Merging OneDrive and iCloud Drive

[iAlexG]

All of my work is currently in iCloud Drive and I mainly work off my MBP and iPad which works great. However... soon I will have a new job with a Windows desktop and Office 365 account.

Essentially I want to be able to relatively seamlessly access my content when I'm in my office and when I'm at home. I doubt the organisation's IT services are going to let me install iCloud Drive on their computer and using the web interface and dragging and dropping everything is impractical.

What the best solution? Perhaps I can have my organisational OneDrive folder located inside my iCloud Drive? I don't really fancy migrating all the content over the OneDrive because when I tried that a couple of years ago OneDrive threw up hundreds of errors because of file names not being accepted.

 

[chown33]

The first thing I'd do is try a OneDrive test account, and check whether there are still filename problems. I'd even look up what the limits on filenames are for OneDrive, and deliberately try some that are forbidden.

In other words, step 1 is to find out what the exact reasons for the filename errors are. Step 2 would then be to go through your iCloud Drive filenames and find names that won't migrate, and change them. There may be a way to automate some of Step 2, but that could only be attempted after discovering what kind of filenames need to be identified.

EDIT
I'd also be using this as an opportunity to look into backup solutions. You didn't mention backups of all the work that's on iCloud Drive, so what would you do if iCloud Drive failed, or became inaccessible for a day or so?

 

[iAlexG]

The first thing I'd do is try a OneDrive test account, and check whether there are still filename problems. I'd even look up what the limits on filenames are for OneDrive, and deliberately try some that are forbidden.

In other words, step 1 is to find out what the exact reasons for the filename errors are. Step 2 would then be to go through your iCloud Drive filenames and find names that won't migrate, and change them. There may be a way to automate some of Step 2, but that could only be attempted after discovering what kind of filenames need to be identified.

EDIT
I'd also be using this as an opportunity to look into backup solutions. You didn't mention backups of all the work that's on iCloud Drive, so what would you do if iCloud Drive failed, or became inaccessible for a day or so?

Filenames are still an issue. Some things get flagged up for the name because of certain symbols and stuff. Others (mostly Word docs) just say they can’t be uploaded with no explanation. I have a ridiculous amount of PDFs with auto names from the internet so changing them would be insanely time consuming.

I think I’m either going to have to have a bit sort out to be able to use OneDrive or just use iCloud on the web interface at work. There doesn’t seem to be a good in between.

I have two hard backups of everything - not losing all my years of research!

 

[chown33]

If you can list the "symbols and stuff", then it can be put into a pattern that's passed to the 'find' command in Terminal. Then at least you'd know where all the problem files are.

I'm not suggesting that you'd need to learn all about the 'find' command by yourself. I know it fairly well, and am willing to provide some help. What I can't do is guess what the symbols are, because I don't use OneDrive.

It's also possible that some of the filenames might be automatically renamed, as long as doing so doesn't produce duplicates. For example, a script can strip out parentheses (as a hypothetical example) and rename to a filename without them.

 

[NoBoMac]

Agree with short term of using iCloud web to access the files, to keep the majority of your devices as-is. Not smooth, but, does not mess anything else (possibly), and not having to go back through gyrations when this gig is done.

Or: copy the work stuff to a USB drive, then when home, can do a command line rsync to copy the deltas back.