Microsoft office - where best to save documents? icloud or MS Onedrive?

[Marty_Macfly]

Hi All


Ok, using MS Office on a macbook.

Where is the best place to save the documents? icloud or Microsoft Onedrive?

Can I save any type of file on the ICloud?

Does time machine only work for files saved to ICloud?

How else to back up files, thinking ahead?


Hope you can advise

Regards
Martin

 

[Phil A.]

Saving Office files to OneDrive will enable auto save and will allow real time collaboration, whereas saving them to iCloud won’t.

OneDrive files will be backed up to TimeMachine, but only if they’ve been downloaded to your machine

Personally, I tend to use OneDrive for Office documents and iCloud for everything else

 

[Marty_Macfly]

Thanks Phil,

I’m new to Macs And trying to get my head around how it all works 🙂

Regards
Martin

 

[Apple_Robert]

I would save in the iCloud. That way, you always have access to them.

 

[chrfr]

I would save in the Cloud. That way, you always have access to them.

Both Onedrive and iCloud are cloud services.
Onedrive, as mentioned above, has the advantage of enabling autosave and collaboration features for Office documents, so I'd use that for my Office documents.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Both Onedrive and iCloud are cloud services.
Onedrive, as mentioned above, has the advantage of enabling autosave and collaboration features for Office documents, so I'd use that for my Office documents.

I was speaking of iCloud. I see I forgot to include the i. I will amend my post.

 

[James_C]

iCloud is better for sharing your own documents to your own Apple devices as its built in.

OneDrive is better if you want to share documents with other people who might not have an Apple device.

 

[ght56]

I use iCloud for personal and OneDrive for business. As others have noted, OneDrive enables real-time collaboration - if you are working on a document with multiple people, it is such a great feature that makes life so much easier. Both services are extremely reliable and I am very happy with both. iCloud is extremely secure when used with two-factor authentication.

Do note that if you use iCloud Drive or OneDrive that by default they do NOT necessarily keep every single file as a local copy (i.e., they offload files from your hard drive and store them exclusively on the cloud--when you click to open, they then download it from the cloud and open it.) They do this to save space. You can manually set both to ALWAYS download and save files locally (on Mac you unselect 'Optimize Mac Storage' and in OneDrive it is in the settings menu), but you must enable it. I recommend doing this if space is not an issue, and this way your common backup methods will include any files you place on the cloud.