Microsoft SkyDrive is a cloud-based storage service, and I’m using it right now to write this chapter. Where are chapter files that I’ve put so many hours of work into? I don’t know, but I do know I moved between my desktop, my ultrabook, my tablet, and my phone without ever copying a file between them. When it was time to send the file to my editor, I tapped the Share charm and it was sent in seconds, without the usual bulky file attachments.
SkyDrive is more than just magical file synchronization. SkyDrive provides continuous, off-site backups for your files and data anytime you have Internet access. While making your own backups is still a good idea, you’ll probably never need them. SkyDrive also creates a version history, allowing you to go back in time to an earlier version of a document. If you accidentally delete a chapter from your novel and save the file, SkyDrive can rescue the lost chapter.
How integrated is SkyDrive into Windows 8.1? Well, there’s no touch-friendly app for accessing files on your hard drive, but there is a touch-friendly app for accessing SkyDrive. And, for the way people use mobile PCs, SkyDrive is a much better choice than your local drive. In fact, SkyDrive is a better choice than your local drive for just about anything.
In summary: store all your files in SkyDrive, and stop using your C drive.
SkyDrive is a cloud storage service, similar in many ways to Dropbox, Google Drive, and Apple iCloud. SkyDrive stores your files on servers connected to the Internet, allowing you to view and edit your files from anywhere with an Internet connection, on just about any device that can connect to the Internet. You can use the optional SkyDrive desktop app to synchronize your SkyDrive files with your PC’s hard drive, allowing you to work with files when you’re offline.
Figure 13-1 illustrates this relationship.
Figure 13-1. SkyDrive apps for Windows Phone, iOS, and Windows 8.1 provide direct access to SkyDrive files, and the SkyDrive desktop app synchronizes files with the local PC.
Once you use SkyDrive for a month, you’ll be amazed that you ever lived without it. You never have to manually copy files between your desktop and laptop. Every file on your PC is accessible from your phone. And if you use SkyDrive for everything, you might never need to worry about backing up your files.
Note
Using the SkyDrive app Watch the video at http://aka.ms/WinIO/skydriveapp.
The SkyDrive app’s controls are similar to the other Windows 8.1 apps, including Photos, Video, and Music. Swipe left and right to browse, and click the arrow in the upper-left corner to go back one page.
Swipe up from the bottom or right-click anywhere to use the commands:
Figure 13-2 shows the SkyDrive app with several files selected and the commands visible.
The SkyDrive app provides a convenient way to browse your files, but browsing your files is a very Windows 7 kind of way to think. A more Windows 8.1 approach is to start with your app. For example, if you want to browse your pictures, launch the Photos app. From within Photos, you can access your SkyDrive folder. Many apps provide direct access to SkyDrive, so you won’t have to use the SkyDrive app regularly.
When you use SkyDrive from Windows 8.1, your files stay in the cloud. You can manually copy individual files to your local PC, but Windows 8.1 never synchronizes files to or from SkyDrive. This eliminates versioning conflicts that occur with synchronization, and it overcomes the limited storage of many mobile PCs. If you want file synchronization (and your PC has the local storage for it), install the SkyDrive desktop app, described later in this chapter.
If you open a Microsoft Office document from SkyDrive, SkyDrive opens it using Internet Explorer and the free web viewer. You can use the Office web app to edit files, too, and if you have Office installed on your PC, you can edit the files directly in the Office apps.
You can share your files directly from SkyDrive without copying them to your local PC; simply open the file or folder in SkyDrive and select the Share charm. SkyDrive will share a link to the online files. Not only is this more efficient than copying files and creating an email attachment, but it allows the recipient to receive changes you make after you share the files.
You can install the SkyDrive app on your Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad, or Android. Additionally, third-party developers have created apps for other platforms. Microsoft lists some recommended apps at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/download#apps. If there isn’t a SkyDrive app for your mobile device, just use your browser to visit the http://www.skydrive.com website.
The mobile apps work great. Figure 13-3 shows the app running on an iPhone. The app can natively display most common file types, including text files, images, and Office documents.
The SkyDrive app can’t edit files directly, but it can move files, rename them, and open files in other apps that you might have installed. To edit a file, open it, select the Forward link in the lower-right corner, and then select Open In Another App. You can use the same technique to rename files.
Be aware of fees your carrier might charge you for accessing data, especially when opening large files. Particularly when travelling to other countries/regions (when roaming charges can be very high), you might save yourself money by waiting until you have access to Wi-Fi to open large files from SkyDrive. Or, plan ahead and copy the files to your mobile device before leaving home.
SkyDrive has specialized apps for many different devices, and those apps will always give you the best experience. If you’re on a PC, Mac, or mobile device that doesn’t have the SkyDrive app installed, you can access SkyDrive from almost any browser.
In other words, if you’re an iPhone user, you should install the SkyDrive app on your iPhone and use that. If you want to quickly show a friend a file using the friend’s tablet, there’s no need to install an app; just open the browser, visit https://skydrive.com, and log in.
When you log in to SkyDrive from a browser, you can view most file types directly within your browser. If you’re on a PC or Mac, SkyDrive will even let you edit Office documents without having Office installed, as shown in Figure 13-4. The web apps aren’t as full-featured as the desktop Office apps that you buy, but they’re useful, free, and work with many web clients.
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Using the SkyDrive website Watch the video at http://aka.ms/WinIO/skydriveweb.
You can’t edit Office documents directly from SkyDrive mobile apps. However, you can view your Office documents and open them in a different app for editing.
The SkyDrive website has several features that you can access by right-clicking files:
Share. Send your files in email or post them to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and other services you might add. Your friends won’t even need to log in to access them, though you can require them to log in if you want to. You can even allow recipients to edit your documents.
Embed. Generates HTML code that you can add to a webpage using an iframe. This is perfect for web designers and bloggers who want to share a file. Embedding is better than simply copying the content into your webpage because any updates you make to the file are immediately reflected on your webpage, no matter which PC or mobile device you use to edit the file. Here’s a sample of the HTML code:
<iframe src="https://skydrive.live.com/embed?cid=D465B387E587EF71&resid= D465B387E587EF71%215415&authkey=ALYzTme1wUa3iUE" width="98" height="120" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
Version history. Retrieve earlier versions of a file that you have saved over. This lets you recover parts of a document that you might have changed or deleted.
Download. Copy the file to your local PC. Any changes you make to the copy won’t be reflected in SkyDrive, however.
While it’s easier to use the SkyDrive desktop app (described in the next section) to add files to SkyDrive, you can also drag files from File Explorer to SkyDrive in your browser. SkyDrive uploads the files and allows you to monitor the progress. The upload tool even gives you an option to automatically resize your pictures to speed up viewing time later.
SkyDrive integrates itself into File Explorer by adding the SkyDrive item between your Favorites and your PC. You can work with files and folders on SkyDrive exactly as you would locally stored files and folders, except that files will take a few moments to download when you open them.
To keep a local copy of a file or folder automatically synchronized, right-click it and then click Make Available Offline. To disable local caching, right-click a file or folder and then select Make Available Online-Only. To synchronize all your files, open the SkyDrive app, select the Settings charm, select Options, and then select Access All Files Offline.
You can control whether SkyDrive synchronizes over metered connections by opening PC Settings, SkyDrive, and then Metered Connections. To change the quality of pictures that are synchronized and whether videos are automatically synchronized, select PC Settings, SkyDrive, and then Camera Roll.
SkyDrive is designed to have very little impact on your PC’s performance. It requires very little memory, and it uses very little processor time even when it’s synchronizing files. Basically, SkyDrive won’t slow down your PC.
Figure 13-5 shows the Performance Monitor analysis of SkyDrive’s processor utilization during a very large synchronization. As you can see, the average processor utilization is less than 3 percent, and the peak processor utilization during a 1-second period is only 15.4 percent
As discussed earlier, SkyDrive’s lazy synchronization can lead to versioning conflicts in which a single file is updated in two different locations. Resolving these conflicts really requires human levels of intelligence; SkyDrive can’t determine how to merge two different files possibly updated by different people. So, it’s up to you to resolve the conflict, but SkyDrive makes it as simple as possible.
If SkyDrive detects a versioning conflict, it uses the most recently updated version of the file. Imagine you are editing a text file on both your desktop and your laptop:
On your desktop (with the clever PC name “mydesktop”), you save diary.txt to your SkyDrive folder with one line, “Dear diary,” and SkyDrive synchronizes the update with the cloud.
Later, still on your desktop, you add a second line to the diary.txt file, “I feel like I’m never in one place long enough to complete a thought.” You immediately shut down your desktop, before SkyDrive can synchronize the changes.
That evening on your laptop, you open diary.txt from your SkyDrive folder and discover that it reads only, “Dear diary,” The second line isn’t there because the change wasn’t synchronized. So, you edit diary.txt and add the line, “I might be losing my mind. I swear I already started this entry.” SkyDrive synchronizes the changes.
The next day, you start your desktop and let it run long enough for SkyDrive to synchronize the changes. You go to open your diary.txt file and discover there are two files in the folder: diary.txt and diary-mydesktop.txt.
In this scenario, diary.txt would read:
Dear diary, I might be losing my mind. I swear I already started this entry.
And diary-mydesktop.txt would read:
Dear diary, I feel like I'm never in one place long enough to complete a thought.
As you can see, SkyDrive didn’t throw out any useful data. When the desktop PC synched with SkyDrive, SkyDrive discovered there was a newer version of the same file in the cloud. So, it left the newer version named diary.txt and renamed the older version on the desktop to <filename>-<PCname>.<extension>.
Now it’s up to you to merge the changes. The best way to do that depends on the file type and app. For most files, you’ll simply need to examine the two files and copy any changes from the renamed file into the master file.
Some apps, however, support merging changes. Most notably, Microsoft Office apps can examine two versions of a file and intelligently merge changes. For example, in Microsoft Word 2010, on the Review tab, click Compare and then click Combine to merge two versions of a single document.
In theory, you’ll just store all your files on SkyDrive, and SkyDrive will automatically synchronize the files you choose for offline use. In practice, many people will move some of their files over to SkyDrive while leaving many more stored on their local PC. Then, they’ll get used to having their files accessible from anywhere and realize when they’re away from home that they didn’t move over an important file.
Not to worry. SkyDrive can give you access to files stored only on your PCs as long as you enable the option, your PC has access to the Internet, your PC is turned on, and you are logged on. Figure 13-6 shows the website’s interface for accessing files on remote PCs that are not stored in the cloud.
If you think you might want to use this feature, adjust the power settings on the PC that you plan to access so that it does not automatically go into Sleep mode. On laptop PCs, this might also require you to change what happens when you close the lid.
Figure 13-6. With your permission, you can access files stored on online PCs even if the files aren’t in the cloud.
Enable the option by right-clicking the SkyDrive icon in the system tray and then clicking Settings. Then, select the Make Files On This PC Available To Me On My Other Devices check box as shown in Figure 13-7.
If you often have multiple people working on a single document, look into Office 365 (http://www.microsoft.com/office365). Office 365 supports online collaboration using the Office web apps, so two people can edit a document simultaneously in their browser. You have to pay for the service, but if you frequently collaborate online, it’s worth it.
SkyDrive does allow two or more people to edit the same documents online with the free Word Web App. However, it doesn’t allow for simultaneous changes. Instead, you must refresh the document to see other users’ changes. If two users update the same version of a document in different locations, the second user will receive the message shown in Figure 13-8.
Figure 13-8. SkyDrive allows multiple users to edit a single document, but you should avoid it because only one user’s changes are saved.
Though it might not happen instantly, eventually SkyDrive will notify you that another user is editing the document with a message such as “Tony Northrup is editing this document.” If the other user saves changes before you, you’ll also receive the message, “This document has been updated by another author. Click Save to refresh this document.” To see other users who are editing the same document, select the View tab and then click the Other Authors button, as shown in Figure 13-9.
Figure 13-9. SkyDrive shows you other authors editing a document (even if it’s you in another location because you forgot to close the window).
If you want multiple users to be able to edit the same document simultaneously, you’ll need to purchase either Office 2010 or Office 365. Office 2010 is the traditional desktop apps, whereas Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud-based application service. Whichever you use, you’ll be able to see other users’ changes appear on your screen each time you save your file.
Figure 13-10 demonstrates the Word 2010 update notification: a bracket with a refresh symbol appears when an update is available on the server. Changes don’t appear until you save your file. Once you save your file, changes made by other users appear highlighted in green. You can view a list of other users editing the same file by clicking the authors icon in the lower-left corner of the status bar.
Figure 13-10. The desktop version of Word 2010 notifies you when other users have edited a file and automatically merges those changes.
The Office 2010 desktop collaboration features work only when you open files from your web browser, which must be Internet Explorer. If you open a document from File Explorer (for example, by browsing to the C:Users<username>SkyDrive folder), the online collaboration features don’t work. Instead, SkyDrive will rename your file for you when it detects conflicts, as described in Handling versioning conflicts earlier in this chapter.
Office also allows you to go back in time to earlier versions of a file, just in case a coworker or a friend destroys an important part of your document. From Word 2010, select the File tab, select Info, and then use the Versions list to view earlier versions of a file.