Can someone explain SkyDrive?

[mach1man]

Ok so I'm trying to figure out what SkyDrive is/does. I know I can store documents and photos what about music? Do I have to only use it on WiFi

 

[sportrckr]

Skydrive is basically cloud storage. You can use it to store pretty much anything and the standard storage space that you get for free is pretty decent. This means that you can store documents, photos, zip files, and music to the cloud and have it synced down to whatever device or computer you have attached to Skydrive. For example, on WP8 if you take a photo in the camera app the default behavior is to automatically sync that picture to Skydrive. If you have Skydrive installed on your computer and tied to the same account, that photo will show up in the Skydrive folder on your computer. Same thing with documents you create on the device. As far as music goes, you can sync it but as far as I know right now there is no way to play (stream) the music from Skydrive to your Windows Phone device. Hopefully this will be something that is included in the future, but for right now Skydrive is mainly for storage. One feature that I really like, is that Skydrive also has built in cloud office apps, so if you put a word doc into Skydrive you can open up your browser, go to skydrive and you can open the document and edit it just like you would in word.

In the end Skydrive is just Microsoft's version of cloud storage and is similar to what Google is doing with Drive and what Apple does with iCloud.

Also you don't need to be on wifi to use it, I use mine just fine on cellular. Although if you don't have LTE, you might have better syncing speeds if you're on wifi.

 

[Funky Cricket]

can you have 2 sky drive accounts on one phone?

 

[brmiller1976]

SkyDrive is a giant hard drive in the sky, that you can access anywhere, on any device.

You can typically use only one SkyDrive per Microsoft account, and only one Microsoft account per active phone.

 

[sportrckr]

Like brmiller1976 said, you can only have one SkyDrive account per phone. However I believe it would be possible to log out and back into another SkyDrive account on the phone if you really needed access to both accounts.

 

[jhguth]

WP7 required resetting the phone to change your Microsoft Live account, is WP8 not the same? Regardless, why do you want two skydive accounts, you only need one.

skydrive.live.com btw if you haven't been. You can also download skydive on your computer so all of your pictures show up and you can use that folder to save files and they will automatically be uploaded and accessible to your phone or another computer. If you want you can choose to only sync certain files with certain devices. Office 2013 and OneNote 2013 have skydrive support built in so you can save documents to it seamlessly.

its pretty great, it's a better Google Drive or Dropbox

 

[erzhik]

SkyDrive is a godsend considering it is now on W8 and Xbox. Didn't use SkyDrive at first, but now can't get enough of it. Xbox integrations is amazing. Definitely better than google, dropbox, icloud and others.

 

[gapost]

With the Skydrive app on your computer (I use Win 7), you basically map the Skydrive cloud folder to your computer and all your Windows devices. For example, I have spreadsheets and docs that I use on my work computer, and also want them on my WP. So, I open and change the documents on \\skydrive\documents and it runs on my local computer, but syncs to my Skydrive account. It works great.

 

[a5cent]

SkyDrive is a giant hard drive in the sky, that you can access anywhere, on any device.

You can typically use only one SkyDrive per Microsoft account, and only one Microsoft account per active phone.

A WP device is linked to ONE main Microsoft account. That account determines things like the services you can legally use in your country and credit card billing. However, you can sync with any number of other Microsoft accounts. I wasn't willing to accept only getting some of Microsoft's services, so I added a placebo U.S. account as my main account and deactivated all syncing for it. My second Microsoft account is what my device syncs with.

Regardless, why do you want two skydive accounts, you only need one.

Example given above.

 

[mach1man]

Ok thanks guys for the help. It seems like its a great idea but if I can't stream music from sky drive then its not quite ready for me yet LOL

 

[sportrckr]

It may be that SkyDrive doesn't currently support streaming from the cloud, but it looks like Microsoft might be planning on adding it in the future which would make sense given the competition: SkyDrive.com coding reveals possible cloud music player | Windows Phone Central.

After doing some quick searching it does look like there are some ways to get that music out of SkyDrive to your mobile device for a pseudo-cloud streaming service as shown with this app: SkyDrive Player - not great, but not bad either | Windows Phone Central