While OneDrive is more thoroughly integrated into the Windows operation on one's PC, with the important idea being that everything on that drive (see illustration left) is held in the cloud, on some Microsoft server somewhere or other, and one can always get at one's OneDrive from wherever one is logging in.
So, for me, this has been fine. I can move between my various Internet capable devices - including here my telephone - without regard to from which device I last updated the document of interest. If I leave one of the devices turned off for a while, say a few weeks, when I turn it on again the display of OneDrive contents is rather out of date and what I do is leave it to its own devices for a little while so that it can update its view of OneDrive. This does not take very long as it only updates the catalogue and only updates documents on demand.
The central copy of the catalogue knows about the different devices and knows which devices have the latest copies of which documents.
All geared up to one's account with Microsoft, the identifier for which is usually one's usual email address. Getting logged into that account mostly seems to happen as part of turning a device on.
Being a reasonably tidy person, I only use one device at a time and I do not work on any one document on more than one device at a time. One probably could work offline to the extent that the documents you want are on the device in question and OneDrive will sort it all out when you get connected again. Not yet tested getting at OneDrive from someone else's PC, for example a Surrey Libraries PC, but I dare say that something sensible would happen. I also dare say that if one worked at it, one could probably catch OneDrive out, but so far the signs are good. The one time that I tried to do something that might have got it into a muddle, it put up a warning message.
So, in the round and so far, a happy customer for low volume cloud storage from Microsoft.
But I am not sure about high volume or long term. I think I get just 15Gb for free from Microsoft, so I am not yet going to drop Dropbox quite yet, not least because of all the bother of migrating from one service to another. Plus, I think that Dropbox offers various long term storage relevant features which are not yet part of the OneDrive offering.
PS: I have often noticed the way that one can think with one's fingers. Sit down at the keyboard and all sorts of stuff comes tumbling out, stuff which one wouldn't have dreamed of while gazing at the ceiling, perhaps when one was trying too hard. Let the conscious mind be occupied with fingers and let the unconscious mind get on with the real work. All of which is perhaps related to the way that one can make up childrens' stories aloud when one and the children concerned are in the right mood.
OneDrive got into a muddle this morning, resulting in a pop-up warning me that a documentation spreadsheet might be being updated by someone else and that maybe I would like to take a side copy of my working copy. Ignored!
ReplyDeleteDiscovered this morning that all this stuff lives at a place called https://d.docs.live.net. Some monster Microsoft data center under a rocky mountain somewhere?
ReplyDeleteFour more snippets. One, OneDrive does not necessarily warn you that you are about to update an out of date copy of a document - although I dare say it does warn you when you go to save the thing, rather late in the day. Two, OneDrive synchronisation is not all under the covers. You can get at synchronisation functions by right click, you can prompt it to get on with synchronisation. Three, OneDrive seems to be mixed up with Sharepoint. But not so tidily that Windows does not worry you about whether it should be allowed to install Sharepoint services. Four, what you see of a OneDrive folder from within, say, Powerpoint, is not always what you might want or expect. Offline documents may be invisible.
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