Onedrive - so slooooooow?

[Mr Pointy]

I decided to use the Christmas break to tidy up my data storage & as part of this thought I'd use Onedrive to store my project data backups, given that I have 1TB associated with my MS 365 account. I have a Dropbox account as well but of course that costs £96 extra every year for 2TB so I reckoned I could drop that.

I set the upload running - about 66Gb - & left it overnight & it's still only just over half done & is showing upload speeds of 2.1MB/sec maximum, although currently it's sat at zero. I've had a look online for how to resolve this & made sure the network rate is not limited but generally the view is that Onedrive upload speed is rubbish.

I'm on Zen with an upload speed of 17Mb/s so is it a case of Bits & Bytes (17/8=2.1) or is Onedrive just rubbish?

Anyone know if it is reliable once synced as I can almost put up with the slow initial upload as long as it never loses data.

[CharlieCrocodile]

Bits and bytes! It's uploading at your maximum upload rate.

[xeny]

Mr Pointy said:

I'm on Zen with an upload speed of 17Mb/s so is it a case of Bits & Bytes (17/8=2.1) or is Onedrive just rubbish?

Anyone know if it is reliable once synced as I can almost put up with the slow initial upload as long as it never loses data.

I don't see how you can expect it to upload faster than your external connection? If you're doing a long upload that saturates the connection you may want to throttle it during the day to avoid the rest of the house getting fustrated.

I've used it for several years and it has been reliable. To the best of my knowledge, compared to dropbox there are two downsides. It won't do local sync, everything goes up and down, with no direct sync between two hosts on the same LAN and it always syncs all of a file even if only part of it has changed, while dropbox is smart enough to only only update the changed part.

[Mr Pointy]

OK, thanks, if it's reliable I'll persevere. Of course I do have backups on a portable HDD as well so it's not the only "backup".

[bigpriest]

From memory the initial setup, upload and sync of One Drive is quite slow but after that you hardly notice it as it syncs as soon as you make a change to a document. If you have huge files it could be an issue as it will upload the entire file each time there is a change rather than carry out an incremental backup. But it's not designed to be a proper backup solution, it's a sync and store product.

[Captain_Morgan]

Mr Pointy said:

OK, thanks, if it's reliable I'll persevere. Of course I do have backups on a portable HDD as well so it's not the only "backup".

I’ve just migrated ~100Gb from a spideroak cloud to onedrive after using onedrive for another related business for ~3 years. Based on a Mac platform I found the uploads to onedrive could stall & stopping/starting the onedrive process would see a increase in performance. I also found onedrive had a number of file name issues that macOS & spideroak were oblivious to, this also seemed to stall the upload.

Also just for clarity onedrive is not a backup product as many have found out. That said neither is manually copying files to external drives.

[Mr Pointy]

Captain_Morgan said:

Mr Pointy said:

OK, thanks, if it's reliable I'll persevere. Of course I do have backups on a portable HDD as well so it's not the only "backup".

I’ve just migrated ~100Gb from a spideroak cloud to onedrive after using onedrive for another related business for ~3 years. Based on a Mac platform I found the uploads to onedrive could stall & stopping/starting the onedrive process would see a increase in performance. I also found onedrive had a number of file name issues that macOS & spideroak were oblivious to, this also seemed to stall the upload.

Also just for clarity onedrive is not a backup product as many have found out. That said neither is manually copying files to external drives.

I'm getting the same issue as you - the upload stalls for long periods & pausing & then restarting kicks it back into life for a while.

By my calculations 60GB should take about 7.8 hours at 17Mb/s ((60*1000*8)/(17*60*60) whereas it actually took well over 30 hours to actually complete. Even if you allow a 100% factor for checking etc it took more than twice as long as it should - the upload ran over two nights when the PC wasn't doing anything else.

I'll do an upload to Dropbox but I'm not impressed with Onedrive at the moment.

[Matty_]

OneDrive does tend to st itself now and again with large uploads (especially if there are '000s of files) and will need a restart, but once it finishes the bulk it'll be seemless in the background.

Captain_Morgan said:

Also just for clarity onedrive is not a backup product as many have found out. That said neither is manually copying files to external drives.

This is a very important distinction - if your files are important, don't rely on OneDrive/Dropbox or whatever as "backups"

Edited by Matty_ on Wednesday 28th December 12:15