Do I want to use Win10 OneDrive (pros & cons)?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been using Windows 10 since it rolled out, but never connected with OneDrive. Got a new computer today and I’m in the middle of the extremely patronizing *("Hello there! We’re glad you’re here! *:slight_smile: ) setup process. It’s offering me the option to connect to OneDrive.

I use a laptop, so there’s no particular reason to be able to access files from all over the place, as I take it with me when I’m going to work away from home. I’m mostly retired (freelancer) now anyway so I’m not creating new projects every day like I used to. I got a 1T hard drive and have two 2T backup drives (and I back up regularly), so I’m not overly concerned with space or losing files. I don’t save movies or music on my computer.

Any reasons y’all can think of why I should take advantage of OneDrive or continue to eschew it? I guess I’m mostly wondering if there are any downsides to using it.

2

I personally swear by OneDrive. I can save a document on my work computer and go to my laptop, home desktop, or phone and easily work on the document.

At work we do not back up laptops. I tell my staff that if there is an issue with their computer - virus or hardware failure - I will not try and fix it. I’ll either reimage or give them a new computer and they re-link OneDrive.

3

That’s my experience. I love it. Between my travel tablet, my phone, and my desktop machine anything I care about using routinely or for a current project is in OneDrive and auto-synced between them. Plus it’s effectively backed up with zero effort on my part. All three devices could die simultaneously and the data would all be safe in the cloud. In fact I’ve had to replace the tablet twice. Just run the setup, point it at OneDrive and in a few minutes it looks just like its now-dead predecessor. All my files are right where they belong.

As a separate matter my desktop unit has a lot of long-term archive files that are not within the OneDrive folder hierarchy. I have Carbonite for that. It auto backs up the entire machine to the cloud.

The last time I made a physical backup onto some kind of media was a 1/8" tape cartridge unit in the 90s. If I was creating a TB a month of video I’d need a different solution. But I’m mostly protecting ancient static archives.
My overall perspective is the whole and entire point of OneDrive is device to device sync. If you own exactly one device it’s 99% useless; it perfectly solves a problem you just don’t have.

The remaining 1% is the ability to grab your files using somebody else’s machine with only a browser. So you show up at some client and discover your laptop battery died & you need to give them whatever. Or you go to your sister’s without your laptop and suddenly she needs a copy of that great recipe or book review or whatever. Just use their browser to log on to onedrive.com as you, copy the file down locally, and log back off. Neat, sweet & quick.

4

That’s pretty much my attitude toward even my personal computers, these days. Saving something locally means it’s either temporary (and I don’t care if I lose it), too big to go in the cloud, or very occasionally something that I want to apply tighter security to or that contractually can’t be stored in the cloud.

When I get a new computer, it takes me a couple hours to re-install apps and I’m pretty much back to where I was with the previous one. I do have backups, but they’re increasingly superfluous.

Since I live in a mixed-platform world and OneDrive is a little flakey on the Mac, I use a few different cloud services rather than just one, but OneDrive is where most of my stuff lives.

5

Thanks for these very helpful and interesting answers.

When y’all talk about saving “all your files” on OneDrive, what magnitude of file size are we talking about?

The computer I’m replacing developed a fatal problem. (Long story.) I dragged all the user files (data/documents) onto an external drive to rescue them-- 700GB. Does OneDrive have a size limit? Can I upload old files?

I don’t access files on my phone (BlackBerry) or my kindle, but OneDrive, as y’all describe it, would be great for reloading data and documents onto a new computer.

6

My experience is similar to FinsToTheLeft and LSLGuy. I have a laptop and a Surface Pro–essentially two laptops, plus I use a handful of other computers for my jobs. And occasionally I’ll make a last minute edit of a Microsoft Word or Excel document on my phone before sending it to someone. These all synchronize with One Drive, so I don’t have to worry about having an out-of-date version of a document.

Before I went to Win 10, I just used Dropbox for doing this, but at that time it couldn’t edit MS files online so seamlessly. I was little hesitant to use One Drive, too, at first, but it’s been extremely useful, with really no problems. One time I had accidentally lost on my hard drives a version of a document I needed, and One Drive online had a memory of it I could rescue from.

Also, they gave me 1T of space when I subscribed to Office 365.

7

Thanks. My next question: is there a cost? Or maybe some basic amount of storage that’s free? I’m still using Office 2013, which is plenty good enough for me. Wasn’t planning to go to 365.

I can see where OneDrive is terrific for the scenarios y’all describe.

8

I just went to onedrive.com and read the intro screen. Here’s the options:[ul][li]The 100% free version gets you 5GB of OneDrive storage with no features beyond storage and sync. That’s what I use.[/li][li]$1.99/mo gets you 50GB of OneDrive storage with no features beyond storage and sync.[/li][li]$6.99/mo gets you Office 365 Personal which is some apps within the online & client-side Office 2016 plus it comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage.[/li][li]$9.99/mo gets you Office 365 Home which is more apps within the online & client-side Office 2016 licensed for multiple PCs plus it comes with 5TB of OneDrive storage.[/ul]You didn’t ask, but the Carbonite online backup solution I use https://www.carbonite.com/ costs $60/year and is designed exactly for 2 missions:[/li]1) I deleted it last week but now I need it, and
2) My computer died & I need to refill my new computer with my old files.

So if you don’t need/want Office online and don’t need/want real time multi-device sync, it’s cheaper to buy Carbonite. Carbonite has no storage limits. If you have a 50TB PC, they’ll back it up for $60/yr. Not including external drives. For that you need the $100/yr option.

Here’s another factor to consider that favors Carbonite (or some other competing online backup product) for your mission.

The way OneDrive works, there is a master OneDrive folder, typically at C:\Users<YourLogin>\OneDrive. It backs up & syncs only and entirely the folder tree rooted there. Nothing else.

So that means trying to use it as a backup for your entire “my whatever” tree doesn’t really work unless you move every magic “my whatever” folder under the OneDrive folder. Which, despite Microsoft’s harping for 30 years now for developers not to hard-code paths to Windows’ magic folders, will often break apps, especially in corner cases.

OneDrive also absolutely doesn’t do anything to back up the rest of your box: exes, Windows settings, etc. That option is available in Carbonite. Or it can be configured just to back up the “My whatever folders”, desktop, plus whatever custom folder trees you want, e.g. "C:\ClientProjects" that you set up 7 machines ago before we all trusted “My Documents” and are still using today. :slight_smile:

I don’t use the “all of my box including Windows & exes” mode because I don’t think restoring that to my next box will be successful or desirable and I’m not trying to protect against, e.g., a ransomware attack where my hardware is still good but my HD is logically hosed. That mode is aimed mostly at that risk, to give consumers the equivalent capability to what the corporate IT guys said above: if anything goes wrong with an employee PC, we just nuke the hard drive and reimage it from scratch.

My PC is old enough that if anything bad happens to my hardware *or *software, the next step is a totally new PC and exe installation, followed by Carboniting in all my documents and archives.

9

Thanks, LSLGuy. :slight_smile: I checked back to say that I found the costs.

I’m not sure I understand exactly what you mean by

Would you go into more detail on this?

I didn’t think about carbonite, but your comments are intriguing, and I will definitely look into it. Are you saying that carbonite backs up everything including installed programs? Surely not. :eek: (I hate that now everything is an app. To channel Der Trumpster, “Not many people know that ‘app’ is short for’application.'”

I don’t need to sync stuff over multiple devices, but I could use additional backup. Can there be too much backup? I think not. I’ve been using the Windows backup utility for years with great success. When (if) I ever get out of bed, I will plug my 2T drive into my new laptop and move files over–all my files.

ETA OneDrive vs Carbonite

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Found the answer to this on the Carbonite site:

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It’s their answer to Dropbox. They’ll give you a small amount of storage and hope that you will exceed it and sign up to pay them for more storage. Nothing wrong with it in general.

12

I much prefer OneDrive to either Google Drive (which hogged my computer’s resources) or Apple whatever-they-call-it (which is a whiny little bitch baby that needs updating every three seconds, just like everything Apple makes). Go for it. Worth it.

13

I’m not sure how far up/down the scale you are on knowledge of Windows PC innards so I apologize if I’m being either too basic or too techy. …

The typical Windows box has a folder C:\Users<YourLogin>. Within there is everything that’s relevant to you as one of the several possible logged-in users on the box. This holds both the stuff intended for end users to see and touch, like their Word files, and the stuff that’s not supposed to be seen or touched by end users but is still customized specifically for them. Things like the files that hold your personal portion of the Windows Registry, the files that hold your personal Outlook email, the browser’s personal cookie cache for you, etc. etc.

The ONLY folders in there that the naïve end user is supposed to see and deal with have historically (since Win 95) been named as “My <whatever>” for various <whatevers>. On my box here now there’s folders for Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos.

These are special Magic Windows folders; they’re not just plain old folders with the name “Documents” or whatever. Windows itself and all Windows-compliant third-party executables (AKA apps in the modern lingo) are expected to store things in the correct Magic folder by default and to look by default into the correct Magic folder when asked to open a file.

Starting with Vista, the word “My” was removed from the name of the magic folders. So on a Win10 box it’ll be named just “Documents”, not “My Documents” like it was on e.g. XP. To any Windows software developer who worked on anything from Win95 to Win10 (e.g. me) they’re still slangly called the “My <whatever>” folders. Any exe written in that era and still being used unmodified today will still ask Windows to connected it to “My Documents” and Windows will know to give it “Documents” instead. That way users can keep using their dumb old familiar exes and stay happy. That’s true for the Documents, Desktop, Music, etc. Whether you actively use them or not.

With all this going on, if you have a bunch of old exes you still use, you really do NOT want to try to move “Documents” to someplace else on your hard drive. The opportunity for stuff to break that only a WinGuru can fix is large. Instead you *really * want to leave it exactly where Windows puts it.
With all that intro out of the way, here’s the punch-line:

To play nice with your exes and apps, your data files = documents (lower case-d) want to be stored under the “Documents” AKA “My Documents” (uppercase-D) folder. Which folder should not be moved from its built-in location.

But in order to have that same lowercase d document participate in OneDrive, it MUST be located under the OneDrive root folder. Which is in a different place. That’s a Catch-22.

To use OneDrive as an all-my-files backup (or all-my-files sync) tool you need to move the upper case Documents folder to be under the OneDrive folder. But you can’t *safely *move the upper case Documents folder to be under the OneDrive folder. Catch-22.

Which drives us to the conclusion: OneDrive is *not *intended to be an all-user-files *backup *solution. That’s *not *what it’s for. It’s a sync tool to help multiple devices hold your active collaborative or work in process or mobile reference files. Which you’re willing to stage in and out of the OneDrive folder hierarchy as appropriate to your workflow.

If you want to make a backup, use a backup tool designed to work *with *the grain of Windows’ ideas of where files live, not against the grain.

Yup. The whole shebang. If you configure it that way.

Which again, is a useful technique to protect against a ransomware attack. But is NOT a useful way to move into a whole new PC of a different brand, size, hardware, etc.

14

So you would just re-install all the applications, right? I’m trying to find if there is a workable way to avoid having to re-install all my applications if a machine just completely gets bricked or stolen. Could a Carbonite back-up reinstall all the applications with their settings on a new machine?

15

I’ve never set it up this way nor tested it. But as I understand it:If the new PC is exactly the same make and model with exactly the same hardware config as the old one then yes. Else no.It’s NOT intended as a way to move into a new PC. It’s intended as a super-duper “system restore point” to return your existing HD in your existing machine to exactly how it looked last week before The Bad Thing happened. That includes Windows itself, its settings, all your exes / apps, all their settings, and all your end user data. IOW, every single bit on every internal drive.

IOW, it’s a Wayback Machine, not a Star Trek Transporter.

Anyone interested in this for real would do far better to talk to their sales folks or read their owner’s manuals or some online 3rd party reviews than listen to my recollections of stuff I idly read about a couple years ago.

16

It really isn’t. Note that the OneDrive folder already has that same hierarchy under it (Documents, Music, Pictures, etc) by default when you create it. Modern apps should default to OneDrive’s version if OneDrive is present (Microsoft Apps do, some other large companies’ apps do, most other don’t). But in either case, after you’ve saved your first file there for each app, it’ll be the default location. That’s on pre-Windows 10 system.

On Windows 10, the entire OS defaults to the OneDrive hierarchy if you’ve enabled OneDrive, so most people will never see the old “magic” folders any more. If you do save something there by mistake, just drag the CONTENTS of the old local folder (not the folder itself) to the OneDrive one once, and you’re done.

Whatever your choice, the app should (and almost all do) remember where you saved last and default to that the next time, so it’s not like you’ll be constantly changing anything. Usually the only confusion arises if the machine is originally set up without OneDrive, then it’s later turned on, but MS discourages that now by offering it for free during Windows setup.

Note that I used to work for Microsoft, who provides excellent prices on their software to employee alumni, so I’m using the basically-unlimited-storage Office365 options. I realize that if you’ve got more limited OneDrive space, your options/benefits/tradeoffs will be different. (Note that I certainly don’t speak for Microsoft now – heck, I didn’t speak for them back then, either. At this point, I’m just a user, and frankly one that does most of his work on a Mac (but still uses Office and OneDrive)).

17

Bolding mine.

That explains it. 100% of my experience is with what started as SkyDrive on Win7 later upgraded to Win8 on some boxes and to Win8 then Win10 on others. Plus there’s some Win8.1RT in the mix. In *that world, OneDrive starts life is a bare root folder and after that you’re on your own. Between 4 boxes each on a different OS or even different processor I had to insert some hardlink junctions in some boxes to redirect stuff where it simply can’t be remedied any other way.

It makes complete sense for OneDrive to be the whole userspace folder structure on a fresh Win10 install. It was obvious from the git-go that that was MS’s eventual destination. I didn’t realize they’d arrived yet. Bravo for them. And us.

As to our OP, I’m not sure what her state of play is. She may still be using LOB apps or some beloved freeware from the Win XP era.
There’s almost nothing as shiny as a fresh new Windows install on fresh hardware with all MS’s latest goodies installed. Smells like a new Mercedes.

The reality of most 5 year old twice upgraded battered road warrior laptops is more like a 2005 Corolla with a very bad aftermarket stereo. Even when maintained by a pro. And when unmaintained by an amateur … Yikes :eek:.

  • Ask me why I haven’t upgraded this mélange to Edge yet. Go ahead, just ask. :slight_smile:
18

I get that – and for this purpose, I just make a periodic system image on an external hard drive, using the Windows’ standard utility. Doesn’t that accomplish the same thing?

19

<ThelmaLou clutches her bosom>

Sir, I would say that you wound me except I know you don’t know what my level of competence is. <Takes a whiff of smelling salts and a slug of Scotch> I’m certainly not a pro (although I did live with a programmer in the late 1970s), but I’m a quite knowledgeable, gutsy amateur. No freeware, no games, no movies, no Facebook. no LinkedIn, no Skype, and very little music. Except for hanging out here, I’m all business, computer-wise speaking, that is. My main thing on my computer, now that I’m mostly retired, is graphic design.

Since this is my thread, and since I seem to have some well-informed people on board, I’m going to do a little self-hijack.

The thing that led to the purchase of the new computer happened about two weeks ago. My main computer, a Precision M6700, which I’ve had for four years (it came with Win7 and I upgraded to Win10 back when the upgrade became available), rebooted itself two Sundays ago. In the middle of the day. I came into my office and the Windows10 start screen was showing, the place where you enter your password or PIN. Except that the screen was stuck/frozen. Unresponsive to mouse, keys, trackpad, etc.

Here I will abridge all the stuff I did over the next few days. I have another laptop, a Dell XPS15 running Win7, so I brought it out of retirement and started searching for what to do. I learned about the turn-it-off-three-times and get the Automatic Repair utility, which I ran many times, trying every option that each of the options presented with no success. I don’t want to belabor this, because it’s not my main question. But I researched like crazy and tried every solution I could find that I could understand.

Ultimately, I got to the bottom of the barrel, end of the line: system restore, which reinstalls Windows10 and leaves your data and documents alone but removes all of your software. It does give you a list at the end of everything it didn’t reinstall, and that was interesting. When Win10 was finished reinstalling (“Hi. We’re so glad you’re here! I’m Cortana! Ask me anything.” :slight_smile: ) with a couple hours’ worth of updates, I reinstalled about a dozen programs, Adobe Creative Suite 5 (my bread and butter), Office 2013, BlackBerry Link, a few other things. I got everything set up just the way I wanted it. I even succumbed to the Windows10 Start menu instead of using the Classic Shell, as I had been doing. Wisely, I did a complete backup at that point.

The computer ran for about three days and then the exact same thing happened. One evening everything froze. The screen was completely unresponsive.

I went back through the same steps, i.e., Automatic Repair, with its tree of options. Nothing worked, not restore points, not changing startup items. And of course everything you try runs for an hour or more before it tells you “this didn’t work.” Finally, once again, back to system restore.

But this time system restore ran for an hour before it said “this didn’t work.” And whispered, “you’re screwed.”

I made a Win10 boot disk using the XPS15, figured out how to get into the BIOS to change the boot order (this took about 1,000 times longer to do that it’s taking to write/read), and reinstalled Win10 again. I found all my documents/data in “windows.old,” and for good mojo, copied everything onto a 1T hard drive, EVEN THOUGH I had the full backup (although not a system image) of everything after the first system restore.

Thanks for reading this far.

There were probably other things a truly knowledgeable pro could have done, and could still do, but I’m short on those, and I didn’t want to take it to Geek Squad. I needed to be able to work.

I went to the Dell website and bought another computer, an Inspiron5567 (8G RAM, 1T hard drive). It was a bargain at $600. I only have one client now, I don’t need a heavy duty machine like the $2K-ish Precision.

The new computer came yesterday. I took it out of the box and saved the box. I plugged it in (“Hi! We’re glad you’re here!”), did all the updates, including the “Creators Update.” The only thing I installed on the computer was Kaspersky (after removing McAfee that came with it), and CCleaner. I shut the computer down, went to a concert, came home and went to bed. When I started this thread about 5 AM today, I had not been into my office yet. I was still in bed reading on my kindle.

Soon I went into the office, I pushed the *on button. Nothing. Black screen. Unresponsive. I push the on button again, then the Dell screen (with the circle) comes up and a message is saying something like “scanning and repairing disk.” WTF?? A percent is going by. Gets to 68% and stays there for about 40 minutes. I turn the computer off with the button. Turn it back on, the whole story plays through again, including getting stuck at 68%. I call Dell and tell the very sympathetic CSR my tale of woe. He says the best thing to do is system restore. I’m in Groundhog Day! * I tell him I want to send it back. He transfers me to “returns,” but they’re closed until Monday.

I keep dicking around with the computer. Finally, after a few more reboots, I get to my old pal “Automatic Repair” and navigate to system restore, which the computer did a couple of hours ago. It reinstalled Win10 (“Hi! We’re glad you’re here! I’m Cortana!”). Now it’s updating–currently at 82%. I’m wondering if I should skip that Creators update if/when it comes up. In my research, many people seemed to have problems after that.

Why would this happen to a brand new computer? Should I send it back? This is my fourth (I think) Dell laptop, and I’ve not had this kind of problem before.

If anyone is moved to answer, don’t worry about TMI or talking down to me. I can take it. If you’ve read to the end, thank you.

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UPDATE: I made that looooong post a couple of hours ago. Since then the new computer has been updating and restarting like a mofo. I don’t remember it doing it this much when I first set it up … geez, was it only yesterday?