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Microsoft Releases Skydrive for Mac App

Hmm a good competitor to Dropbox?
Download and installation is faster than dropbox but you don't get a menu bar, just a dock icon that you can't disable.

Also, I noticed they reduced the free storage to 7GB. You can still get the original 25GB of storage if you go to skydrive.com and confirm that you want the 25GB of storage but that option will only show up if you had skydrive before today.
Fortunately, I did so I got my free 25GB. The upload limit is 2GB but that's a pretty good deal considering Dropbox free storage starts at 2GB.
 
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it's great, i've got me 20 gigs with dropbox and 25 with skydrive, not to mention 50gb with box (although box sucks without sync feature).
 
Watabou said:
Hmm a good competitor to Dropbox?
Download and installation is faster than dropbox but you don't get a menu bar, just a dock icon that you can't disable.
Click to expand...

There is a menu icon and the dock bar icon can easily be hidden with a few free utilities out there. Wish I would have gotten in for the free 25 gigs but 7 is okay and I have 50 with dropbox. Adding another 20 gigs with ms is dirt cheap and the iPhone app is pretty nice.
 
Looks like a contender and the free upgrade to 25gb is a huge plus.

One downside is that it won't install on my workstation in the office (running winxp) I get a skydrivesetup not a valid win32 application error.

From what I can see from googling its an issue with winxp. MS's help on this is to start the computer in a "clean boot" state by clearing out all start up items via msconfig
 
I've been waiting for this for a while. I was an early Dropbox adopter, then I moved over to SugarSync about six months ago because the pricing is better. Now that SkyDrive is out and more or less replicates the functions of these services at a fraction of the price, I have no reason not to switch. Now it's between Google Drive and SkyDrive- I'm going with SkyDrive (I'm grandfathered into the 25GB free, which is very nice). SkyDrive is substantially cheaper, edits my Office docs natively at SkyDrive.com (whereas you have to first convert the doc to a Google Doc to do the same with Google Drive), and for some reason, I trust MS more with my data from a privacy perspective. MS's business strategy is to sell software, and free applications like this (which integrate deeply into Window 8 and Windows Phone 7) spur sales of enterprise software, whereas Google makes it money from advertising. Simply put, Google has an incentive to mine my data to sell me ads, and that makes me a little uncomfortable (just look to the tailored ads in GMail).

But yeah, with the latest update, SkyDrive is pretty sweet.
 
Now if only Microsoft would allow third-parties to use a Skydrive API we would be all set.
 
jbouklas said:
SkyDrive is substantially cheaper, edits my Office docs natively at SkyDrive.com (whereas you have to first convert the doc to a Google Doc to do the same with Google Drive)
Click to expand...

Ok, I'd be careful. While yes, you have to convert a file to Google Docs, which makes my skin crawl. The MS Word app is... what's the right word? Well, it's a piece of junk. If you're doing more than just basic text edits or have any images inserted into the doc, etc... It just doesn't work.

Being a PC guy, I'd love to say MS is one step ahead here, and to an extent they are. Still, Google Docs blows the MS Word Web app out of the water. I'm actually sticking with Dropbox. There may be a 2GB limit, but I've lived with it so far. I have to believe that either Google will improve accessibility to the synced versions or MS will improve the web apps. Either way would be fine with me, but until one does something, I'm not messing with them.
 
It looks promising but lacks a lot of the advanced features of Dropbox from what I can see (shared folders, selective sync, etc)

If they beef up the feature set it could definitely put a big dent in Dropbox's revenues!
 
Microsoft is doing lots of things right with Skydrive. I hope they update the Mac Client to support selective sync and running hidden as a service. I am switching to Skydrive since I have 25GB free (had an account already) and I can sync my Windows laptop with my Mac. Dropbox will be used for 1Password syncing only.
 
JohnDoe98 said:
Now if only Microsoft would allow third-parties to use a Skydrive API we would be all set.
Click to expand...

Do you mean this? There's already a few apps for iOS that use the SkyDrive API's. It's far too late for me to think of what they are, but I remember they were featured in some article I was reading as proof-of-concept for the SkyDrive API's
 
I've noticed a bug in SkyDrive for Mac. Most of the time it doesn't even tell you if the file path is too long, it just ends up trying to upload folders/files as much as it can lol. I only got the error message once then renamed some folders to make it shorter - only it uploaded half of the files in the folders :(
 
It has definitely been an interesting 24 hours as far as cloud services go. I have been using Dropbox for several years and had planned on continuing to use it to replace iDisk. But then all of a sudden we have SkyDrive and Google Drive. I have tried them both and think I will switch over to SkyDrive from Dropbox. My main reason is that I was able to get in on the 25GB deal. It seems to work just as good as Dropbox but I have a whole lot more space. I tried Google Drive and it was okay except occasionally it seemed to just grind on and on while synching stuck at the same place. I would finally shut it down and restart and it would finish. Not sure what that was all about. So I guess right now I am using SkyDrive to store all my documents and files and I use Google+ with Picasa to share my photos. It seems to me that the bar has been set kind of high for Apple to do more with iCloud. They really do need to come out with a true iDisk replacement as well as expand the iPhoto Journal sharing to Mac iPhoto.
 
sulliweb said:
The MS Word app is... what's the right word? Well, it's a piece of junk. If you're doing more than just basic text edits or have any images inserted into the doc, etc... It just doesn't work.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it does pale in comparison to Google Docs- kind of a big disappointment. But I like the ability to make an edit to a Word doc that I have without making any destructive changes to the formatting, which the Word webapp does manage to do correctly. As it stands, if you want to edit in Google Docs, then you have to convert it to Google Docs, and I have formatting specs that I need retained.

If anyone knows of a better alternative to either, I'm all ears. I've tried Zoho, but it lacks polish and didn't play well with Chrome and Safari until fairly recently.
 
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