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Comment by Scroll_Swe | Hacker News Reader

And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.

YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.

OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.

>So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.

Probably enterprise config. Standard OneDrive office 365 enterprise with SharePoint can absolutely work over the "normal internet", you don't need a "network that's safe" whatever that means. VPN? Anyway the big office 365 win was it will work over the normal internet without running /owa open on your exchange server.

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>And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost. [...] OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.

In my previous job there was an app(by Dell EMC I think) that would run every day at lunch and backup all your user document folders to some company network drive. You could then view all your backup files in the webUI.

So network backup feels like a solved problem for decades now.

However, cloud is more than just a backup solution.

Some jank 3rd party app is never preferred over a native MS solution.

Lol. OneDrive is the most jank solution there is.

The failure modes of OneDrive outweigh the wins for many individual users.

It may be good enough in the aggregate from the perspective of IT admins.

No catastrophic failures, just a steady drip of confusion, friction, frustration and lost productivity for the users.

Id rather the people being irresponsible with their files lose them than me randomly.

My IT even set up my downloads folder to sync... my job involves downloading 4gb files and throwing them away after I run a script on them frequently...

That sounds more like an issue with your relationship with your IT guy than OneDrive as a product.

Not necessarily blaming you for the relationship fault, but someone forcing using the software improperly isn't really a failure of the software.

The second part is, yeah. I'm more annoyed with the whole concept and was using that as evidence of its reliability, and also about how we're willing to sacrifice time without thinking about tradesoffs when it comes to "more onedrive backup better"

That's why Dropbox exists. Superior in every way.

You could use an actual backup solution, OneDrive is not that.

Cloud document best use case is document sharing for online collaboration, backup is a side effect, and frankly, as backup solution it is far from ideal.

Frankly, the best configuration is NOT installing OneDrive on user machines, actually disallow users to install it and let them share files from office 365 itself when they actually want to share those files. And then, have a proper network backup solution.

Make

Also just having your stuff available on multiple devices, having it be easy to move devices, etc.

All that said, I don't like the deep desktop-OneDrive type integration, very much a clear, separate sync folders type person, even if I store a bunch of my stuff inside said folder. But Sync Service Kingdoms are to be very clear, it's the one way they will be ~99% benefit, 1% headache.

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