Microsoft OneDrive

The integration with the Microsoft products is awesome, we can share a file directly from OneDrive to e-mail, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, it helps to have a unique point where all of your files are located, also, we can setup the software to do a continuous backup of your desktops and notebooks.

The price is expensive for the small companies, specially when you have some products with better price on the market. Other point that needs to be enligheted: it is not so easy to configure it on the users computers, and it cannot backup Outlook .PST files, it could have been a problem for the companies that stores a large amount of e-mails.

I rate OneDrive highly due to the safe-guarding/keeping features, the straightforward nature of One Drive and the intuitive UI. If you are fully integrated with Office then it provides a seamless experience to connect all Office apps for collaboration and synchronisation. I need files across various devices and OneDrive provides apps for all popular desktop OS's and device.

Specific areas in order of importance:

Security - As a minimum I have 2-factor authentication on everything and OneDrive utilises this too. Even if your password is blacklisted and weak then you have the safety of the MS Authenticator App on mobile and email with the former working on my Apple Watch, which is a great feature. For the ultimate protection you use OneDrive's Personal Vault feature, AES 256-bit encrypted on Microsoft’s servers and controlled by PIN for chosen folders.

Sharing & Security - The ability to drop your files or folders in a OneDrive folder on one device, it is then duplicated on all the devices which have the OneDrive folder installed. A great feature that is lacking with icloud and Google Drive is the ability to Password protect and set expiration dates.

Photo management - This is more personal than business. One Drive includes really rich photo management attributes. OneDrive emulates iCloud (vice versa) and OD auto-uploads pics & videos from my smartphone's camera roll. It saves small Kb versions on your phone that can be downloaded for full resolution if needed.

Storage - If you take it as a stand alone I would say that there are better options for storage capacity relative to OneDrive, for price versus storage.

I have yet to experience the issue myself, but I have had colleagues who have claimed that they cannot gain access to folders or files that are shared and password protected.

OneDrive lets MacOS down with it's less inspiring offering.

OneDrive Personal is free for all users that sign up and are given 5GB of storage. Storage capacity can be expanded with prices starting at $1.99 a month. It is very easy to share data and assign permissions to your files and folders. Syncing your data with the app allows effortless uploading. Another cool feature is OneDrive's ability to detect your most frequently used files and then making those files readily available on your PC - while your less used files are kept in the cloud. The purpose of this feature is to save storage on you PC but also allows for faster access of those you use more. OneDrive for Business offers all the features of Personal but you are given a larger capacity from start. OneDrive FileVault is another cool feature that MS has recently added. With the FileVault you can store a limited amount of files in a folder that is password protected.

Some of the downsides to uploading documents to OneDrive include the rejection of special characters in the file name. It does notify you of files that do not upload and to fix this, all you do is change the name but if dealing with a large number of files, this can be an inconvenience. Also, uploading large files, over 1GB can take a long time and if your connection is lost, you must start over.