OneDrive is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iCloud and Google Drive. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, since OneDrive preceded those cloud storage and syncing services by at least five years. OneDrive’s functionality and design have reached a point of slick usability and reliability. It has a rich feature set, online office apps, and wide platform support. The service’s deep integration with Windows and Microsoft 365, alongside its completeness, maturity, and polish, earn it not only an Editors’ Choice award but also a rare five-out-of-five rating.
Like iCloud and Google Drive, OneDrive serves a lot of functions. If you just want access to documents or media files, it offers simple online storage accessible from the web. If you want the same set of files replicated on multiple PCs, it provides syncing. For Windows 10 and Windows 11 users, it backs up device settings, including images for your lock screen and desktop background, as well as browser favorites. It also syncs Microsoft 365 documents and enables coauthoring.
You can view data in OneDrive in a few different ways: by type of data, client, or function. The data types include documents, photos, video, music, and settings. The clients include desktop, mobile, and web. And the functions are things like syncing, viewing, playing, and simple storage. Here we look at the service from these various angles.
OneDrive has photo AI tagging, real-time collaborative editing, and powerful search. Everything it stores is also available in any web browser you log in to. This cloud storage service integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 apps. Recent OneDrive feature updates include online photo editing, the ability to cast photos to a TV via Chromecast, photo organization by date or source, and an upcoming AI-enhanced web home page redesign.
Coming to OneDrive in 2023 are a redesigned, AI-powered home screen, offline web syncing, more sharing and collaboration options, file favoriting, Teams integration, and macOS Desktop and Document folder backup. A private shared photo (and video) story feature with followers is also coming soon. These features are currently arriving in corporate and educational accounts. Below is a screenshot from the company showing the new look.
The new design includes OneDrive Home with an AI-powered For You section of suggestions, a People view organized by people you’ve shared files with, color choices for folders, and filtering by file type.
Anyone with a Microsoft account already has a OneDrive account, and that includes everyone who’s ever signed up for a Hotmail, Live, or Outlook.com email account. You can also sign up with any email provider.
Free users get 5GB of free storage space, and some smartphones and PCs add free OneDrive storage. For comparison, iCloud offers 1GB free, unless you bought an Apple device, which gets you 5GB. Dropbox gives you 2GB for free. IDrive offers 10GB. Google Drive gives you 15GB, though that’s shared with Gmail. Disappointingly, Microsoft recently followed Google in this policy, now including Outlook.com email attachments against your storage quota. Other smaller players like Mega and pCloud also offer more free space but fewer features.
Microsoft 365 users get a terabyte more with their $6.99-per-month Personal subscription, along with features like expiring and password-protected share links, ransomware protection, and downloadable Microsoft 365 programs. A $9.99-per-month Home subscription includes 6TB (1TB each for six users). Another option is to add 200GB of storage to OneDrive for $1.99 per month, though you lose the benefits I just mentioned. Apple, Dropbox, and Google all charge $9.99 per month for 2TB of storage.
The OneDrive desktop syncing runs on Windows 10, Windows 11, and macOS 10.14 or later. (Support for earlier Windows versions has been discontinued.) There are workarounds for using it on Linux, but no first-party client app. The OneDrive mobile app runs on Android 6.0 or later and iOS 15 or later. It’s also available in the Amazon Appstore for Kindle Fire. You can also run it on Xbox One.
The desktop syncing app is quick to install, with a setup wizard that lets you create an account if you don’t already have one. The setup shows how your OneDrive folder will appear in Windows Explorer (or Finder), with its little blue cloud icon instead of the traditional yellow folder icon. Setup also places a cloud icon in your system tray, from which you can open your synced folder or change settings.
When you place a photo, document, or another item in the created OneDrive folder, it automatically uploads to the cloud and then appears in any of your other OneDrive clients on any of your other computers. You can now upload files of up to 250GB in size—larger than most people will ever need, but not as big as Google Drive’s 5TB (though for some file types, the size is much smaller). You can share any files or folders stored in the OneDrive cloud with either viewing or editing privileges. Paid OneDrive users can password-protect shared files as well as set expiration times for sharing. Apple and Google’s cloud services don’t offer either of those features at any plan level without workarounds or third-party add-ins. Dropbox offers them but only with some paid plans.
For a quick test of cross-platform syncing, I installed OneDrive on both an iMac and a Windows desktop. I then created a new folder in the OneDrive app, which appeared a couple of seconds later in the Mac’s OneDrive folder. Including OneDrive in Windows Explorer is incredibly helpful because you can save work from any application to your cloud storage directly, without having to go to a website. That includes apps that autosave files. I should note, however, that iCloud and Google Drive desktop utilities can do the same.
OneDrive has multiple functions and features. The most important ones to highlight are device syncing, folder and file syncing, Personal Vault, folder backup, and synced Microsoft 365 collaboration.
Device Syncing. OneDrive can sync settings and apps on all your Windows desktops, laptops, and tablets. Clients for iOS, Android, and macOS give users of those devices access to the synced files stored in OneDrive’s online folders.
OneDrive lets smartphone users with iPhones or Androids running the OneDrive app automatically upload photos and videos taken with the phone’s camera to OneDrive’s camera roll. iCloud, Dropbox, and other services have this option, too. With automatic mobile photo backup, your images and videos are quickly available for viewing online in a OneDrive folder on a PC, in Windows’ Photos app, on the web, or in any other OneDrive app you have installed.
Folder and File Syncing. OneDrive’s file and folder syncing is similar to what you get from Dropbox and SugarSync. In the past, Microsoft had separate storage and syncing services. The joining of online storage and syncing into one cloud service is a refreshing simplification of a previously somewhat confusing set of systems. Unlike SugarSync, OneDrive keeps all your synced file under its umbrella folder, the way Dropbox does. That means you can’t sync a particular folder on one computer to a particular folder on another; that approach gets messy though, and all the services save SugarSync have abandoned it.
Personal Vault. OneDrive’s Personal Vault adds an extra degree of security for the files you store on OneDrive. When you enable your Personal Vault, you must use multi-factor authentication to open it. It can take the form of a security code to your email, phone, or authenticator app (we recommend the latter for best security). The files are locally encrypted by BitLocker, they lock after a set number of minutes of inactivity (which varies by device), and you can’t share them accidentally.
Folder Backup. Unlike true backup services, OneDrive doesn’t let you sync any file in any folder on your local drive to the cloud. But the Backup choice in Settings does let you protect the three most likely suspects for backup: Desktop, Documents and Pictures. These folders don’t have to live inside the OneDrive folder to be synced.
Synced Microsoft 365 Collaboration. When you create a document in a Microsoft 365 app like Word or Excel in your OneDrive folder, it’s accessible from any device and the web, and you get real-time collaborative editing, too.
With Windows 11, OneDrive is more of a built-in capability than a separate web service. You see OneDrive in the File Explorer, and you can choose which OneDrive folders are synced or have everything synced. Results in Windows desktop searches or Cortana searches include OneDrive files, and the Windows 11 Media Player can play music files you upload to it.
The Windows 11 version of OneDrive has a slick new Settings panel where you can choose options for Files On Demand, PC backup, and more.
Microsoft no longer supports the store app for Windows, instead pointing users to install the web version as a PWA, or progressive web app. This will be getting offline capability eventually using Microsoft’s Nucleus technology, but for now, it requires a connection.
One of the best things to happen to OneDrive is its implementation of Files on Demand. With it enabled by default from OneDrive’s Settings panel, you no longer have to fill up every connected computer’s drive with every file stored in the OneDrive cloud. Instead, as the name implies, the files are only downloaded on-demand as you open them. OneDrive’s Files on Demand is available in the macOS OneDrive client, too.
You can still designate folders and files to be downloaded for offline use, either for all files or on a case-by-case basis. A column in File Explorer called Status shows a cloud icon for online files and folders and a circled check mark for items stored locally. Files waiting to be uploaded sport a circular-arrows icon. In my usage, the feature works flawlessly. Google has added a similar capability to Google Drive, but Apple’s iCloud Drive still has no on-demand capability for its Windows client; it does work in on-demand mode by default for Macs and iOS devices.
I already mentioned the availability of Android and iOS apps for OneDrive, but mobile apps for OneDrive have also made the jump beyond the smartphone. Apple Watch and Wear OS versions are now available, which let you do things like cycle through recent photos on the watch face. Tablets running iPadOS, Windows 10, and Android can also take advantage of OneDrive apps, and failing that, there’s always the excellent web interface.
The mobile apps let you not only view anything stored in your OneDrive but also upload files and share anything stored via the cloud to any app on the phone that can accept files. You can even see photos grouped by autogenerated tags like #people, #animal, #building, and so on.
I tried out mobile access to OneDrive on iPhone and Android. The OneDrive apps clearly show your cloud folders or file icons, and let you view photos and documents, including spreadsheets and PDFs, within the app. They also let you share anything in the folders via an email link (with view only, edit, and expiration options), or you can copy items to the phone’s clipboard. You can also designate files for offline viewing and editing.
Happily, Microsoft has added a search capability to the mobile apps. All the mobile apps also now let you automatically upload any photos and videos shot on the device using the Automatically Upload to OneDrive setting. Most other cloud storage services have had a similar feature for years. You can watch videos on the phone, too.
Another OneDrive option for mobile users is the collection of Microsoft 365 mobile apps—Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, and OneNote. When you open an office document in the OneDrive mobile app, you can view it, and you can launch the editing app (such as Word) from its icon at the top. The web version of OneDrive offers a big dropdown menu of tiles for all these online apps. Documents you create in them are automatically synced to all your OneDrive access points.
Microsoft’s cloud service plays and displays all the most common types of files you might want to store in the cloud, including documents, music, photos, and video. Here’s a rundown of how each is handled.
You can download and upload document files, as you can with iCloud’s web interface, as well as view and edit them online with OneDrive using either the Microsoft 365 Online or installed apps. OneDrive serves as the main folder and file location for all your online documents made with those apps, just as Google Drive does for Google Docs. And just as in Google Docs, multiple authors can edit documents at the same time. An icon shows who’s typing where, and the document contents are updated live. Microsoft 365 Online also offers better document-formatting fidelity than you get with Docs, and having the option to use either the web client or an installed app is another advantage. One disadvantage that both share is that you can’t see text revisions while collaborating.
I had no problem viewing Microsoft file formats like Word Documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations using the online Microsoft 365 apps as well as in the mobile and desktop apps. I could also view PDFs, and Windows knew to open a ZIP file on the desktop, showing the archive’s contents in a folder. Microsoft 365 apps have OneDrive baked in, too, as the default save location. It’s especially convenient when you want to work on a file at home that you started at work, without having to log in to a website.
Windows 11’s Media Player and Windows 10’s Groove app let you play songs stored on OneDrive. It’s not streaming, however, as the files must be downloaded to play them. Google Play Music does the same for Android users. OneDrive’s web version can play songs via streaming, as can Google Drive’s, but iCloud’s cannot, and Apple Music can’t access songs stored on iCloud Drive.
OneDrive does an impressive job of displaying photos and videos in its web interface. It even auto-tags images using AI the way Flickr does, grouping, for example, all photos of dogs, crowds, or buildings by tag. The auto-tagging makes searching more powerful since you can narrow results down by either type of tag. Google Photos offers a similar search capability, though without explicitly showing you the tags. Both of those services also let you see a map of where the photo was taken (if it’s geotagged, as most smartphone photos are now) and EXIF camera data. Apple’s iCloud web interface doesn’t have any search, tagging, or EXIF display at all. You can share and tag photos yourself, too, in OneDrive, and the recipient doesn’t have to sign into a Microsoft account unless you grant edit rights rather than just viewing.
When you share a video from OneDrive, the cloud service transcodes it on the fly using MPEG-DASH to match the capabilities of the receiver’s bandwidth. This way if you share to someone’s phone, they won’t download an unnecessarily large file that would be prone to pause the video for buffering. I tried sharing a video to a phone with just three bars of LTE connectivity, and my test movie played smoothly and clearly without interruption.
OneDrive’s photo tricks also include optical character recognition (OCR) technology, which extracts text from images. If you save a photo with text in it to your cloud storage, the Info panel on its OneDrive page includes an extracted text area, which you can click to cut and paste anywhere. Google Drive’s help talks about OCR, but it’s not in the Drive interface. You need to open the image in Google Docs to get the functionality. You can forget about any OCR in iCloud, though Dropbox offers it to business accounts.
OneDrive also lets you edit photos by cropping, rotating, altering the lighting, and adjusting the color. The tools are useful and simple. My only complaint is that the service is missing an auto-correct button, though it includes several effect filters with a slider for adjusting their strength. Note that editing works for HEIC files as well as JPGs and PNGs.
Any Windows app or web service can take advantage of OneDrive cloud storage, though. And like Dropbox and Google Drive, OneDrive integrates with a multitude of web services that can use it as their storage through an API it provides to third-party service developers. For example, ACDSee Photo Studio lets you open and save edited images to OneDrive. Other examples include Vimeo, Wrike, Zapier, and Zoom. Another announced capability coming this year is the ability to open a file directly from OneDrive on the web in its native app. For example, if you have PDFs set to open in Adobe Acrobat, you can launch them in that app.
Microsoft states that your OneDrive data is covered by “advanced encryption, compliance, and other enterprise-grade security features.” The service supports multi-factor authentication and has at-rest and in-transit encryption for all users and file types. It’s not a zero-knowledge system, however, but the company doesn’t allow staff standing access to data keys, According to its documentation, it “maintains a ‘zero-standing access’ policy, which means that engineers do not have access to the service unless it is explicitly granted in response to a specific incident that requires elevation of access.”
The company also proactively monitors for threats: “OneDrive and Office 365 maintain robust, real-time security monitoring systems. Among other issues, these systems raise alerts for attempts to illicitly access customer data, or for attempts to illicitly transfer data out of our service.” After more than a decade in operation, there have been no major breaches of OneDrive, so the track record does inspire confidence. If absolute privacy for your cloud files is your primary concern rather than convenience and features, check out Proton Drive.
Finally, OneDrive offers the Personal Vault, mentioned above, which requires extra authentication whenever you want to access it.
Microsoft’s cloud solution has come together admirably in OneDrive, combining file syncing with cloud storage. Cross-platform support for Android, iOS, macOS, and Xbox devices is a smart move on Microsoft’s part, too. That’s not to say that there aren’t other great choices out there. Fellow Editors’ Choice winner Google Drive is also an excellent service, especially for those who are committed to Google’s online ecosystem, and for its more generous 15GB free storage. IDrive is another PCMag Editors’ Choice winner for its low price per TB.
OneDrive, however, was the first platform cloud service with on-demand desktop file storage for individuals. Its integration with Microsoft 365 and third-party apps, collaborative document editing, security options, strong photo tools, and wide platform support—including a top-notch web interface and productivity apps—earn the service a five-star rating and an Editors’ Choice award for cloud storage and syncing.
For more on how to get the most out of it, read how to manage, sync, and share files in OneDrive.
PC hardware is nice, but it’s not much use without innovative software. I’ve been reviewing software for PCMag since 2008, and I still get a kick out of seeing what’s new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft win and misstep up to the latest Windows 11.
Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech, and before that I headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team, but I’m happy to be back in the more accessible realm …
PCMag is obsessed with culture and tech, offering smart, spirited coverage of the products and innovations that shape our connected lives and the digital trends that keep us talking.
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