Windows 10, OneDrive Sync: Enabling Broader Ways of Communication

Technology was never easy to predict, and it always surprised people around us with new and innovative ideas. It is full with uncertainties that we are not even able to imagine before they appear on the horizon. Probably, a decade or even earlier, we were devoid of ideas of devices like iPhone, iPad, smartwatches, modern notebooks and ultrabooks. But today they are realities and very successful as well, in appealing to the mass user.

Microsoft and Cloud Storage

Let us take the example of Microsoft's cloud storage service. The cloud storage service of the company didn’t appear just like another place where you can store files over the cloud. Instead, it was conceived as a powerful and probably a complex sync system referred as Live Mesh. It was meticulously conceptualized to deliver an innovative service using which you can copy your files from one PC to another. Moreover, it lets you log in via a remote PC and thus enables you to access files, stored on your home PC.

OneDrive Features

Now, today Microsoft OneDrive has been integrated into the Windows 8.1 OS. This unique technological arrangement enables you to view in Explorer all the files and documents that you have previously selected to sync. You can also to have a look on the whole structure of files stored on the cloud. Irrespective of the fact that you are online or offline, you would be able to see those files along with thumbnails for images and other vital details or data like when the file got created or modified.

It clearly leads to a new arrangement in which in you can conveniently find or browse a file through your folders. Moreover, if you have more details of these files then you can also search for them directly on the cloud. Let us consider another situation of when you are online, you can easily open any file by simply double-clicking as you did earlier. Although, you need to wait for it to get downloaded, but you can still rename those without downloading. The cloud files like other files that you can easily send as an email attachment. You can open it in Paint or compress it as a Zipfile. So these files are treated like any other file.

How Windows and OneDrive Sync Helps

You get more and more storage with Microsoft OneDrive, or you get unlimited storage if you are an Office 365 user. Because of this facility, the amount of space taken by placeholder information can become very important, particularly for smaller devices like tablets are in vogue these days. It might become problematic sometimes as only index, thumbnails and metadata can consume 5-10 percent of the entire file size. You can imagine the situation of a 16GB tablet with an index measuring one terabyte of online files.

Considering this fact, you need to right-click a file, go to details and check which files are synced and which are only online. Microsoft decided that checking placeholder file is the best way out as the problem is caused mainly because of that.

To deal with the whole problem, Microsoft took imitative and started working on developing an entirely new sync engine featuring a newly designed architecture to help you sync more reliably. It was mainly to deal with issues faced by the users of OneDrive for Business, which is without any placeholder feature.

Microsoft implemented the same idea into the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview to deal with the existing situation. The company announced the new sync machine as a way out to fix the issue in which placeholder files were not marked clearly.