3 ms·

OneDrive is pretty good and underrated IMO

southerntofu 5y ago
And suffers from the same underlying problem as Dropbox and iCloud: it's profit-driven proprietary software. Are you sure your interests as a user are aligned with that of Microsoft as a company? Are you confident that will not change over time?
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Im not, and thats why I don’t rely on it too much. For backup I rely on backblaze - and i pay them for the service. Microsoft OneDrive is clearly a loss leader as it is so cheap when used in a family plan it is crazy! Im more worried about my gmail reliance to be honest.
- adwn 5y ago
  Are you sure your interests as a user are aligned with that of Syncthing's open source developers? Are you confident that will not change over time?
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    I'm confident they are at the moment. And i'm even more confident that if that ever changes, i'll find many people in a HN/Github thread whose interest are very much aligned with mine to fork the project and keep it going in a direction that suits us. Something you won't ever be able to do with a proprietary piece of software, unless of course you're willing to spend thousands of hours reverse-engineering a protocol they're going to change as soon as you achieve interop.
dt2m 5y ago
Agreed. The recent Google Drive update which completely broke file metadata on Mac OS, along with it often times mounting twice, requiring a reboot to fix it, prompted me to test out all the different cloud storage solutions. As stated in the OP Dropbox has become far too bloated, and just feels wrong. iCloud Drive only works 90% of the time, and doesn't play nice with apps that use absolute paths (even many Cocoa MacOS apps, which do this under the hood). OneDrive is the only client that gets out of my way, just works, and even can automatically move unused files to the cloud without them disappearing from the filesystem entirely. It's crazy to think that Microsoft are making better Mac OS software than Apple. I haven't considered going the self-hosted route yet, but Syncthing looks promising if you don't need folder sharing or robust iOS support.
datavirtue 5y ago
Agreed. I use it as part of my personal Office 365 Enterprise account and it has been fairly annoyance free compared to Dropbox/iCloud. I really only treat these cloud storage services as a sync and as an additional convenience backup. I don't ever think of them as primary storage. Box is another popular one, which has SSO and other options to allow it's use in more restricted environments. It's at about the same annoyance level as OneDeive. This guy mentions Drop Box being good in 2012...that's when I stopped using it due to the various bloat and annoyances.
Nextgrid 5y ago
The performance of the Mac client is terrible. Simply clicking the menu bar icon sometimes takes several seconds to bring up a terrible looking menu that smells like Electron.
- dt2m 5y ago
  I wouldn't necessarily call it terrible, as all the big 3 cloud storage services just wrap Web UIs in a window instead of doing a fully native app. The file syncing functionality works just fine for me every time, compared to iCloud, which regularly will stop syncing silently, despite it being better integrated into the Finder. I'd rather have reliable syncing with an Electron wrapper than a fully native UI with broken sync.
random_upvoter 5y ago
I agree it's ok. One time it really bit me in the ass by silently deciding that some random old backup folder of my Desktop, residing on my Onedrive, should actually be my desktop folder and all of a sudden all this old crap appeared on my desktop. No fun was had undoing that. Even now my computer seems to be in some murky situation where my desktop is partly local and partly on my Onedrive, not cool, I haven't really looked into it and I really have no time for this.
prmoustache 5y ago
Not really multiplatform though. Opensource clients exists but they could break anytime from some MS changes.

And suffers from the same underlying problem as Dropbox and iCloud: it's profit-driven proprietary software. Are you sure your interests as a user are aligned with that of Microsoft as a company? Are you confident that will not change over time?

quickthrower2 5y ago
Im not, and thats why I don’t rely on it too much. For backup I rely on backblaze - and i pay them for the service. Microsoft OneDrive is clearly a loss leader as it is so cheap when used in a family plan it is crazy! Im more worried about my gmail reliance to be honest.
adwn 5y ago
Are you sure your interests as a user are aligned with that of Syncthing's open source developers? Are you confident that will not change over time?
- southerntofu 5y ago
  I'm confident they are at the moment. And i'm even more confident that if that ever changes, i'll find many people in a HN/Github thread whose interest are very much aligned with mine to fork the project and keep it going in a direction that suits us. Something you won't ever be able to do with a proprietary piece of software, unless of course you're willing to spend thousands of hours reverse-engineering a protocol they're going to change as soon as you achieve interop.

dt2m 5y ago

Agreed. The recent Google Drive update which completely broke file metadata on Mac OS, along with it often times mounting twice, requiring a reboot to fix it, prompted me to test out all the different cloud storage solutions. As stated in the OP Dropbox has become far too bloated, and just feels wrong. iCloud Drive only works 90% of the time, and doesn't play nice with apps that use absolute paths (even many Cocoa MacOS apps, which do this under the hood). OneDrive is the only client that gets out of my way, just works, and even can automatically move unused files to the cloud without them disappearing from the filesystem entirely. It's crazy to think that Microsoft are making better Mac OS software than Apple. I haven't considered going the self-hosted route yet, but Syncthing looks promising if you don't need folder sharing or robust iOS support.

datavirtue 5y ago

Agreed. I use it as part of my personal Office 365 Enterprise account and it has been fairly annoyance free compared to Dropbox/iCloud. I really only treat these cloud storage services as a sync and as an additional convenience backup. I don't ever think of them as primary storage. Box is another popular one, which has SSO and other options to allow it's use in more restricted environments. It's at about the same annoyance level as OneDeive. This guy mentions Drop Box being good in 2012...that's when I stopped using it due to the various bloat and annoyances.

Nextgrid 5y ago

The performance of the Mac client is terrible. Simply clicking the menu bar icon sometimes takes several seconds to bring up a terrible looking menu that smells like Electron.

dt2m 5y ago
I wouldn't necessarily call it terrible, as all the big 3 cloud storage services just wrap Web UIs in a window instead of doing a fully native app. The file syncing functionality works just fine for me every time, compared to iCloud, which regularly will stop syncing silently, despite it being better integrated into the Finder. I'd rather have reliable syncing with an Electron wrapper than a fully native UI with broken sync.

random_upvoter 5y ago

I agree it's ok. One time it really bit me in the ass by silently deciding that some random old backup folder of my Desktop, residing on my Onedrive, should actually be my desktop folder and all of a sudden all this old crap appeared on my desktop. No fun was had undoing that. Even now my computer seems to be in some murky situation where my desktop is partly local and partly on my Onedrive, not cool, I haven't really looked into it and I really have no time for this.

prmoustache 5y ago

Not really multiplatform though. Opensource clients exists but they could break anytime from some MS changes.