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OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

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Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#41

Post by zelon88 »

"The next morning, there’s no internet access. Cable outage? Hacker attack? Power failure? Nope, it’s OneDrive. It’s spent all night uploading to the cloud, and it’s still running. In fact, it’s got hours – probably days – still to go, and it’s hogging so much bandwidth that everything else on the network is stalled. Surprise! OneDrive has no bandwidth throttle. It uses 100% of your network, so say goodbye to email, web browsing, video streaming, and everything else. (Turns out, OneDrive will allow you to limit upload/download bandwidth, but it’s not turned on by default.)"

That's most likely because you have Comcast or some other crappy broadband provider with plans like "150mbps down/10mbps up."

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#43

Post by justwalt »

java-man wrote: post #39
desiarnezjr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In hindsight, Windows 8 wasn't that bad overall. The real disaster was the Metro UI, but the underlying OS was relatively unobtrusive and a bit more performant than Win7. Once something like Classic Shell was installed, it was pretty slick and reliable. My last Windows machine now runs 10 begrudgingly, and compared to my daily drivers MacOS and Ubuntu, it's a shockingly inconsistent operating system. I don't rely on…

Classic Shell was great. Looking back, going from XP to 7 to 8 to 10, I can't think of any improvement, but the user experience got consistently worse. This might be the Second Law of Thermodynamics at work, but seriously, I don't understand how these things got shipped.

FWIW, I think the multiple desktops feature in 10 is a good quality of life change. Past that I’d probably agree. Give me any other modern OS before Windows.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#45

Post by laurentl »

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…

We just started using AWS workdocs, which has clients for Mac and Windows (plus iOS and Android iirc). You can either use it as a network drive (Windows only and not fully baked yet) or as a synched folder. There’s also a web interface where you can see the different versions, comment on a file, and which has a decent integration with Office (Workdocs Companion): the file opens in Office, you save your changes and it gets updated remotely.

Honestly it’s not great (esp. the UIs which definitely need improvement) but it seems much less erratic than OneDrive. Plus they have frequent updates and they seem to read the questions on the support forum so I’m cautiously hopeful it’ll improve over time.

However the best document sharing experience I had was with Jive. It’s what Sharepoint should have been. You get a nice, powerful intranet and a great plugin for Office which makes editing a shared, online file as easy and seamless as a local one. Unfortunately they don’t have a SaaS model (last time I checked) so you have to buy the software and set up and manage the infra yourself.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#46

Post by amanzi »

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?

PST files are tricky because they often get to hundreds of MB or GBs in size. And every time Onedrive detects a change it will create a backup of that file and sync up the changes. So you quickly end up with hundreds of backup copies of your huge PST file consuming all your Onedrive storage. So the recommendation is to not store your PST files in your Onedrive folder. I assume the same advice would apply if using Dropbox or other cloud storage providers.

Re: OneDrive Leaves a Lot to be Desired

#48

Post by lozenge »

amanzi wrote: post #46
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?

PST files are tricky because they often get to hundreds of MB or GBs in size. And every time Onedrive detects a change it will create a backup of that file and sync up the changes. So you quickly end up with hundreds of backup copies of your huge PST file consuming all your Onedrive storage. So the recommendation is to not store your PST files in your Onedrive folder. I assume the same advice would apply if using Dro…

Rsync solves this - it can transfer only the changed parts. And past versions can be saved as diffs and take very little space.
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