alt Hacker NewsAnd as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.
YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.
OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
>So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.
Probably enterprise config. Standard OneDrive office 365 enterprise with SharePoint can absolutely work over the "normal internet", you don't need a "network that's safe" whatever that means. VPN? Anyway the big office 365 win was it will work over the normal internet without running /owa open on your exchange server.
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That's why Dropbox exists. Superior in every way.
>And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost. [...] OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
In my previous job there was an app(by Dell EMC I think) that would run every day at lunch and backup all your user document folders to some company network drive. You could then view all your backup files in the webUI.
So network backup feels like a solved problem for decades now.
However, cloud is more than just a backup solution.
The failure modes of OneDrive outweigh the wins for many individual users.
It may be good enough in the aggregate from the perspective of IT admins.
No catastrophic failures, just a steady drip of confusion, friction, frustration and lost productivity for the users.
Cloud document best use case is document sharing for online collaboration, backup is a side effect, and frankly, as backup solution it is far from ideal.
Frankly, the best configuration is NOT installing OneDrive on user machines, actually disallow users to install it and let them share files from office 365 itself when they actually want to share those files. And then, have a proper network backup solution.
Make
Id rather the people being irresponsible with their files lose them than me randomly.
My IT even set up my downloads folder to sync... my job involves downloading 4gb files and throwing them away after I run a script on them frequently...