Our relationship goes back quite a while; we met in the early 80s although I guess it wasn’t too formal until I split from my previous relationship around 1989 I think. I became locked in, as many of us were, after that for quite a while. But something prettier caught my eye in the late aughts, and I became hopelessly infatuated, but never fully broke off the long term relationship.
I’m talking about Microsoft, of course. Although I haven’t used a WinPC in years, I was still subscribed to the office and online services with their ever-changing names. I finally deleted the Office Suite from my Mac last week, although I’ve been all in on the Apple suite for a while (and necessarily Google, unfortunately) and I cancelled my O365 (or whatever it’s called now) account today. Thanks to Homebrew rclone, I’m reliably and quickly downloading all eleventy-zillion files out of my OneDrive storage, although I’m pretty sure they’re mostly backups. I’ll know for sure shortly. I still have a legacy hotmail account, and my live.com email is my most active (it’s super short address will be tough to transition from) but after tonight, that will be my only connection. That will be my last tie to cut. It’s been a long time coming.
I never settled down. My first love’s parents were from New York, but “she” was born in Florida. Later I met someone from California, and now am seeing one of her relatives. She’s younger and a lot more fun
Every six months it seems I go through a similar process but every time I get stuck at replacing OneDrive. iCloud simply doesn’t give me enough flexibility for folder based synching between machines, and stuff like Dropbox would just be replacing one paid-for third-party solution for another, so I just stick with what has worked for me for years. And the cycle continues…
Eh. Divorce involves too much emotional labor, not to mention paperwork, and I’ve got enough in my life. “We” discussed conscious uncoupling, but opted for a polycule instead, and couldn’t be happier … Every now and then Word will give Typora some side-eye, but we join hands, take a deep, cleansing breath, and bask in the afterglow.
Not sure what to say. I just install it on my machines and run it, and it does the job.
I currently have three OneDrive accounts (for different areas of work and personal), and use them to synchronize across three Macs, plus iPhone and iPads (more precisely, synchronize specific folders across different sets of machines). It all goes back to the days I had both Macs and Window machines; but now that I’m Mac only I keep it going as it “just works”.
Now I’m curious - what additional flexibility does OneDrive have? I too kept OneDrive because I’d had it forever (and it was included with the Office subscription), but it had it’s own issues that I learned to live with, like undependable large & bulk file management. Once I started paying for iCloud (primarily to simplify my non techie family’s Photo library access), I learned to appreciate what iCloud had to offer - especially after watching Gary Rozenzweig’s super helpful videos on iCloud, like this one.
Of course, it sounds like you have a more unique situation with multiple accounts with various syncing combinations, and maybe OneDrive is really the best solution for that situation. I use iCloud in a custom arrangement - not simply for Photos - across multiple machines as well, although not for multiple interactive accounts. Other than it’s unpredictable automated syncing schedule (the manual syncing is fine), it has been working well for my purposes.
My experience was that I could not rely on it to synchronize files onto a local file system - and I only had one target windows machine. That’s been a number of years ago. I can’t say why that was, but it didn’t work for me.
OneDrive, like most cloud services, really wants you to not have your files on your local file system. Easy to fix: “always keep on this device” by right clicking on “OneDrive - Personal” in File Manager’s Navigation Pane. But, it’s not readily evident that choice exists.
I don’t really like iCloud Drive because of where it stores your files on your local file system: “Users/username/Library/Mobile\ Documents/“ and it feels like it was designed for an earlier class of computers and internet connection speeds. Sync.com is 25GB for $12/year; enough for me and very fast E2EE syncing, although sometimes it loses the network connection. Pause-Resume syncing fixes it.
01-23-2026 EDIT: I did go back to iCloud Drive and it is working properly. sync.com does not understand iWork documents on the phone. I’m also on a war path to reduce the number of subscriptions I have.
