OneDrive - My experience as a researcher
May 20, 2016
OneDrive - My experience as a researcher
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with OneDrive
I personally use OneDrive for storing my research data and other data that I find to be important so that even if my hard drive fails, I won't lose the content in it. For this purpose, I have logged in to my OneDrive account from My RIT Office computer and also the laptop that I own. This way, I'm able to work at my office in the desktop as long as I want, and then I can come home and continue working on it without any extra effort. Another use I have for OneDrive is that I put files in it that I want to share. I get the link for that particular folder and send it to whoever I want to share it with.
- Mobility: I can add and edit files any time and these get updated in the cloud instantly. This way, I don't need to remember to sync the data. I can do my job in any computer and then log off from it and continue my job in the other connected system without any effort.
- Backup: I keep all my important files in there so that I don't have to worry about hardware failures.
- Ease of use: Since Onedrive can be accessed similar to how local folders in computers are accessed, it is very easy to use. Once an account has been logged in to, I do not need to login again, or even open the browser.
- Windows 7 support - The office system that I have is Windows 7 and when I use it, sometimes it doesn't sync. I don't know whether this is because it's Windows 7 or if it is a RIT network problem.
- There should be an option to select one folder and manually sync in case the automatic sync isn't working. Once I worked on something and somehow the synchronization did not happen, so I had to create a dummy folder and delete it for the software to detect changes being made.
- Better integration with Office 360: I have an Office 360 account and I feel that OneDrive and Office can be better integrated to make sharing and editing files easier and faster.
- I haven't invested anything in OneDrive as I got a lot of space due to multiple other offers that I had. Since I have 100+ GB of OneDrive storage, I never had to buy any more than that.
- The use of OneDrive has been very useful for me, so if one day i run out of space, then it would be still good to buy some storage. I have never considered doing the same with Google Drive though.
- Google Drive, Box and Dropbox
All these require logging in to the browser and manually drag and drop the items into the interface. Even though some of the software provide desktop client, I found it hard to use and had integration issues with Windows. But OneDrive was already integrated with Windows which made the job a lot easier. I could also just save files like I always do so it took no extra effort.