One Drive, Google drive etc for small business?

[Mark M]

I thought this might be the best place to ask about online storage solutions for a small office set up. Currently we have a Synology NAS acting as a file share but just wondering how an online solution would work for us? Im working more and more from home now to fit around my son so might be a better solution moving forward?

The main question I have is that does it operate like a conventional file share? I dont want a dropbox type solution where its synced to each computer as that allows the same file to be worked on at the same time which would cause us problems. Can this be achieved with One Drive or similar or do I need a more complex solution?

Thanks.

 

[edscdk]

I installed one drive for a 5 user company, nothing but trouble, they have spend days on the phone to MS.. initially crippled their machines (using all the CPU) missed out 100's of files/ folders... eventually we worked out all the bugs, removed all the files it did not like... re-synced everything... it worked for 2 months MS broke their account some how - took a week to fix... a few months after that the same happened....

a few months after that MS trashed one drive for a new version, the user base was unable to install the new version (because they did not know how to)... all users had to come to the office, 2 days to fix everything.. worked for a month or 2... account issues (fairly quickly fixed by MS a few hours)... now its all stopped again so I have given up and told them to get IT support from someone else (I have limited time to help people and this is just using too much time)

Before that they used drop box for 3 years.. I installed drop box... it worked... only 1 issue where an old PC ran out of disk space.

 

[edscdk]

forgot to add before drop box they tried to use onedrive and gave up (before I started looking after their IT) I came in and moved them from one drive to dropbox

 

[16-bit]

We use OneDrive as our personal storage solution and SharePoint as the main repository (which you can access like a shared drive if you go the davroot route)

If your business is already a 365 subscriber then it is defiantly worth looking at.

 

[Mujja]

For home (5 users) folder redirection to a Windows file server with the Google Drive client running on the server.

On the FS folder structure is something like
\GoogleDrive\Users\User1\Desktop
\GoogleDrive\Users\User1\Documents
\GoogleDrive\Users\User1\Pictures
...
\GoogleDrive\Shared Documents
\GoogleDrive\Shared Pictures
\GoogleDrive\Shared Music
\GoogleDrive\Shared Files

This keeps every user's files and other data synced with Google Drive.
File history etc is also disabled on the clients as Google Drive has it's own revision history and restore feature with an unlimited recycle bin.

You only need one Google App account and with 1TB\Unlimited storage it's around £6/month. The storage is only unlimited if more than 5 user accounts are added to the domain, although this might have changed.

You won't need to install the Drive client on users computers.

 

[Liquidfox]

OneDrive is by far THE worst out of the available cloud storage software. The amount of times I've had it fail to sync between two computers and then need a complete manual uninstall and rebuild since the built in functions do jack **** is ridiculous. It's also got an insanely low object limit to the point we couldn't even upload 80GB of data to it because there were too many objects. I think we hit about 25% of the uploaded data before having an non-descript error message thrown back at us, only eventually did I find the object limit.

Google Drive or DropBox are my only recommendations.


OneDrive Item Limit: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/2933738 - This includes both files AND folders! One folder with five files underneath is 6 objects, you can see how you'd hit it so quickly.

 

[edscdk]

OneDrive is by far THE worst out of the available cloud storage software. The amount of times I've had it fail to sync between two computers and then need a complete manual uninstall and rebuild since the built in functions do jack **** is ridiculous. It's also got an insanely low object limit to the point we couldn't even upload 80GB of data to it because there were too many objects. I think we hit about 25% of the uploaded data before having an non-descript error message thrown back at us, only eventually did I find the object limit.

Google Drive or DropBox are my only recommendations.


OneDrive Item Limit: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/2933738 - This includes both files AND folders! One folder with five files underneath is 6 objects, you can see how you'd hit it so quickly.

I also remember its very hard to see what's not synced... when it gets stuck its not possible to see where.. I think its missing a pause option.. its got the feel of some totally botched cobbled together POS.....

 

[nightmare99]

Yes the OneDrive for business groove sync client was utter pap, luckily the next gen sync client has removed most of the restrictions. Today you can sync OneDrive for business personal folders in the release version and the new preview version allows syncing of SharePoint document libraries & group libraries, see here https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Get-started-syncing-SharePoint-sites-with-the-new-OneDrive-sync-client-Preview-6de9ede8-5b6e-4503-80b2-6190f3354a88?ui=en-US&rs=en-GB&ad=GB
We try and avoid sync with Office 365 unless users specifically require offline access.


The first ten mins of this video explains a few of the previous problems and they are fixing them, my favourite bits are the "We're sorry" & "Look at all the possible error dialogs"

 

[Steeps]

We tried OneDrive with 10 users (5 in office, 5 out of office) to keep an archive of marketing materials available and sync new material easily so everyone was up to date. Total nightmare.

An old FTP script to sync folders is more reliable than the rubbish Microsoft released. After 8 months of trying we scrapped the project and went back to sending emails and file links because I'd get a call each week having to walk through how to re-sync the library, delete the cache... all over a standard broadband connection.

 

[Boycie]

Hi there,

We rolled out Google Apps to all 30 of our users a little over a year ago leaving behind office 2003 and an on premise file server. I've not used any of the competing products so I have nothing to compare it against but from my point of view it is absolutely brilliant.

There is a Google Drive application that you can install for windows/MacOS and it will allow you to treat your Google Drive as another folder on your computer. You can just drag/drop move items in or out of there and it will sync pretty much straight away.

File sharing is very easy as well, you can share with a link or by adding and removing users within your organisation and external people as well.

Hope this helps
Thanks
B

 

[mejinks]

I installed one drive for a 5 user company, nothing but trouble, they have spend days on the phone to MS.. initially crippled their machines (using all the CPU) missed out 100's of files/ folders... eventually we worked out all the bugs, removed all the files it did not like... re-synced everything... it worked for 2 months MS broke their account some how - took a week to fix... a few months after that the same happened....

a few months after that MS trashed one drive for a new version <SNIP>

Yes. Pretty much sums up the experience of ALL customers I used to support. Each company that used One drive gave up using it.