Simple OneDrive Better Practice

This morning I saw a post on Facebook (the other Yammer) from my friend Jasper Oosterveld (@jasoosterveld):

Great start of the morning! OneDrive for Business Sync lost my Visio file with my sitemaps and page lay-outs. Un&*@(believable….

It truly pains me to see posts like this for several reasons.

First of all, I hate to hear that someone has lost some work. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, but sometimes I miss index cards.

More importantly, OneDrive ought to be awesome no matter which flavor you are using: OneDrive for Business, OneDrive [for Consumer], or whatever other adjunct flavor you may run into. (It’s OneDrive, but there’s more than one!)

The OneDrive team is making huge strides on the reliability of the product  – six months ago this would have just been a flat out rant – but there still a way to go. For example, here’s a recent post about how Managing your work files in the browser keeps getting easier on the OneDrive blog.

As I replied to Jasper, I’ve found that the most reliable approach using OneDrive for Business is to edit in one place only. By this, I mean to always edit locally or always edit in the host Document Library. What I’ve found works best for me is to use the Document Library only for central storage and always edit locally. It’s faster (the file is here already) and I know I’m backing it up with CrashPlan regularly.

OneDrive (none of the flavors) is *not* a backup mechanism – it’s a syncing mechanism. It’s main purpose – at least for me – is to make sure that I can access my files from any device. If I edit a file on my Surface Pro 3, then I know that I’ll see those edits on my ASUS laptop and vice versa.

OneDrive is getting better and better, but for now it requires a bit of caution. At some point in the not too distant future, I plan to throw that caution to the wind when OneDrive lives up to its promise.