The sins of OneDrive as Microsoft's cloud storage service turns 15
- Reference: 1660134611
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/08/10/onedrive_at_15/
- Source link:
OneDrive emerged in [1]2007 after paying its dues in beta form for US users. Initially called Windows Live Folders and then Windows Live SkyDrive, it allowed users to stash files on Microsoft's servers. Desktop apps for Windows Vista, 7 and 8 arrived, allowing for synchronization of files.
Microsoft has since forced the service deeper into Windows, recently attracting attention from [2]regulators concerned that users might be being forced into using the service.
[3]
For Microsoft, things appear to have gone swimmingly. The company [4]reported a 240 percent increase in monthly active users over the last five years and it is hard to avoid the service if you are a Microsoft 365 user. The latest update planned is a redesigned OneDrive Home experience, which will surface a user's most relevant files as well most recent and show activity updates.
[5]
[6]
However, it hasn't all been roses in the OneDrive garden. Sometimes things have gone terribly wrong, and some things continue to do so.
That Name
The name "OneDrive" is yet another reminder that Microsoft can be stared down by lawyers. In 2011 the British Sky Broadcasting Group (the European satellite broadcasting arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire) claimed that the SkyDrive brand violated BSkyB's trademark for internet storage services. It took a while, [7]but by 2014 Microsoft acquiesced and the OneDrive branding was born.
Placeholders begone
A user favorite, placeholders allowed for fine-grained control over what was – and wasn't – downloaded to a PC. A catalog of files would show up, but not all were downloaded. An indicator showed if a file was downloaded or not. [8]The feature was removed in Windows 10 , meaning only those files selected for download would show up. Files On Demand eventually arrived to restore the much missed functionality, but the experience was a reminder of how certain elements within Microsoft can appear deaf to user pleas.
OneDrive, more like NoneDrive when it comes to capacity
After a brief flirtation with unlimited storage (something that Microsoft eventually pulled, citing naughtiness on the part of a minority of users) OneDrive has remained very much the poor relation when it comes to storage, with little changing since the days of SkyDrive.
Users start with 5GB for free. $19.99 per year gets you 100GB, which can be upped to 1TB if one signs up for a Microsoft 365 Personal subscription for $69.99 per year.
In 2012, Microsoft upped the free storage to 7GB but reckoned hardly anyone would need that much. We agreed, saying: "Dare we say that 7GB should be enough for anyone?" but that was 10 years ago, and getting to 2TB now requires [9]spending some serious cash ; considerably more than its rivals (Apple's iCloud, for example, asks for just $9.99/month, or £6.99 in the UK, for 2TB.)
What happens when the cloud disappears?
OneDrive, being part of Microsoft's cloud services, is not immune to the various outages that have struck Azure and its tentacles over the years. [10]Networking issues have left users bereft of their files and occasionally users have had to install fixes or fiddle with Registry settings when Microsoft put out a release [11]that left OneDrive severely broken .
Bundling
[12]Microsoft revises software licensing, cloud policies amid EU regulator scrutiny
[13]Microsoft revises software licensing, cloud policies amid EU regulator scrutiny
[14]Microsoft faces EU antitrust complaint from OVHcloud
[15]New year, new OS: OneDrive support axed for old versions of Windows from 1 Jan 2022
[16]And then there is the bundling . As OneDrive's tendrils thread ever deeper into the Windows operating system, there is a suspicion among [17]Microsoft's rivals that the bundling of its own online services with Windows is somewhat of a trojan horse for getting customers to sign up. There is more than a faint whiff of the browser wars of 1990 about the approach and, frankly, OneDrive (and the associated Microsoft 365) is getting rather hard to avoid.
So what does the next 15 years hold? Clearly, OneDrive represents a useful way to both acquire and hold on to customers (and it is undeniably convenient to use in current versions of Windows.) The hiccups of the past are receding and, other than the occasional tumble, the service is pretty stable.
[18]
Microsoft does, however, need to address the storage limitations of OneDrive and keep a very close eye on both regulators and the increasing concern on the part of users with regard to where and how their data is being stored. ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2007/08/10/google_sells_storage/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/18/microsoft_cloud_concessions/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YvPWJ839oenbQ5QKIjvIKgAAABE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2022/08/09/onedrive-turns-15-delivering-new-and-intuitive-experiences/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YvPWJ839oenbQ5QKIjvIKgAAABE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YvPWJ839oenbQ5QKIjvIKgAAABE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/27/microsoft_skydrive_renamed_onedrive/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2017/07/20/microsoft_tweaks_onedrive/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/25/microsoft_onedrive_storage_price/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/29/microsoft_onedrive_down/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/29/microsoft_onedrive_down/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/18/microsoft_cloud_concessions/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/18/microsoft_cloud_concessions/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/17/ovhcloud_microsoft_complaint/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/08/onedrive_end_of_support/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/29/onedrive_antitrust/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/17/ovhcloud_microsoft_complaint/
[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YvPWJ839oenbQ5QKIjvIKgAAABE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: MS 365 Personal
Why? I used to be able to buy a home version of office. Now I have to rent it. Why is that a good thing?
Re: MS 365 Personal
Grey Market license for about $5CDN for Office Pro 2021 works for me on each machine that requires it.
Sign into my Microsoft account for extra features - No thanks.
While we are on the subject why does Autosave require......no demand it's stored in OneDrive.
OneDrive
Sorry, but I'm not going to make even more easy for the NSA to access my files.
Not that the NSA should be interested, but it doesn't appear to be very picky.
Because of the Cloud Act, any information you put on OneDrive can be accessed without warning or notice by US agencies. Knowing how these agencies can [1]provide information to some US companies to give a competitive advantage , non-US companies should be very careful before putting information there. The same applies to GDrive, iCloud, AWS...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon#Patent_dispute
Article 48 GDPR stipulates, court orders requesting the transfer of data outside the EU are only acceptable if grounded on an international agreement, such as a MLAT. Other legal bases are also not acceptable under EU law for such requests.
So in short, the Cloud Act cant force companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce to hand over data for customers in the EU or the UK.
What happened to Enercon, the link you posted?
Re: Regional data centres
So, as a US company presented with a demand under the Cloud act by your local government are you going to say "We can't obey domestic law because a law in other countries prohibit it"?
Good luck with that one.
A real concern
But it depends on the company, and if they do biz on both sides of the pond. US based companies that aren't maintaining a presence in Europe are a roll of the dice.
Don't think that the US government won't just steal it either. Marching orders are still to hoover up everything that can be sniffed, scraped, tapped, tortured, tricked, bribed or bought. 5-eyes are still playing the "you spy on our citizens and share the details with us we can't legally gather on the same people" game, so also remember in most cases the people that are interested are your own governments.
But keep up the good work, while the cookie law was a useless shit show, thanks to Schrems(Thanks Max!) the ball is moving back toward the privacy side again. And stateside things are starting to change, so please keep humiliating our politicians by building a society with a little privacy and proving the world won't come to an end if starbucks has to ask for consent for location tracking.
My favourite thing
to date about OneDrive was when my last company changed personal directories (Desktop, Downloads, Documents etc.) from local to OneDrive-backed. It all worked great from a roaming profiles perspective and was sorely needed, but pretty much anybody that had ever had a Visual Studio project cross paths with those directories found themselves bombarded with error notifications due to the fact that OneDrive straight up didn't support certain characters in filenames (a problem you'd have hoped MICROS~1 had put behind it years ago — this was in about 2018 — I shudder to think what the code behind it was like if such lofty concepts as objects and string escaping weren't being used).
The offending character was #, which last time I checked constituted approximately 50% of the name of MICROS~1's flagship programming language, so you'd've thunk they might have caught and addressed that one early on.
Forget the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing; the company seems to have several thousand hands, each of which is pathologically solipsistic.
And another thing
A while back I attempted to help a guy download his photo archive from onedrive. He had several thousand jpeg files to download, so (using what appeared to be common sense) we selected them all and hit the download button. Contrary to expectation, onedrive created a single multi-gigabyte zipped file containing all the images and attempted to transfer it en masse . Unfortunately the link wasn't stable enough for a transfer that would have taken several hours, so multiple attempts aborted with unreadable partial zip files. There was no option to select multiple files for individual download, so ultimately he had to transfer them one at a time manually and it took him weeks. I don't call that smart, particularly as jpeg files hardly compress at all when zipped.
Re: And another thing
You're right, it's very much not smart. But it ain't Microsoft that were being dumb.
He could have gone into File Explorer, and copied the files in any manner he fancied from there, just as if they were on the local disk. "File Explorer", you see? The clue's in the name?
The web interface into OneDrive used to be pretty clunky, simply because it's just not needed. It's a lot better now, but still completely unnecessary in most cases - I use it occasionally to archive project stuff from customer's machines that can't be logged into my Microsoft account directly.
GJC
15 years of not using it and counting
No need, don't want the access issues, clients working / not working / being removed.
Nor the challenge about storage capacity limits going up and down.
Nor the issue of not being in control of my own data.
which will surface a user's most relevant files as well most recent and show activity updates.
No!!!
1)What they think are the most relevant files are not necessarily what I think are.
2)If I've stored something that likely means I don't want to see it the next time I log in.
3)Actually I just want to go to the list of files and get the one(s) I do need. Not click through what MS tells me I ought to want first.
I use Onenote - which embeds itself within Onedrive, but in a rather unfathomable way that has caused links to not open in the past, when something has gone pear shaped. And Onenote insists on opening in "Recent files" (see 2 above). From which it takes me to "Notebooks" even though that's a list of 1.From which I need to select the appropriate notebook from the list (of one).
And there is no way to bypass this nonsense.
Yeah, One Note is the new kid
Give it another 15 years and it will blend into the rest of the suite a little more. It needs a couple more cosmetic rewrites and for its default scripting engine to change at least twice. Then is will have a suitably crusty layer. Like the bread on a gas station sandwich.
MS 365 Personal
-> a Microsoft 365 Personal subscription for $69.99 per year.
This includes Office (or much of it). If you need office, this is a good deal.