[liamwire]

Come on, a problem nobody really had? I wholeheartedly disagree. Data loss and the orthogonal problem of lacking free space on computers is/was a massive problem at enterprise scale and OneDrive, for all its many shortcomings, is well and truly into good-enough territory to cover the 80% case. I'd go so far as to argue that the scenario you've described is by far the less frequent one. And if it frustrates you, you're afforded the ability to designate files and entire folders to be kept downloaded at all times anyway.

[bilekas]

Data loss and storage is always a challenge, that's why companies will have network drives, network storage that's not strongly coupled with your account acess. OneDrive doesn't solve the problem in a clean way. It adds an extra layer of brittleness.

[cheschire]

Network storage does not handle the online/offline switching as transparently as OneDrive (or other cloud storage).

For large enterprises that old architecture you refer to means long lead times on network and storage outage notifications, and huge fallout if an outage window is blown.

And if the building network goes down, or if your storage servers are located off site because you’re too big for one building and the commercial internet goes down, etc etc

But it doesn’t have to be OneDrive. There are many other options. I run ownCloud 10 for my personal files. If I were a small to medium business, I would look hard at OCIS.

[rcxdude]

onedrive doesn't really handle online/offline switching well. Unless you configure it carefully, it will generally not keep stuff local and so things will break without an internet connection.

[zamadatix]

Network drives mean no local retention and no real good answer for Windows+Mac+Android+iOS clients to remotely access the files. It also doesn't solve sharing those files externally with granular permissions.

All of these kinds things need protection against data loss and centralized control+management, not just the user folder alone.

[vel0city]

> Network drives mean no local retention

Technically speaking, Windows does support client-side caching on network drives. I've used it in the past for a highly limited number of users (read: me, on a personal share) and it works kind of like OneDrive/Dropbox/other cloud platform. But it's really rough and doesn't handle conflicts well.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/web-hosting/configurin...

[seb1204]

10 years ago this was not a key requirement. But now it is

Sadly One Drive has pushed out the implementation of proper DMS in some instances.

[vrighter]

isn't that also the case witf onedrive because it deletes local copies?

[zamadatix]

With OneDrive if you edit a file offline and someone edits a file online AND it's not a file type edit it can attempt to merge (like with Office documents) you end up with "{name}-conflict.{extension}" files rather than deleted local copies. You also get version history of files and the recycle bin of files deleted from the cloud to recover any mistakes from.

[Scroll_Swe]

And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.

YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.

OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.

[lifeisgood99]

Sure. And you wouldn't need phishing protections if users had brains. But then you run into real users so hand-holding solutions start to make sense.

[isoprophlex]

Seems to me that if you want to experience data loss, Sharepoint is going to cover your needs just fine.