f you happen to be a proud owner of a Windows Phone, Microsoft has decided to make this holiday season a little better by offering extra SkyDrive storage for free. As described in an email sent to all Windows Phone users, you'll be able to claim 20 GB of free SkyDrive storage that's active for a year, so long as you click the link before the end of January.

The 20 GB of cloud storage is in addition to the free 7 GB (or 25 GB for early adopters) already offered by the service. If you happen to have an Office 365 subscription, you'll likely find yourself with over 50 GB of storage available in Microsoft's cloud; even more if you claimed the free 200 GB (for two years) that comes with any Surface 2 or Surface Pro 2 purchase.

So what are you going to do with all this free space? One of the best uses is to enable automatic full-resolution backups of your Windows Phone camera photos over Wi-Fi. Smartphone photos, especially those taken by the 41-megapixel Nokia Lumia 1020, can occupy quite a bit of space, which is where the extra 20 GB can come in handy.

Head on over to your email inbox to claim the extra 20 GB. At this stage it looks like the offer is only there for Windows Phone 8 users - unfortunate for the few Windows Phone 7 users still out there - but it should nevertheless be available for the majority of Windows Phone users.