What can I do with OneDrive

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For various reasons I have storage in:

Dropbox,
ICloud,
OneDrive,
Google,

I can’t get rid of any of them. The short story is that for business purposes, each is needed.

Dropbox is my main gig for business storage and syncing.
iCloud is there for all things Apple.
I use Gmail [since it was offered many years ago, now]. Too, i have a ShieldTvPro box, and I use Google docs for business stuff.

One drive is there because, 1) Office, and 2) various business contacts use it for storage and sharing.

I have a grudge against OneDrive. I have an alienware R17 for investing and trading. [there are little to no true, legit futures trading apps for the Mac].

OneDrive is invasive on a Windows machine. If you’re not paying attention during setup it will ensnare the entire file system and you cannot remove it peacefully. This has caused me serious issues in the past. It interrupted some file paths of a few critical financial data market apps and essentially shut down my primary needs for a Windows machine. It is also coded to piggy-back back into the file structure on occasion. Some folks say this isn’t true but I know it damn well is. I’m not a coder but I know what code does, and I know certain things do not happen with repetition in the same way in various computer theaters without intent behind it.

But here I am with it, available in my Mac ecosystem.

I no longer use Word as my writer, but Pages.

I’m also willing to accept that despite my experience with OneDrive/Windows, it may be a different story on the Mac.

I have plenty of space elsewhere. When i personally use Microsoft products I do not store in OneDrive. But like I said, I do regular business with folks that do, and often have to receive shares from their OneDrive account.

Is there a cool Mac experience that requires OneDrive that I’m missing out on?

I recently moved my business case file management to DT. I haven’t started yet with sharing/syncing to devices, but I will at some point in the next few weeks.

Since I have to have a OneDrive account, does it offer the Mac user anything that the others do not?

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I have 1 TB OneDrive space because of my Microsoft 365 Family subscription (for Office).

I use this to make offline backups with Arq:

https://www.arqbackup.com

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that’s an idea. i need a backup space where i’ll never do anything at all except keep true backups.

thx

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Back up to OneDrive. Never occurred to me. (Because Microsoft.) What about encryption? Can you selectively sync OneDrive to your Mac so that the backup is not synced, but things like Office documents are?

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Arq encrypts on your Mac before sending to the cloud. Likewise, you can set a Synology to do the same and there are other apps that will sit on your Mac and present the Onedrive folder as an encrypted folder.

As to the original question, no, I don’t think Onedrive offers anything over the other competitors. I use it because I have to for work, and whilst I like the Sharepoint syncing, I wouldn’t say it offers more then Dropbox, as there are less apps that use the API. Simply put, I use it because I have to with work. It does what it’s supposed to do and I’ve no real complaints about it.

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I’m in the same position as @sidvicious with Dropbox, iCloud, Google and OneDrive cloud storage. Similarly I had no use for the OneDrive storage, but have been using it as encrypted cloud backup via Arq for years now.

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:hushed: Did you mean with Arq via Mac or directly?
If the latter do you mind to share how to I encrypt the data on a Synology NAS and backup it regularly straight to OneDrive? That sounds like a perfect 4th backup layer for my most important data.
Thank you!

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I don’t use it directly, but I have my Synology NAS do continual backups of important folders to my one drive account.

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  • Backups are encrypted locally before being sent to the cloud.
  • Since I don’t use OneDrive for other purposes, I don’t sync OneDrive to my Mac at all.
    I only access OneDrive via Arq (backup/restore).
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For Onedrive, it’s unfortunately Cloud Sync, which isn’t as good as Hyper Backup.
When creating, just use the data encryption setting. It remains unencrypted on the Synology, but it’s encrypted on the cloud.

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I will admit that it isn’t something I’ve tried, as I have it set to sync my work documents to the NAS and I want those unencrypted on the cloud, so it doesn’t mess up my Windows sync on my work laptop.

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Damn it’s one of those things that you miss if you are customer for a long time (almost 10 years for me) and have everything set up and grooved in. At some point you get blind :sweat_smile: I wasn’t even aware of that native package. Thanks a lot!

I use encryption a lot with Hyper Backup to both remote NAS and external drives. Also all my internal volumes are encrypted. It can be a hassle sometime and surely slows backups down, but I like the peace of mind that at least my clients and personal data is safe or the device rendered useless if stolen.

Thanks again for the great tip :slight_smile:

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Grooved in? No pun intended?

And Groove Music on a lesser scale…

OneDrive is the one (pun intended) thing that I like about Microsoft. The desktop client for Google Drive is very finicky.

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I use OneDrive for work only and find it marginal at best on a Mac. It constantly hangs, takes it’s sweet time syncing between devices, and on my rig is a resource monster.

I’ll give it credit for good sharing features but that’s about it. Overall, not impressed.

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This is a Thread Success Story. I came on looking for information related to this, found this thread and had what I needed within like 5 minutes.

Thank you all! I have more quality coffee-time thanks to you :slight_smile:

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