Friday, August 5, 2011

Skydrive/Windows Live or Google?

For the past month or so I've been using Microsoft's Skydrive to save files online for transfer among systems and off-site backup. I have a free gigabyte there. I've also been occasionally using Google Documents for this purpose. In each case, what I transfer is an encrypted compressed tarball, and I saw little difference in terms of performance or convenience.

Today I've decided to stop using Skydrive--it's too unreliable. Two of the last three times I've tried an upload (using Chrome from an Ubuntu box) the transfer to Skydrive has stalled. Each time, when giving it extra time, I've opened a tab and Windows Live informs me that if I leave the page the upload will be canceled. WTF? I was leaving that tab open and going somewhere else.

Until yesterday I would have said I like Skydrive, and that it's nowhere near as clunky as Outlook Live, which is very retro, and very limited in what it allows one to do. Now, I think I can say Microsoft online services are to be avoided.

Do these work better with IE on a Windows machine? Probably, but that defeats the purpose of a web-based service. Why might they work better with IE/Windows? Possibly ActiveX, and intrusive access to the PC.

1 comment:

Jeff Martens said...

It turns out I don't even have to open another tab, or to do anything, to cause the warning to appear. Windows Live Skydrive--what a piece of garbage.