Microsoft OneDrive, any good?

AndyWest

AndyWest

Messages
8,400
Name
Andy
Edit My Images
No
A few people have been suggesting I get some cloud back up just in case my entire house blows up into oblivion! I have had a quick look at a few cloud storage offerings and quite like OneDrive as for £5.99 a month you get the office suit as well as 1TB of storage.

I currently have everything backed up on 2x 2Tb USB drives. I have 685Gb of the same data on both. I don't keep anything on my PC except the images I am currently working on and my music plus a few downloads and documents (all of which are backed up to the HDD's)

It is my plan that one day I can do without a normal PC and just use a large tablet instead. This could bring that day forward possibly.

So is OneDrive any good or is there anything better?
 
How fast is your online connection? 700Mb of data can take quite a bit of uploading, and that's probably the biggest limitation to storing stuff on other people's computers on t'intarwebz.
 
Mine is pretty fast i think. I could do it over a week or so. Set it off before I go to work. It's really for back up more than anything.
 
It depends whether you really want to have the Office license as part of the deal. You can get a cheaper backup plan using iDrive but that does not include Microsoft Office obviously.

iDrive also allows you to back up 2Tb from various sources; many other providers price on a per computer basis.

iDrive also has a backup client that runs in the background. Not sure if OneDrive has something equivalent.

I have used LiveDrive in the past but migrated to Crashplan for 1 PC and iDrive for another PC. If I needed to back up less than 2Tb in total (not the case unfortunately), I would probably go exclusively with iDrive,
 
The office license would be good. I will look at iDrive. thanks.
 
I have an Office 365 sub so I get One Drive "free". It's fine. I can't say I use it much but it seems no better or worse than most cloud drives. I guess if I had to rank them, it's better than Google and not as good as Dropbox.
 
If you have Amazon Prime, they do unlimited photo backup. That's my off-site storage with OneDrive for documents. If the house blows up, I can re-download everything else in a pinch. My wife got Prime a while ago for Pantry (and free postage) so it is just another benefit.
 
You can sync onedrive with a folder on your PC, by default it adds a folder in your file explorer. Sync can take some time and can affect your internet link, although there are options for throttling. Don't forget your upload speed is usually significantly slower than your download speed.
1Tb isn't a lot for photos but is a lot for documents etc. It's handy to have access when away from your main storage, be that a work server or home pc.

If you look at other offerings, see if they charge for restore. Sometimes it's very cheap for upload, expensive for restore.
 
Use OneDrive for work and find it really good. Haven't really tried it for photos.
Got Amazon Prime and have just set up a job to back up my NAS copies to Amazon (there is an add-on within the NAS to set that up). Took ages to copy everything over, but now at least have the library, the back up on the NAS and a backup in Amazon.
Also have dropbox. never considered that for large amounts of data (will have to check). Use it for a sort of staging area for photos before I put them on things like Flickr. Works well and would imagine that backups there would work as well.
 
Thanks everyone. OneDrive looks to be the best value for money so will prob go with that.

Cheers
 
Yep got a free Terabyte on OneDrive with Office 365 so I use it for photo backup, seems fine. Remember that broadband (ADSL) Upload speeds are a lot less than download so it does take a while to upload but OneDrive just ticks away in the background you don't really notice, just leave the computer on for a few days until it catches up. I'm currently syncing 3.6GB, at 67kB/S
 
Onedrive will probably do exactly what you need, I would probably also look at an actual NAS device with something like synology or even build your own using freenas or unraid.

I like unraid as you can mix your drives and has several docker based apps that can automatically sync to or from cloud storage.

If you want a quick plug and play solution definitely have a look on amazon.

I think Western Digital do a NAS drive with cloud storage.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top