Glad I had set up a Skydrive account before a number of months ago… I played around with it a bit, and used it to access my OneNote file from the Mac, but honestly, with Skydrive, whatever the heck Windows Live Mesh was (never did figure that out), etc, I just stuck to Dropbox. It was simple, and it worked on all the platforms I had access to.
Today, though, MS released an iOS update that added a Retina-capable iPad client, a Mac OS client, and announced that current Skydrive users (prior to 4/22) would get 25Gb of storage. That got my attention! So I checked out the iOS and Windows clients, and sure enough, it can fully replace Dropbox for me, but with lots more storage.
If you had a Skydrive account before today, head up to https://skydrive.live.com/ManageStorage and click the button and you can upgrade from 7GB to 25GB free. If you’re a new user, you’ll get 7GB free.
I just moved my Dropbox folder into my Skydrive folder. :) You can actually run both and point Dropbox to the folder inside the Skydrive folder if you want.
There’s no Android client. I’m not sure if one is planned or not, but there are a couple of very popular third-party clients for Android.
Anyway, mainly wanted to share the 25GB upgrade link with you guys – not sure how long that will last.
So it never started out as 25GB? When I got my copy of Office last year and began using OneNote I could have sworn 25GB was the standard free storage option.
On the cloud side, there’s are some major changes to availability. Under the old system, users had 25 GB of non-synced SkyDrive cloud storage, and 5 GB of synced Mesh storage. Now, there’s just a single 7 GB of synced storage, with paid options to buy more space, starting at $10 for 20 GB per year, up to $50 for 100 GB per year. Though this increases the amount of synced storage, it nonetheless represents a reduction in total storage availability. However, any users that signed up for SkyDrive before April 22, and who have uploaded at least one file to the service, are eligible for a free upgrade to 25 GB. Existing users with at least 4 GB uploaded will pick up the 25 GB update automatically.
I was already a user of Skydrive so glad to see that I get to keep my 25GB for free. I’m guessing the with the new capabilities that they are predicting a influx of new user so 7GB keeps them above the competition without stressing the system. I used Skydrive to store photos because it is easy to use with Photo gallery, but now that I can use the same way I use Dropbox it will be more useful.
You can use Skydrive on Android with a third party app. Like dropbox there is API available for developers so they can use Skydrive in their apps not just for Windows Phone but IOs or Android. This seems to be a under reported capability that I predict the tech press will overlook when Google Drive finally appears with the same features. Speaking of Google Drive curious if they will keep storage at a similar level or are going to go all out 100GB was a recent rumor leading to cloud storage wars.
Also how much does Microsoft wants people to drop XP when they support MacOS X and not XP.
I logged into the link in Denny’s original post and was offered an upgrade from 7 GB to 25 GB, even though I’ve never heard of, much less used Skydrive before. I did have a Windows Live account prior to this from my various and sundry gaming activities, so I wonder if it’s somewhat based on your account age.
I’d never used Skydrive, but I’ve been using Mesh to keep files synced between home and work for a long time now. Thanks for the link! I might have missed it otherwise.
There’s no native android or linux client, and the many mobile apps with dropbox integration would need to do the same for skydrive. Really I look at this as pressure on google to start google drive with 7GB storage rather than 5GB.
Dropbox has selective folder sync, Skydrive not yet.
Dropbox keeps some older versions of files that you can access on the web interface, Skydrive no.
Anyone can think of other things, I will probably continue to use both but for the time being but I feel that may drop Dropbox and use Skydrive with Google Drive in the future for redundancy.
Does this mean that Mesh is being discontinued, or is this integrating Mesh, or… I kind of like having folders sync via Mesh without having to put them in a special folder on the hard hard; is there a way to do that with Skydrive?
I sure Mesh is going to be discontinued but they will probably keep it alive while they improve Skydrive, but in the announcement post they said that multiple folders from Mesh should not be making the transition to Skydrive, of course it’s possible they change their mind in the future. Funny that the initial idea of Mesh was quite ambitious sort of an virtual desktop in the cloud with lots of collaborative features, one of Ray Ozzie projects I believe, eventually it was shutdown and has been living in this strange relation with Skydrive where the two services never interact now that Skydrive is moving forward don’t see a reason for Mesh to exist.
Unless I’m missing something, you can’t hotlink directly to a file? Even to provide a file link within the Skydrive interface, you have to obtain it from the website, with no ability to get a link from the Windows app, ie context menu.
Please forgive my ignorance, but what kind of things do you guys use these services for? (Btw, Denny, thanks for the heads up, I had signed up a long time ago, and now I upgraded). I never stored anything there. What kind of things do you store? Anything you want to back up from your computer? Do you trust these services by storing personal data? Do you store music on there? Can you then somehow access the music through an android device maybe? I’m just trying to think of ideas here. Do you store your photos? If so, can they be shared by providing people with a link or something?
Well, I use Dropbox to store some documents and files that I need to access from more than one computer and also keep synched. E.g., I am working on a document and when I work on it from my netbook at work, then save, when I open my notebook at home that file is automatically updated in my dropbox folder on that computer to be in synch with the one at work.
I just upgraded my Skydrive to 25G (thanks Denny!) even though I’ve never used it. I need to figure out how to use it in an analogous manner to Dropbox.
For Skydrive I use to store photos, I do a selection of best photos to upload and them shared them with family. Is easy to share albums even if they don’t have a windows Live account I don’t like to share photos with everyone as you do in Facebook so in Skydrive is easy to be more selective.
As for dropbox I use it as a work folder that I keep shared with 3 different PCs I use, with almost everything I need for my everyday work, also have a shared folder with my wife for some work we do together. Now I can use Skydrive for both things.
Google Drive announced 5GB free. Again similar to Dropbox and Skydrive, the bonus feature is search across supported formats and they will read your scanned documents so you can search across those also, and do image recognition on your photos so you can search them.
I used to advocate for Mesh and used it substantially, but in the last year or so I’ve whittled down my usage of it to practically nothing. Just sync one folder, and use the remote desktop ability built into it.
Even in the simplest, most straightforward syncing relationships, Mesh would create tons of duplicates after conflicts, and it would screw up my files time and time again. I never lost anything, but the endless creation of duplicates just made me give up.
The main thing I used Mesh for was to sync around 20GB of my music library peer-to-peer (not using cloud storage). The intent of the feature was awesome, but on at least two occasions it duplicated almost my entire music library, sending gigabytes over the wire when it shouldn’t have been required.
Now that I have 25GB of simple SkyDrive storage, my hope is that the sync relationships will be much simpler. So I’m trying it out, currently uploading the same 20GB of my music library or so to sync between 3 computers I’m using regularly. Hopefully it works out better than Mesh.
Thanks for this. I signed up awhile ago and forgot about it until today when I installed the iphone app. Was a bit bummed that I only had 7gb free but the link above sorted me out.
I currently use Dropbox for keeping various things sync’d between home and work (the non-secure stuff at least), and somewhere around 27gb at sugarsync.com (for comics/books etc) which has the advantage of letting you sync whatever folders on your system you like. Throwing Skydrive into the mix with another 25gb will no doubt be helpful somehow or other.
I’ll keep writing projects I’m working on that I might need to access on the road in Dropbox/Skydrive. But the most useful thing I’ve found is to create a Manuals directory and copy PDF manuals for all our electronics, PC components, gadgets, etc to that folder. Then I can pull them up instantly whether I’m at my computer or using my phone/tablet.
One other advantage Skydrive has if you’re using it to store documents: You can edit the online documents in the web version of the MS Office apps. (I’m sure Google offers the same capability, but the I like the online Office apps better, and they give me access to my OneNote stuff too.)
As for Mesh, I think it’s biggest problems was communicating what it was and what it did. Which has been an issue for a lot of innovative web apps in the past few years.
