Windows 10: OneDrive delivers unlimited cloud storage to Office 365

While a NAS is certainly a viable option, when the house/office burns down it is of little use... *Smile

For consumers that need Office, this is certainly a big plus for them. This way they have some sort of off-site backup. Considering that all too many consumers have no backup of any kind, it is great for them. For a business I'm of a mixed bag of whether it is all that good or bad.

 

Disaster can strike in any form at any place. And damage by fire differs unless your house burned down to the ground. But in that case there is much more to worry about other than NAS. *Smile So, that shouldn't be part of discussion.

 

I disagree. Disaster certainly can happen anywhere at anytime and that's why a backup of some sort is important. OneDrive (or other cloud service) could be a life saver if you need to recover documents that are really important. For me, all my bills with the exception of power and water, are electronic. I save those bills in my cloud based mail.

My other documents, like car titles and home deed are scanned, encrypted and saved as are other important documents.

So cloud storage can and should be part of your disaster recovery planning imo.

 

The only thing Important I may lose are my family digital photos which I have a copy everywhere. As for my important docs, they are safe in my safety deposit box. I guess it all depends what kind of data we are talking about here. *Smile Probably movies and music collection which I really don't mind losing. Safety deposit box is the best place to keep your important files. It comes free with a bank account. *Smile

 

One thing NAS needs before it can be even compared to OneDrive and other similar cloud services is an adequate line speed, especially upload speed. Quite a many users globally are still using broadband with something less than 10 Mbps down / 1 or 2 Mbps up. At home, within your own network this is not an issue as the download / upload speed and bandwidth limitations do not apply to transfers between your local computers and NAS, using Gigabyte Ethernet and such the transfers can be really fast.

It's a totally new ballgame if one reason to have data on cloud or NAS is to access it from outside world, a few Mpbs upload speed can make it almost impossible. It is totally irrelevant if the office or airport or hotel where you are accessing the files from home NAS has a hyper speed fiber optic connection because the upload speed of your home network is the theoretical maximum speed you can download data from home NAS.

That alone is my point, my reason to use cloud services instead of NAS.

 

That's one good point Kari.
Fortunately I live in a city tangled in fiber optics cable.
That's one important point to consider. But either way, you still need a good speed to efficiently use commercial online storage.

 

Your 5 Mbps is totally OK to set up cloud service for your most important data. The idea is to let the computers upload and sync when bandwidth is available. Move or copy the files to cloud folder and let it take as long as it takes. They will be all the time available on local computer and on cloud whenever the upload / sync is finished.

The situation changes if you with your 5 Mbps upload speed were using a NAS and you would need a larger file when away from home. At that point your home broadband upload limit becomes the download speed limit, the fastest you can get data from your NAS. Whereas 5 Mbps upload is totally enough to maintain a cloud service and keep copies of important files, documents and pictures alike, on cloud, it will be slow to get files from NAS when on the road and the need arises.

A cloud when used as it is intended to be used (talking now about private users) works in the background without you even noticing it. My Windows Phone is set to upload all the photos and videos I take and make automatically to OneDrive; of course I know that if I record a half an hour high resolution video, it will not be on cloud a second after I have pressed the stop and save buttons. But it will be there, tomorrow or next week.

 

Talking about speed, mine is only 60down/10up. I just recently shared the 3.70GB Build 9860 ISO to a forum friend in North Carolina (I am in Toronto) direct from my NAS. The recipient in N. Carolina said it only took him less than an hour to download the ISO. Not bad I guess.

 

Onedrive is an easy way to share large files or small,
All of the Office 365 stuff is secondary outllok.com/ Hotmail.com/ live.com all come with probably the largest free offering available and for now it's all free and advertisement free to you and your visitors you share with *Wink

 

One of the big benefit for cloud storage is to help protect against disasters. My sisters house did burn to the ground and they lost everything. House, garage, cars, pets, etc. For things like digital pictures and such, those are memories that cannot be replaced, unlike the house, cars, etc.

Having offsite storage of my backups is an absolute must. It's not an option. With that said, a NAS isn't out of the question, but I absolutely have to have a method to back it up. And keep that backup offsite.

 

The main issue I see with NAS and other servers being run out of your own house, is those things depend on having a static IP address for easy remote access. Most Americans do not have that. Where I am, Verizon and Comcast are the only choices for internet (not counting mobile internet) and both of those charge a significantly higher amount to get a static IP. I have been told that Time Warner and AT&T are the same way. For most people, they are fine with a non-static IP, but that means every time their modem resets/reboots for any reason, their WAN IP address has changed. That, combined with previously mentioned issues with slow connections (personally, I only have 3 Mbps down, and 700Kbps up at home), makes online storage a much more viable option for the vast majority of people in the US.

 

I agree with everything you said. But for changing WAN IP issue, that's easy. I use a DDNS service. For now I am only using a free DDNS service ( www. no-ip. com) which requires monthly re-activation (just a matter of clicking a URL sent with a reminder to my email.. very easy). Later on I will get a premium service. I am just waiting for a good deal. There is a $30 for 2 years. In the meantime, the free service serves me well.

DDNS works by creating a hostname that you will use in place of WAN IP. It doesn't matter if your WAN IP changes all the time. Your hostname will remain the same but it will automatically pick up your new WAN IP and update itself.

 

I did not know DDNS services even existed. That does eliminate that issue.

 

The good thing about DDNS is that you don't have to expose your WAN IP. It is completely masked by a hostname (any name you want). And you can create multiple hostnames with 1 WAN IP. I created a different hostname for my surveillance cam and router.