I recently migrated the contents of my Dropbox to Microsoft OneDrive since I understand I was on borrowed time at my university, which plans to retire Dropbox in the near future. It has been 1-week now and many files are still not in sync with the cloud service. While the migration issues have been frustrating, what I am more concerned about is how new / recent files are synchronized. In fact, it’s just plain miserable.
Case in point 1, I use screenshots religiously to take snapshots of applications, which I can then embed into presentations. After uploading the presentation from my smartphone to OneDrive, I received an alert, stating that the file was uploaded. The following screenshot begs to differ. A day later, it’s still empty, although it’s showing on my desktop machine. I’m not even sure this is a syncing issue since it’s not showing on the device I uploaded it from. And why it shows on a different machine before the machine it’s uploaded from is baffling.
Case in point 2, I frequently use my desktop to construct recommendations for students, which I digitally sign on my smartphone using Adobe Sign. Today, I encountered a never-ending refresh icon on my desktop and only one of the updates is showing on my mobile device. Guess which one is not showing? Yes, of course, the file that requires the signature. Screenshots of this transaction are below.
To say these issues are frustrating is moot. The issues make the technology unusable and I’ll be moving back to Dropbox before the end of the day since the technology is unreliable.
Not to be overly critical of Microsoft since I experienced the same issues using Google Drive many years ago. I guess this shows the impressive nature of Dropbox and how sophisticated their replication and indexing capabilities are. In my experience using Dropbox, I have never run into issues syncing files to the extent I am facing with OneDrive.