# Why is my OneDrive (for Business) folder identified as network location?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-my-onedrive-for-business-folder-identified-as-network-location/717514>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [April 12, 2015, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-my-onedrive-for-business-folder-identified-as-network-location/717514 "2015-04-12T19:47:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-my-onedrive-for-business-folder-identified-as-network-location/717514/1 "2015-04-12T19:47:06Z")

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I have Microsoft OneDrive for Business, as part of a corporate Office265 account that my company has. I figured this worked like DropBox, where there is a local folder on my machine that is synced across local replicas on my other machines. It is also available on a web interface.

I just put a bunch of files in there, and when I opened one in Word, Word tells me that I am opening a file from a network location. Why? Should I care? When I save it tells me it will merge changes with other users’ changes (but of course no other users have access to it). File reads and writes seem to be slower than before. But it’s on my local disk. This does not happen with DropBox.

I was hoping this was going to be really simple, but as usual Microsoft has introduced some confusion and in searching Microsoft’s many pages describing this service, I cannot find a description of this particular point.

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**Author:** ![jimbuff314](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c57346/32.png) [@jimbuff314](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jimbuff314)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-my-onedrive-for-business-folder-identified-as-network-location/717514/2 "2015-04-12T20:19:25Z")

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This

> [@](#):
>
> When you save a document in OneDrive, your document is stored in a central location that you can access from nearly anywhere. Even if you’re away from your computer, you can work on your document whenever you have a connection to the Web.
> 
> Saving a document in OneDrive also makes it easy to share the document with others. You can send a link rather than sending an attachment. That way, you maintain just a single copy of the document. If people need to make revisions, they do so in the same copy, with no need to reconcile multiple versions and copies of the document.
> 
> Saving Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents in OneDrive enables you and others to view and edit the documents in a Web browser, using Office Online programs

makes me think that OneDrive is intended to regard itself as being on a network. It also clarifies the “When I save it tells me it will merge changes with other users’ changes”.

From [here](https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Save-a-document-to-your-OneDrive-from-Office-2010-b9e0c0a9-2bd7-42cf-9178-24d60c51ac75).

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**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2015, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-my-onedrive-for-business-folder-identified-as-network-location/717514/3 "2015-04-12T21:50:45Z")

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There is a local hard drive folder. Which is where you’re reading from / saving to. The onedrive app runs in the background to sync those local changes with the server.

The fundamental distinction about a network location for opening is security awareness. A doc you create & maintain locally is less risky than one you get over the wire from somebody else. Once you put a doc online _and enable others to edit it_, it’s no longer pristinely yours. Somebody could have put evil content into it while you weren’t watching. So the doc becomes less trustworthy.  
Fundamentally, OneDrive for business is about more than just you having cloud storage for sharing / syncing docs between various devices used only _by you_. It’s for sharing / syncing docs between multiple devices used _by multiple people_. So to simplify the use cases, they treat all docs in the cloud as networked docs. The fact it is shar_able_ means they chose to treat it as shar_ed_.