Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What Is Microsoft 365 Family?
3. Benefits Over Office LTSC 2024
4. Microsoft 365 Copilot at Home
5. OneDrive: Storage, Sync, and Mobile Device Optimisation
6. Protecting Your Microsoft Account (Passwordless Sign‑in)
7. Why OneDrive Is Not a Backup
8. Streamlining Microsoft 365 Apps for Home Users (Removing Unused Components)
9. Outlook, Publisher, and Future Changes

10. Upcoming Blog: Migrating and Syncing Contacts and Calendars and effective sync across devices with Outlook New

11. Final Recommendations

1. Introduction

Microsoft 365 Family offers a modern, flexible, and secure digital environment for households. This post explains how to streamline your setup, protect your data, and keep your devices organised with minimal effort.

Microsoft 365 Family is a subscription designed for households that need up‑to‑date productivity tools, secure cloud storage, and seamless use across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. This article explains why Microsoft 365 Family is a better long‑term choice than Office LTSC 2024, how to streamline the installation by removing unused apps, how to protect your Microsoft Account with passwordless sign‑in, and how to combine OneDrive with Macrium Reflect for proper backup. It also includes recommendations for reducing local storage usage and outlines the role of Copilot for home productivity.

2. What Is Microsoft 365 Family?

Microsoft 365 Family is a subscription service for up to six people. Each user receives:

Their own private Microsoft apps
• 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage
• Email, productivity, and security services
• Cross‑device access (Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Web)

Latest changes require all members to become part of a family group, but each users data remains independently. So as long every Microsoft Account member birthday is of age 18 or older (Account > Birthday setting), there is no issue.

Mind the licensing terms: you may only share M365 Family with family members. You may not use it for any business use, incl. micro-businesses.

$$$ Savings: Consolidate costs for other Cloud storages, such as Google Drive. I believe Google Photos is very nasty keep prompting users for cloud backups of their pictures, even when they declined multiple times. OneDrive will not do this.

Try to disable the recurring billing. Amazon has great offers or bundles - don't get trapped for Security suites, Defender is more than enough.
Caveat for Amazon based Subscriptions: You can use them but keep in mind that they become activated and effective immediately after purchase. In contradition to the "activate" buttons that exist, the remainder of the subscription time is set at purchase date. Amazon cannot change it. Microsoft Support won't fix it either. Means that hoarding activation keys from Black Friday is no longer possible :/ If you bought a subscription too early, you can return it by calling Amazon Hotline / Callback > Digital Services.

3. Benefits Over Office LTSC 2024

In comparison to Office LTSC 2024, Microsoft 365 Family provides:

• Continuous feature updates
• The new Outlook with an ad‑free experience
• Full Copilot support and experience, even with benefits beyond Office Applications
• PST read/write support
• Premium Word, Excel, PowerPoint features (Online Version is available for free).
• Cloud integration and collaboration tools
• Better value over time
• Multi‑device use without extra licences, mobile, tablet and PC

Office LTSC 2024 is static, does not support Copilot, and receives only security fixes.

$$$ Savings: Office LTSC is the most cost efficient solution with no subscription attached. OneDrive is Limited to 5 GB per Microsoft Account. If you do not need much space and no AI this is for you. Outlook New is still usable, with few ads, but no PST support.

4. Microsoft 365 Copilot at Home

Copilot helps you:

• Summarise long documents
• Draft messages or essays
• Organise tasks
• Extract information quickly
• Improve language and translation
• Coding (PowerShell and other lanugages), with Visual Studio Code integration

Learn more:
https://www.microsoft.com/copilot

Consider to install the M356 Copilot app to get the most out of it. On your phone (iOS / Android) you can also use this app, along with Edge Browser and OneDrive for a seamless experience. Microsoft Outlook on Android / iOS has not the same featureset as Outlook New, very unfortunately.

$$$ Savings: M365 Family includes Copilot and expands it to everywhere: Edge Browser, M365 Apps. Spare a seperate Copilot or GPT plan.

5. OneDrive: Storage, Sync, and Mobile Device Optimisation

Each user gets 1 TB of cloud storage.

Key features:

• Automatic sync across devices
  • iOS and Android photo upload
  • Files On‑Demand to reduce disk usage
  • Access to all files from any device
  • Easy sharing and version history on all devices, including PC. Stop saving Document version 1, Document version 1.2 :) Trust the XML based Office files and power of OneDrive, which is a bit similar to enterprise trusted SharePoint features.
  
  
• To reduce smartphone storage usage:
  • Enable camera upload
  • Keep files online‑only when possible
  • Store large media primarily in OneDrive
  
  
• On Android Phones, within OneDrive > Settings > Free up Space on your device - you can delete uploaded pictures from your phone, at your own pace with a fingertip. iOS does not have this cleanup feature. Mind you have to use OneDrive or pin - means download caching - files as on PC, if you want to have them accessible when there is no internet connection or your data plan is limited. You can share or download pictures to apps like Whatsapp without manual download.
  
  
• OneDrive now supports optional AI based face recognition which makes it a blast sorting pictures of people. Very unfortunately it does not work with cats.
  I would love to see OneDrive organizing all cat pictures into a virtual collection, too.
  
  
• Collections made on the Phone or in Windows 11 will seamless sync with Windows Photo App. This makes organizing digital pictures and videos so much easier.
  
  
• Protip: If you trust your partner / friend / family member to the fullest, you can share the OneDrive Picture Upload into one single account across phones. So both share the same pictures, picture of the day / week. Also this makes it obsolete to "can you send me over the photo that you took..."

$$$ Savings: Save big on required phone capacity.  With OneDrive at hand, you'll never need 128,256 or even 512 GB phone storage, you'll find use for a 64 GB phone again, even more that the HW crisis, thanks or no thanks to AI made flash memory super expensive. :/  - let's not talk about other resources like water, energy and CO2e.

6. Protecting Your Microsoft Account (Passwordless Sign‑in)

All Windows 10/11 users are strongly advised to protect their Microsoft Account. 

Passwordless sign‑in reduces risk and enhances convenience. I recommend this especially when you store files in OneDrive.
Windows Hello PIN, Passkeys and Microsoft Passwordless Accounts have not been compromised in my bubble, opposite to Microsoft Accounts without MFA protection or traditional passwords and Windows local users (Password spraying, NTLM attacks).

Setup guidance:
https://support.microsoft.com/office/passwordless

$$$ Savings: Save you mind and sleepless nights that you'd have after an successful hack. The danger is real, and there is no exclusion to home users - even if they pretend there have "nothing to hide", an argument I hear quite often when it comes to account security and password management.

7. Why OneDrive Is Not a Backup

OneDrive synchronises files. If you delete a file locally, the deletion syncs to OneDrive. same goes for encryption attacks on your device, especially PCs
For real resilience, you need an offline or image‑based backup. 

To build a safe and simple backup system:

1. Move your OneDrive folder to a dedicated physical drive or partition (not C:) but O:. I recommend a 5400 rpm Harddisk or SATA SSD, as the performance requirements are negible.
2. Disconnect OneDrive and login again, choosing a folder on Drive O:
3. Let OneDrive do the initial sync.
4. Then Configure OneDrive to download all files locally.
5. Use Macrium Reflect X to create an image of that partition (Drive O: - OneDrive).
6. Update the image regularly. If you need super speed > Use external NVMe case from UGreen or Sabrent, and a cheap but reliable NVMe like Samsung, Crucial (as long as available).

Note: Macrium Reflect 8 support ends on 27 February 2026, this means it will not receive any updates. In addition I found it is not compatible with SecureBoot certificate 2023 updates.

Why I recommend Macrium Reflect X

• lightweight, no bloat like Acronis nowadays and tons of services
• one of the few fully x64 apps in the home market
• supports synthentic full backups, esp. great on SSD or NVMe
• easy UI, works on Server Core (for business use)
• Does Backup and Recovery with excelleny, but serves also as Partitioning and Cloning Tool
• Neat Windows RE integration
• One of the first to support Secure Boot with CA2023 certificates
• super fast esp. on NVMe or external NVMe (compared to other products)
• multi-language support
• Hyper-V Boot support (with Windows 11 Pro)
• meaningful and regular application updates, influenced by a strong and active community
• excellent support agents and quality

$$$ Savings:  No savings here in terms of money but peace of mind. The cloud is not a backup. Period. I have seen people loosing their digital life.

8. Streamlining Microsoft 365 Apps for Home users (Removing Unused Components)

Many home users do not need the full suite of Microsoft 365

You could remove:

• Access – rarely needed privately
  • Publisher – discontinued in 2024, will change to read-only access for pub files. Alternatives: Migrate your pub files content to Word or PowerPoint or 3rd party App by copy paste.
  • Legacy Outlook – supported until ~2029
  • Teams (Classic), if unused - -Teams often comes preinstalled in Windows 11 anyway.
  • OneDrive – comes preinstalled in Windows 11.

With Microsoft 365:

• You receive the new Outlook
  • Copilot is enabled
  • You benefit from an ad‑free inbox.
  • PST files are fully supported / Attach - read - write

ODT allows you to install Microsoft 365 with a custom configuration. Do not use the default OfficeSetup.exe in this case, that you would receive from your invitation or Microsoft Account page

Typical use cases for ODT at home:

• Install only Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook
• Exclude Access, Publisher, and Teams
• Reduce disk footprint and complexity

How-to deploy customized M365 Family:

• Download ODT to your download folder
  
  
• Extract ODT / execute setup in your download folder
  
  
• Create a config file to your needs at config.office.com - no login required - choose M365 for a while
  
  
• Export & Save the file to your download folder named YourOfficeConfig.xml, Choose Office Format or ODT, depending on your preference.
  
  
• Run PowerShell
  Windows Key + X > Terminal (Admin) 
  Change to your download folder e.g. cd c:\users\username\downloads
  
  
• Download Microsoft 365 Family
  

  .\setup.exe /download c:\users\username\downloads\YourOfficeConfig.xml

  
  
  
• Install Microsoft 365 Family customized
  

  .\setup.exe /configure c:\users\username\downloads\YourOfficeConfig.xml

$$$ Savings: Save valuable space on the OS drive (C:). Save monthly update size and time. Benefit from a smaller attack surface.

Here is an example for a working officeconfig.xml that will download office without the forementioned features.

<Configuration ID="d1fde4ee-5072-4e95-b319-9c0682773668">
  <Add OfficeClientEdition="64" Channel="Current" MigrateArch="TRUE">
    <Product ID="O365HomePremRetail">
      <Language ID="de-de" />
      <Language ID="MatchOS" />
      <Language ID="MatchPreviousMSI" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Access" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Groove" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Lync" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="OneDrive" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Outlook" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Publisher" />
    </Product>
    <Product ID="ProofingTools">
      <Language ID="en-gb" />
    </Product>
  </Add>
  <Property Name="SharedComputerLicensing" Value="0" />
  <Property Name="FORCEAPPSHUTDOWN" Value="TRUE" />
  <Property Name="DeviceBasedLicensing" Value="0" />
  <Property Name="SCLCacheOverride" Value="0" />
  <Updates Enabled="TRUE" />
  <RemoveMSI />
  <AppSettings>
    <User Key="software\microsoft\office\16.0\excel\options" Name="defaultformat" Value="51" Type="REG_DWORD" App="excel16" Id="L_SaveExcelfilesas" />
    <User Key="software\microsoft\office\16.0\powerpoint\options" Name="defaultformat" Value="27" Type="REG_DWORD" App="ppt16" Id="L_SavePowerPointfilesas" />
    <User Key="software\microsoft\office\16.0\word\options" Name="defaultformat" Value="" Type="REG_SZ" App="word16" Id="L_SaveWordfilesas" />
  </AppSettings>
  <Display Level="Full" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />
</Configuration>

 

 

Bonus: If you think this Office customisation isn't giving enough of savings on the OS drive, try this:

#windows key + X > Terminal (Admin)
#Powershell
#PS C:\Users\username>

powercfg /h off

#saves a bunch of space, if you are not using hibernation / standby (suspend to RAM/ to file). The more RAM installed, the more your savings. powercfg /h off

9. Outlook, Publisher, and Future Changes

• Publisher will be removed from the Office product family by October 2026. Or change to Read-Only mode when installed, both for security reasons. See announcement
  • Legacy Outlook will reach its end around 2029.
  • The new Outlook supports modern sync, Gmail integration, iCloud Integration and PST files support and sophisticated anti-spam and other Exchange Online like security features.

$$$ Savings: Nothing to see here. Move on.

10. Upcoming Blog: Migrating and Syncing Contacts and Calendars and effective sync across devices with Outlook New

In a follow‑up blog I will cover:

• Migrating IMAP contacts and calendars to iCloud
• Why the iCloud Windows app is no longer functional
• Why Outlook‑for‑Gmail no longer works
• New approach: add your Google Account directly to the new Outlook

11. Final Recommendations

• Use Microsoft 365 Family for a modern, secure, up‑to‑date system.
  • Streamline the suite to what you actually need using ODT.
  • Protect your device with passwordless sign‑in.
  • Store data in OneDrive, but use Macrium Reflect for real backup.
  • Keep an eye on upcoming changes to Outlook and Publisher