What Actually Counts Against Your Free Cloud Storage

Why the number moved without you

Free storage is nearly always a shared pool, and the products drawing on it are ones you think of as separate. Email is not “email” to the accountant keeping the tally; it is bytes in the same bucket as the photographs.

Membership of that pool is not fixed either. A provider can add a contributor, and your usage jumps overnight without a new file arriving. All four companies below publish the current list, and all four document notice before anything is deleted — but nobody writes to say the rules you learned in 2014 have been superseded. What follows is what each provider’s own documentation said on 31 July 2026, not what a comparison site says about it.

Google: 15 GB, three products, one new arrival

Google’s help page is plain about the shape: “Each Google Account includes up to 15 GB of storage, which is shared across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos.” The itemized list underneath is where the surprises are — Gmail’s share includes Spam and Trash, and so do Meet recordings, Android WhatsApp backups and any Docs-type file created or edited after 1 June 2021.

Then the newest entry: “All data managed through the Android backup settings,” broken out as SMS and MMS messages, call logs and history, device settings, and app data. The phone backup used to sit outside the 15 GB.

That last date is the other half of the story. Until then, uploads in “High quality” — since renamed Storage saver — were free and unlimited. Google announced the end on its own blog on 11 November 2020 and did not make it retroactive, which is why deleting a decade of holiday photos often frees up nothing at all.

Apple: 5 GB and the backup nobody counted

Apple gives every account 5 GB, used “for your iCloud backups, to keep your photos and videos stored in iCloud Photos, to keep your files up to date in iCloud Drive, and more.” The order is telling: for most people the device backup is the largest single occupant of a free iCloud account.

An iCloud Backup is defined by subtraction — everything on the device that is not already syncing. Apple’s page on it, published 1 May 2025, lists device settings, Home Screen layout, app organization, purchased ringtones and app data for every app you have downloaded. If Messages in iCloud is switched off, your entire message history is in there too; if iCloud Photos is switched off, your Camera Roll may be. Turn either on and that data moves into the synced pool instead.

Paid tiers are priced per country, and the two currencies are not a straight conversion of one another: checked on 31 July 2026, Apple’s US and UK pages quoted different amounts for the same 50 GB tier. Prices also change without notice, so read your own country’s page rather than a figure quoted anywhere else, including here.

Microsoft: two quotas that look like one

Microsoft’s free tier is the most misquoted of the four, because it is two allowances rather than one. Without a Microsoft 365 subscription you get, in Microsoft’s own words, “15 GB of free mailbox storage for your Outlook.com emails, contacts and calendar items” and, separately, “5 GB of free cloud storage for your email attachments, files and photos in OneDrive.” Attachments count in both.

The 5 GB is a wider pool than most people picture — the full list is in the table below — and the OneDrive Recycle Bin sitting on it accounts for a lot of confused arithmetic.

On pooling, the folklore has it backwards. Microsoft 365 Family covers up to six people, and Microsoft states that each gets 1 TB of cloud storage and a 100 GB mailbox. It is not a shared 6 TB pot that one heavy user can eat.

Dropbox: the limit that is not storage

Dropbox Basic is 2 GB, the smallest of the four, but the constraint people run into is not the gigabytes. Dropbox states that Basic users “can be logged into up to three devices at a time.” Devices signed in before March 2019 stay on your list even if that puts you over three; what you cannot do is add a new one, so a replacement phone forces you to sign out somewhere else or upgrade.

The other Dropbox rule is the direct inverse of Google’s: “the size of a shared folder will be counted against the quota of every member of that folder,” unless everyone is on the same team or Family plan. Join a friend’s 5 GB folder on a 2 GB account and you are instantly over.

What actually happens when you go over

The table below has the short version. Three points deserve the longer one, in each company’s own words.

Microsoft’s is the most consequential. Existing files “will remain but will be read-only,” and you cannot send or receive Outlook.com email “even if you have not exceeded your email storage quota,” with mail returned to the sender. Over the limit for more than three months, the account is frozen. Then: “After 6 months, we may delete your OneDrive and all files within it. Once deleted, these files are non-recoverable.”

Google’s is deliberately vague. Uploads and new Docs files stop, and “until you reduce your storage usage, nobody can edit or copy your affected files.” Your email “can be impacted” — Google leaves that soft, and so do we. You can still sign in and read everything.

The deletion clocks are reported wrongly more often than anything else here. Google removes content only after you are over quota “for 2 years or longer,” and says it will contact you “at least 3 months before content is eligible for deletion.” Its two-year inactivity policy is a separate rule with a published exceptions list, and Google’s own page names 1 December 2023 as the earliest date any account could be deleted under it. Apple’s equivalent is not on a support page at all but in the iCloud Terms of Service, which reserve the right to terminate an account “upon 30 days’ prior notice via email” if it “has been inactive for one (1) year.”

All four offer you the export instead, with one caveat specific to photographs: a bulk export often arrives ordered by the day of the export rather than the day of the shot, with capture dates parked in a sidecar file the rest of your software ignores. Our walkthrough on what Google Takeout does to photo dates covers where they went — the repair Photo Date Rescue does.

The four, side by side

Six things widely repeated that are wrong

Storage rules attract confident misinformation because the old version of the rule was true, once.

1. “OneDrive’s free tier is 15 GB.” It is 5 GB of cloud storage plus a separate 15 GB Outlook.com mailbox. The 15 GB OneDrive allowance was real, until Microsoft announced its reduction on 2 November 2015.
2. “Microsoft 365 Family is 6 TB you share.” Microsoft’s page says each of up to six people gets 1 TB. There is no shared pot.
3. “Files people share with you eat your storage.” Wrong for Google, which charges the owner and only the owner. Right for Dropbox, which charges every member of a shared folder. Advice for one platform gets repeated as though it covered both.
4. “All your Google Docs count against the 15 GB.” Only files created or edited after 1 June 2021.
5. “Google Photos’ free unlimited storage ended for everyone.” Wrong twice over. High quality and Express quality uploads made before 1 June 2021 are permanently exempt, and a Pixel 5 or earlier still gets unlimited backup from that device.
6. “Google deletes any account after two years of inactivity.” The policy exists, but it carries a published exceptions list, it is separate from the over-quota clock, and Google’s own page names 1 December 2023 as the earliest date any account could be deleted under it.

A free tier is a decision, not a law

These tiers are generous, and they stay put for years. When Google ended unlimited photo uploads it announced the change more than six months ahead and exempted every existing upload permanently. Nobody has been robbed.

But a free tier is a commercial decision, and commercial decisions get revisited. The clearest example is in Microsoft’s own words. On 2 November 2015 the OneDrive team wrote that a small number of users had backed up entire movie collections and DVR recordings, in some cases exceeding 75 TB, and concluded: “Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new.” Existing users kept access for at least twelve months. It was handled decently, and it was still a two-thirds cut to something people had treated as a fixture.

The inference is not cynicism, just that a free tier is a service maintained on the provider’s terms — a different kind of object from a drive on your desk, which is the whole argument in why sync is not a backup. So the practical close is short. Open your provider’s storage page and read the itemized breakdown rather than the total. Check the email address on the account still reaches you. And if the answer to “where else do these photographs exist?” is “nowhere,” that is the finding, not the quota.