’s an understandable use for an extra terabyte of cloud storage. That folder and its contents are now available from anywhere I can use OneDrive: the web, my desktop, and the OneDrive mobile...