OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired • Hacker News Board

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#21

Post by donmcronald » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

zelos wrote: post #11

>”Wait, what? OneDrive can’t handle Microsoft’s own file types? Sure enough, the official online help says you have to move the offending files to a different folder that OneDrive can’t see” How does something like that ship? That’s going to affect virtually every Office user. Why not just filter out files that won’t sync and warn the user?

There are other pain points too. One I ran into lately is the business version of OneDrive uses a fixed folder name based off your company name and it's hard to change. For example:

  C:\Users\Rumpelstiltskin\OneDrive - Rumpelstiltskin's Gold Spinning Services Inc.\

Then you realize that Excel has a 218 character path limit on file names and things get ridiculous really fast.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#22

Post by revision17 » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

caiob wrote: post #6

iCloud doesn’t get a lot of love around here, but it’s been one of the most stable cloud services that I’ve been using for the past couple of years or so. It really lives up to Apple’s motto of “it just works”

Unless you're a poor soul who tries to use their Windows based sync client :-P

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#23

Post by aj7 » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #15

zelos wrote: post #11

>”Wait, what? OneDrive can’t handle Microsoft’s own file types? Sure enough, the official online help says you have to move the offending files to a different folder that OneDrive can’t see” How does something like that ship? That’s going to affect virtually every Office user. Why not just filter out files that won’t sync and warn the user?

Also, what makes those combinations of bytes unsupported by OneDrive? I get that OneDrive might have some special support and recognition for certain filetypes, but I assume it also supports unknown file types ... so why on earth would they make it specially recognize certain file types just to blacklist them?

I don’t “get” this at all. I want my cloud services to act like dumb mechanical drives, but ones that never break and have zero mass.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#24

Post by weberc2 » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #21

zelos wrote: post #11

>”Wait, what? OneDrive can’t handle Microsoft’s own file types? Sure enough, the official online help says you have to move the offending files to a different folder that OneDrive can’t see” How does something like that ship? That’s going to affect virtually every Office user. Why not just filter out files that won’t sync and warn the user?

There are other pain points too. One I ran into lately is the business version of OneDrive uses a fixed folder name based off your company name and it's hard to change. For example: C:\Users\Rumpelstiltskin\OneDrive - Rumpelstiltskin's Gold Spinning Services Inc.\ Then you realize that Excel has a 218 character path limit on file names and things get ridiculous really fast.

Reminds me of the days when Eclipse wouldn't run on Windows because Windows filepaths were fixed and Java package paths/identifiers (which I guess map to filesystem paths?) are crazy verbose.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#25

Post by pixl97 » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #21

zelos wrote: post #11

>”Wait, what? OneDrive can’t handle Microsoft’s own file types? Sure enough, the official online help says you have to move the offending files to a different folder that OneDrive can’t see” How does something like that ship? That’s going to affect virtually every Office user. Why not just filter out files that won’t sync and warn the user?

There are other pain points too. One I ran into lately is the business version of OneDrive uses a fixed folder name based off your company name and it's hard to change. For example: C:\Users\Rumpelstiltskin\OneDrive - Rumpelstiltskin's Gold Spinning Services Inc.\ Then you realize that Excel has a 218 character path limit on file names and things get ridiculous really fast.

     subst X: C:\Users\Rumpelstiltskin\OneDrive - Rumpelstiltskin's Gold Spinning Services Inc.\

Annoying, but it does work.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#26

Post by brianmcc » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

MR4D wrote: post #19

I feel that OneDrive is a piece of $&!+. Not that it's bad, but that it's randomly inconsistent. We made the decision two years ago to run our company on OneDrive, and we've experienced almost everything covered in this article (except the .pst and one-note file issues because we don't use them). That being said, I don't really know of a good alternative. It mostly works. Until those really random days when it just c…

DropBox?

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#27

Post by CobrastanJorji » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

java-man wrote: post #18

zelos wrote: post #11

>”Wait, what? OneDrive can’t handle Microsoft’s own file types? Sure enough, the official online help says you have to move the offending files to a different folder that OneDrive can’t see” How does something like that ship? That’s going to affect virtually every Office user. Why not just filter out files that won’t sync and warn the user?

How did Windows 10 ship? The thing constantly overrides user-set preferences: fonts, colors, and worst of all - default apps. Reports usage data to Microsoft with no way to turn it off. An update mechanism that lives its own dominating life, interrupting user workflow whenever it wants.

To be fair, it was replacing Windows 8.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#28

Post by winthrowe » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #15

zelos wrote: post #11

>”Wait, what? OneDrive can’t handle Microsoft’s own file types? Sure enough, the official online help says you have to move the offending files to a different folder that OneDrive can’t see” How does something like that ship? That’s going to affect virtually every Office user. Why not just filter out files that won’t sync and warn the user?

Also, what makes those combinations of bytes unsupported by OneDrive? I get that OneDrive might have some special support and recognition for certain filetypes, but I assume it also supports unknown file types ... so why on earth would they make it specially recognize certain file types just to blacklist them?

Because you're holding it wrong.

The blacklisted file types are frequently changing, tanking your sync performance, and the client applications that use them communicate directly with their backend services.

I'm not saying it's a good reason, but it's not completely arbitrary.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#29

Post by la6470 » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #9

Would it be appropriate to change the title to "OneDrive leaves a lot to be desired"... I originally thought this was about Microsoft Azure.

No because Microsoft indirectly force enterprises to sign up for Azure because enterprises are locked in with Windows OS , applications and Microsoft licenses. I have seen it happening in many enterprise companies.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#30

Post by toyg » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

OneDrive is a classic example of how screwed MS management techniques still are: it started as a Windows-only service that was pretty good; then the focus switched to Mac and now it’s pretty good on Mac, but the Windows version got worse. Office apps kinda work with it (I don’t use Outlook...), but the Sharepoint integration is a shitshow. It all seems very haphazardly developed.

For something that should be the rock on which to build the MS consumer cloud, it still looks like a me-too Dropbox clone.