I’ve just starting paying for One Drive on Windows 10. I thought the purpose was to back up and sync the folders of my choosing however One Drive seems to seek to do everything in its power to put my entire PC in the cloud! This may be good for the average Joe, but surely this can’t be good for music producers like us who are playing a lot of audio files and plugins and effects in one go
It even by default set to backup my desktop. Next thing I know is that half my desktop has disappeared! It doesn’t just seem to make a copy and leave one on the local drive, it seems to leave nothing behind.
I am using the One Drive desktop app if it helps.
What am I doing wrong here?
Fortunately I had the good sense to image my drive before using this bloodsucker!
Microsoft support seems to be next to useless unless you fork out hundreds of pounds!
I think I set it up so that it only synced a few dedicated folders. There’s a way to choose what happens to, i.e. if items exist in both locations or just one with a snapshot or “icon” in the other.
Maybe you can share what your settings are in the app so people can help you troubleshoot it.
Not sure if they’re better. I want to say “no”, but honestly I haven’t done a thorough comparison. I used to have a Lumia 950 Windows Phone so OneDrive did automatic backup of photos and file and everything and was nicely integrated into the phone essentially. One thing I believe it allows me to do “automatically” is link to files in OneDrive in emails, so that the email itself never contains the files, just the path to the OneDrive storage - but I think it’s still transparent to the recipient.
I suppose one thing doesn’t exclude another. Many clients of mine use both Drive and Dropbox so I’m occasionally forced to use them.
I find the easiest option is Dropbox, but don’t install the client … use the web interface instead. That way you’ve got more control over access to your own computer. OneDrive is too deeply integrated with Windows 10, which means that Microsoft can change the functioning of it at any time, and therefore alter how others can access your computer. DropBox does one thing, and it does it very well in my opinion.
If you use the open source Thunderbird email client (from the same people who brought is Firefox), there’s a feature call Filelink for large attachments which you can configure to use a variety of “cloud” storage providers, including Dropbox. There’s even one that comes pre-configured, for quick and dirty transfers of large files where security is not an issue. That said, if security is an issue one shouldn’t use any so-called “cloud” service at all …
What do you mean by “others”? As far as I know the only company that will have access to anything will be MS, if using OneDrive.
In general I find this worry about third-party access to our files when using cloud services pretty overrated. Let’s face it, for the most part sane people who use this technology will make available media and maybe some other types of files that are all fairly low-value and low-risk.
Beside, I actually think MS has a good track record when it comes to guarding your data. I’ve seen zero reports of data breaches from OneDrive.
One drive works a whole lot better when it is installed. It’s easy to set up and control what is happening. Using the web interface is clunky and slow. I would know - I do it both ways for work. Onedrive is installed on my laptop, but I can only access it through a browser on my home pc. Night and day difference in workflow.
there are some security settings in Win10 that only allows “some” programs to access to the documents and settings folder.
That did mess things up for me, after removing that setting (sorry don’t remember the name) it reverted to the folder stored in One Drive.
I would look into restricting One drive to the folders you want to backup/share. One Drive has become my primary cloud service, mostly because of the unbeatable price.
1Tb of storage with a office subscription. I also find it to be faster than dropbox and Google Drive now
One of your assumptions appears to be that all people are sane, all of the time. Musicians, and artists in general in my experience, would not belong to a group that tend to guard their intellectual property rights fastidiously, at all times. I’m not arguing against these services, it’s great technology (and are we not lucky to have it, during this pandemic?) but people need to be aware of the downsides as well, given the current mass theft of IP happening on a global scale.
Seriously?
OK maybe you were being serious, but the fact that you haven’t heard of any data breaches from OneDrive might be even more worrying. Try even Microsoft’s own search engine Bing (scroll down a bit, and then, for balance, maybe check out some neutral news sources).
It’s not just data breaches you should be worried about. Have you read and understood all the terms and conditions you agreed to when you signed up for that service? Was there a paragraph there that permitted the other party to change the terms of the agreement unilaterally? If you were to object, where would the court proceedings be held, and who would pay for it?
Yeah, I suppose what I was really asking was who you think Microsoft would give access to your computer. So, now that we’re clear that I understand what the word “others” mean:
Who do you think Microsoft would give access to your computer?
and
To whom has Microsoft given access to your computer so far?
Ok, maybe I don’t understand the word "other’ after all.
If the only company that WILL have access to anything when using OneDrive is Microsoft then by definition there are no “others” that WILL have that access.
Yeah, but let’s just stop and consider who we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a huge corporation that makes most of its money from services at this point. This means data storage and management. If you think for one second that Microsoft would alter the terms of their agreements in a way that allowed for massive IP theft using OneDrive or some other feature then that basically equates to MS digging its own grave. So it’s absolutely not in MS’ interested to do so.
Another way of looking at it is that any big artist whose music would be worth stealing would a) likely protect that music in a different way, b) cause such a big and very public stink that MS would lose out on revenue it wants…
… and those that are not big artists simply aren’t on the radar in the first place. I’m not sure what technology you think would be employed, but I fail to see how someone would be able to somehow find the music of obscure artists in protected cloud storage hosted by Microsoft. It’s not like MS makes all data available for people to just ‘sleuth’ through.
So again, it’s not in the interest of MS to make it possible for people to steal your IP, not on a small scale, not on a global scale.
In addition to that there’s of course also encryption of data as well as MS OneDrive’s secure “vault” that has an extra layer of protection, should one need that.
Ok, first link that actually deals with data breaches reads “Attackers can access Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive files without a user’s password”. So that puts all three on an equal level. And here’s why blaming MS for this is silly:
The attack w> orks by grabbing the password token> , a small file that sits > on a user’s devices > for convenience (which saves the user from entering their password each time). When the token is obtained, either > through a phishing attack or a drive-by exploit> , it can be used to fool a new machine into thinking the attacker is the account’s owner.
I hope you see why it has near nothing to do with MS. “'These services are meant to deliver files seamlessly from your computer to the cloud to other devices around the world. These services aren’t dangerous or insecure,’ he added.”
In other words it’s a matter of a user protecting his device, not MS “altering the deal” or suffering a targeted breach against its servers.
The next “breach” (misnomer) reads:
"The former Emory physician, who now works for the University of Arizona College of Medicine, obtained and placed patient files on a OneDrive account that was accessible to “individuals set up with a specific UA email account,” according to a notice posted by Emory. "
i.e. again human error. Not MS.
Every other link I clicked on that first search result page was either someone asking if there had been a breach, someone reporting an issue that again resulted from human error, or it was a page about how to generally protect your data.
So again: If you want to say that Microsoft has a poor record of data security regarding cloud services then I’m all ears. It is something we all would benefit from knowing about. So please share. But so far I haven’t seen any evidence of data breaches that had anything to do with MS screwing up or granting access to third parties that weren’t doing what we wanted them to.
Spell it out then. Tell me how the services in question differ.
