SPECIAL EDITION: OneDrive

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ISSUE 18.25 • 2021-07-05 ONEDRIVE By Will Fastie Our writers have the week off. No rest for the editor, though. We decided to publish an issue for you
[See the full post at: SPECIAL EDITION: OneDrive]

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AWRon

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Happy 4th!  I have a suggestion: why not put all Newsletters under a separate heading on the right (under View the Forum) rather than on the Home landing page?!  I know you want to highlight the Newsletters, but they sort of overwhelm other topics posted.  Just a suggestion!

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Will Fastie

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CBA wrote:

… but they sort of overwhelm other topics posted.

Thanks for visiting the site to read the main blog. We appreciate that.

AskWoody has something of a split personality. And not just two ways — we’ve got the main blog, the extensive forums, and the emailed newsletters. The Plus edition of the newsletter pays the bills; without the generous support of Plus members like you, we couldn’t keep the lights on. That’s the reason we make the presence of new issues of the newsletter prominent on the home page of the site, the blog. And that’s why, this year, we have made those postings slightly more prominent than in previous years.

As you suggest, there is a section in the right column called “Recent blog posts” that lists the last few items from the main blog. The nature of our system does not allow us to list only newsletter articles there. But we have a page for that: Newsletters/Alerts.

Thanks for being a Plus member!

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Hi Will:

Thanks for this great, comprehensive review! Turn a topic over to Fred Langa and the rest of the team, and you get a veritable feast in return!

For those of us who are only passingly interested in OneDrive, supportive of (but deservedly cautious about) anything Microsoft, can you publish a couple of paragraphs that summarize the conclusions of this long and comprehensive discussion?

As simple as highlighting the main pros and cons, and suggesting the types of users for whom it is a good fit, and those for whom it is something to avoid?

Thanks again for the great work the whole team at AskWoody does for us all!

— AWRon

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Will Fastie

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Wow; great article. Only perused through the email but will do a better job of reading later.  My only beef with OneDrive (as it pertains to my new PC) is that out by the default it was backing up all major drives (such as my Desktop).  At first, was not happy about this but then said to myself, well at least my data’s being backed up now.   lololololol

I did have to create subdirectories within my major directories used to exclusively not back up otherwise I would quickly run out of OneDrive space since I’m not willing to pay for any more storage (have backed up externally that info).    Not hard to figure out how to do this.   Had I had your article a week ago (when I received my new Minisforum X400), it would have been nice, but still I’m transferring data slowly to my new system as I find the time to do so.   Anyway, appreciate the article and the effort made for penning it.   🙂

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Will Fastie

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AWRon wrote:

… can you publish a couple of paragraphs that summarize the conclusions of this long and comprehensive discussion?

The three reasons to use OneDrive:

• You want an off-premises copy of your most important digital assets;
• You want access to those assets from more than one device;
• You are working collaboratively.

The operational side of AskWoody uses OneDrive as its repository. We couldn’t work efficiently without it, especially because we are geographically dispersed. We subscribe to Microsoft 365 and get 1TB of OneDrive space; collaborative work in the 5GB space given to all those with a Microsoft Account might be adequate for some but is not enough to accommodate us.

Cons? As Fred is pointing out, there are some dark corners of complexity and weak documentation.

It is always wise to exercise caution when sharing important data and assets with a faceless service. However, cloud services are what has made Microsoft so valuable. That simply means the company cannot afford for any of these services, including OneDrive, to be anything other than trustworthy, secure, and reliable.

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JohnS1606, AWRon

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Hi Will:

Thanks for the quick answer.  I can see that it is an easy choice to stay within the Microsoft family and adopt OneDrive (and even eventually Teams, etc).

However there are several substantial other cloud storage providers, most notably Google which has a similar complete suite, as well as Sharefile and other enterprise products, even leaving aside the reportedly less secure alternatives of Box and DropBox.

Comparative evaluation of these is probably out of the domain of AskWoody, but the widespread adoption of the Google infrastructure might eventually warrant a similar exploration of the “dark corners” of that ecosystem (which almost surely also exist!).

— AWRon

 

 

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JohnS1606

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I use Sharefile at the office and don’t see it quite as integrated as Word/Excel is into One drive.  Also I’ve used Google drive with clients and if you are hard core Excel, Google sheets isn’t quite robust enough.  It just depends on your needs.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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AWRon wrote:

I can see that it is an easy choice to stay within the Microsoft family and adopt OneDrive (and even eventually Teams, etc).

“Easy” only in the sense that that it is better integrated. I have long felt that that only a “full stack” solution can be sufficiently safe and reliable. (That is my personal opinion.)

The operational side of AskWoody ran on a different solution prior to 2021. However, Microsoft Office was still used. To make it work, one of the staffers used a personal 365 account to stitch things together and the transition to new management proved difficult.

Other solutions are on our radar.

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JohnS1606

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Well, good luck with all of that.  Technology transitions can often be tedious.

But for sure you have enough talent available to you, both on the team and within the audience, to make it all work!

— AWRon

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Thanks for a great article. Have spent hours trying to figure out what Microsoft did.

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What a great idea this special edition newsletter is Will. Thanks for putting all eight individual emails about working with OneDrive for the Plus Subscribers into a single issue. I had saved the individual ones, but this will make it easier to find and review any points I may need a refresher on.

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JohnS1606, ScotchJohn, Will Fastie, LH

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AWRon wrote:

… to make it all work!

Yes, we switched to a Microsoft 365 business plan. 98% of our problems vanished. Full stack. OneNote remains quirky, but more on that to come.

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Great set of articles. However I have a question which was not explicitly discussed but could likely be inferred (although possibly incorrectly). Dees the methods talked about, i.e. Symlinks, work with network drives like a NAS or only local storage?

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It can.  There’s also third party tools that map drives into OneDrive.  So if native OneDrive doesn’t quite meet your needs, there are also lots of third party tools.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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