I ask because of this article as well as this other article.
I don’t use OneDrive because it seems to slow down windows 10 for me. I have an older Laptop that runs just fine but when MS kept bugging me to use onedrive my PC seemed to slow way down. So I disabled it.
I use Dropbox for file storage, no slow down.
As you know, you can store your data in the cloud like Dropbox, Mega and OneDrive, etc. However there are other free solutions. If you have two or more computers in your house, you can store your backup on the other computer by opening a share between them.
There is software like Syncthing (free) which can copy your data to another computer aywhere in the world, or into space assuming you have internet there. That data can be encrypted too if you wish. Syncthing is free and works on multiple platforms. I have win7 and Win10 and my Android Cell sharing data. Some of the data between the windows systems is bi-directional menaing I have the same data on each system. The cellphone just sends photos to my Windows systems.
Well, Lavarock, do you recommend that Windows 10 users use Windows Backup to sync their Windows settings to OneDrive just so they can get an extra year of free security updates? Does Clark Howard recommend OneDrive? I can’t say that stuff said about OneDrive in this Ask Leo! video doesn’t bother me. No offense, but I wish that Scott Mueller of Upgrading and Repairing PCs fame were still available for consultation.
I have spent lots of time trying to delete Microsoft OneDrive because I did not like that every time I put a camera SD card in my computer, it had to read and download it. I’m still not sure if I was able to do that.
Companys such as Microsoft want you to use their software and facilities, which was obvious with their Explorer lawsuit. Even Google got on the bandwagon offering free telephone service and (at the time) unlimited storage of photos and email. They used that data for their own purposes. Have you ever thought about those “choose the motorcycles” challenges on websites? If enough people choose the same squares contining morotcycles, people have now identified what most say a motorcycle looks like. Then the computers can look at other photos of items and decide what is a motorcycle.
So back to OneDrive. OneDrive is telling me that it will no longer run on my Windows 7 computers. Yes, even the forums here are ready to bid me goodbye for using old browsers.
I was able to search and find a hack to allow me to continue to get security updates and fixes for my Win7 boxaes and still get them today. This was offered to companys who could not upgrade from Win7. Did you know that video poker machines and other video devices in casinos run software like Windows server, XP and other versions? To force big companys to upgrade doesn’t work well, so behind the scenes, if an old system such as Win7 could bring down the Internet, Microsoft would be hard-pressed not to offer a patch. Win7 has over 2% of users but is still going strong.
There are other software solutions I have mentioned. These include free cloud storage like Mega.NZ which offers 20Gb of free storage and paid tiers above that. Also GoogleDrive and Dropbox with various free tiers. It just depends upon your needs.
I used to buy external drives from Costco every year or two. The latest drive usually cost about $100 to $130. I could just copy my system completely to the drive and have it elsewhere in the house. I then decided to rent cloud space for cheaper through Backblaze. For $99 a year I have unlimited storage. Note that I take advantage of that deal because I have approximately 5 TB od data stored, so yes, their unlimited is unlimited. Their system by default does not back up the operating system, but if you use a backup program to create a disk file backup, that file could be uploaded and saved.
As I mentioned before Syncthing could be used between other computers. One might have a family member on the East coast and one on the West coast. They could copy their files across the country and have a far away backup. Those files could be in an encrypted folder so your Brotherinlaw can’t see your financial data and hit you up for a loan.
If you need and want OneDrive, use it. I would also have alternate backups for any service that all of a sudden decides to change their terms and prices.
As I mentioned, many backup programs and system may not backup the operating system, which I think is a major flaw. On our HP Mainframes we had a system backup and a data backup. With those two backups you could recreate a system from scratch. On these PC computers Windows pretty much requires you to install a fresh copy of Windows and then restore your data. HOWEVER, the programs usually need to be all re-installed. I personally have hundreds of programs and mst of those Win7 install files no longer exist. So a complete disk backup is prefered to a file backup.
Lava, I have to ask? Why are you still using Win7? I loved it when it was the current windows but now it’s 4 versions behind. What do you do to make sure it’s secure?