First Ring Daily EP 46: OneDrive For The Billions

On this episode of First Ring Daily, it’s impossible to avoid the $26.2 billion figure, Windows 10 gets new features and how Paul and I backup our bits.

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  • 3216

    08 December, 2016 - 3:14 pm

    <p>Regarding backup…&nbsp; This is a never ending but ever changing topic and it’s one that I’ve struggled with for roughly 25 years.&nbsp;</p>
    <p>There’s no point in rehashing old strategies other than to say that the fundamental principals still apply.&nbsp; First off, there are basically two types of backups.&nbsp; One type is the incremental file backup which allows you can go back to a prior instance of a file – as a program developer, that is extremely important to me but it’s probably the one that is least relevant to this weeks discussion.&nbsp; A variation of this is the periodic drive image, which allows a drive to be restored to a prior point in time (e.g. after a virus screws the boot drive).</p>
    <p>That brings us to the second type which are backup file copies, which is the main thing being discussed here.&nbsp; As noted, NAS and external drive prices have come down to the point where it’s fairly easy to have 4GB of redundant storage at home.&nbsp; I have a NAS with two mirrored 2GB drives a 2BG backup USB drive, and a 1GB USB/WiFi drive for media that I can carry with me on trips if I want.&nbsp; The only thing this doesn’t give me is off-site storage for protection from a fire.</p>
    <p>I have a free 30GB OneDrive account but only have about 5GB of important documents on it because these are things that I don’t want to risk getting lost.&nbsp; That leaves me with 25GB free and a the question of what do I really want to use it for.&nbsp; Part of the issue I have with OneDrive is that regardless of how much storage I have, I have to have a machine locally synced to it.&nbsp; If I could sync part of my NAS to my OneDrive account, it would be fairly easy to figure out how to use my additional 25GB and I could even see my way clear to paying for a 1TB account.&nbsp;</p>
    <p>The main problem with OneDrive and Dropbox are that they are tough to use in the same way you would use a NAS or external drive.&nbsp; IOW, put files there and see them there and use them there without having to pull a copy to your computer.&nbsp; Sooner or later we will get there (SkyDrive was part way there) but until we do I still feel as if the only real way to accomplish this is have a local computer with a big hard drive that can act as a "storage server".</p>
    <p>If Microsoft really wants to do something new and creative, they need to market a NAS that can sync to OneDrive.&nbsp; WesternDigital and Seagate are already turning out devices that can sync to their cloud services and some NAS devices can sync to Google Drive (and possibly DropBox but I have yet to see one that will work with OneDrive.</p>

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