Authors: Mike Halsey (MVP)

Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips

Microsoft’s SkyDrive service has been with us for some time now and it’s been tweaked here and there, and integrated with Hotmail, Live Mesh and the company’s Office Web Apps.  As a technology though it’s still fairly immature.  Part of the reason for this is that Microsoft are currently unwilling to open up the entire storage space to people for free via Live Mesh, so that entire documents, pictures and music libraries can be stored and backed up in the cloud for free.  The reason that Live Mesh can only use 5Gb of the 25Gb on offer is because once files are uploaded to the cloud Microsoft will have to maintain theme there, even if people never access them again.  Many people would try the service out and then decide not to use it any more, this is perfectly normal and a scenario that every cloud services company faces.  With Microsoft’s enormous user-base however the problem would be tens if not hundreds times worse than it is for Dropbox or Mozy.

SkyDrive remains a fairly limited service however as, while Microsoft will be building Live Mesh support into Windows 8, they won’t be giving people more storage space than the 5Gb already available.  For access to the remaining 20Gb of free space users will still need to go to the clunky SkyDrive web interface and drop individual files in one at a time; this is hardly an incentive to use the service and perhaps this is the entire point.

But what other uses could this 20Gb of free space be put to?  Anybody who has used the Outlook Connector to synchronise their Hotmail account with the desktop software will know that it can take many hours for the software to synchronise fully.  The problem is caused by ever-expanding volumes of sent and received email and the addition of ever-larger attachments.  I believe that Hotmail should have a switch that will automatically archive all email attachments for messages older than, say, six months into SkyDrive, replacing them in the email with a link to the file.  Not only would this give people a central location for all attachments; sorted automatically into folders perhaps named after the sender, but it will prevent an already frustrating problem from getting any worse in the future.

The concept of automatic backup isn’t a bad one at all, and it’s a concept that Microsoft really should take on board properly.  Why offer up to 25Gb of free storage if you’re not going to allow people to use it?  I can’t synchronise my own files with SkyDrive as I have more than 5Gb in my documents library alone.  Many people would be prepared to pay for storage over the 25Gb and this is a business model that is already proving commercially successful.  Introducing this properly with an edition of Windows would give people considerably more peace of mind; those people that trust their data to cloud-based datacentres anyway.

It really is time now for SkyDrive to reach maturity and for users to be able to use it in a truly meaningful way.  The argument that Microsoft would just have to maintain unaccessed data in perpetuity simply isn’t good enough.  Microsoft set this system up in the first place, now they need to accept responsibility for that decision.

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