In my personal desire to “get modern” with myself and the company, I am happy to say that we’ve all made the move to touch, we’re all on Windows 8 and on Office 365. So far so good. I recently decided to “clean house” and make OneDrive my primary data repository. That way I can access my information anytime, anywhere. As I started to move my “Documents” on the C: drive to the OneDrive via File Explorer, I hit a snag. The consumer-side OneDrive offers 15GB free storage. My Documents’ data corpus exceeded 33GB. So the copy operating failed just before mid-point. Read below for my interim solution as part one of my journey. In part two, I’ll complete the transition to OneDrive for Business 2013.
The short answer is that I increased my OneDrive storage to 100GB for $1.99 a month by making a frictionless online purchase from Microsoft. The transition was akin to buying a service from Amazon, perhaps the gold standard for online purchases. The file copy from “Document” on my C: Drive restarted at its point of failure and completed a bit later. Full disclosure: I went for a late afternoon bike ride while the copy function completed. My local C: Drive is nearly empty after this data migration.
Pictured: Bike ride with my son during the One Drive data migration
I feel like I “cheated” by simply buying my way out of trouble for $1.99/month. It’s like throwing money at a problem to solve it. So I started to investigate OneDrive for Business 2013. Here is what I found:
- OneDrive and OneDrive for Business 2013 have different use cases. I spoke with my source on the Office 365 support team (who will be attending our three-day Office 365 Nation summit in Redmond, September 26-28 fall2014.smbnation.com). Whereas my hope and desire was that the two OneDrive products have a parent-child relationship (OneDrive for Business 2013 = parent; OneDrive = child), such is not the case. It’s like two individuals with the last name Smith, who are unrelated.
- Different use cases. This excellent article by J. Peter Bruzzese, “SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro? Cut through the confusion,” highlights that the two products have different use cases. OneDrive is akin to Dropbox. OneDrive Pro for Business 2013 points towards a legacy from the Groove acquisition + SharePoint pedigree. My source on the O365 team confirmed these scenarios as well.
- OneDrive for Business 2013, as part of Office 365, delivers a whopping 1TB out of the gate versus OneDrive’s default of the aforementioned 15GB.
- OneDrive for Business 2013 is much more sophisticated with versioning, check-in, check-out, etc. All the things an author like myself needs!
So the question then was, is there a simple friction-free button to push in Office 365 (say the Admin console), to move my data corpus from OneDrive to OneDrive for Business 2013?
The answer is you will have to see part two of this blog series later this week.
P.S.: Be sure to join me for the three-day SMB Nation 2014 Fall Conference, Sept 26-28 in Redmond, WA! More info at fall2014.smbnation.com
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