How does Skydrive on Windows 8 work...?

[chriscookz]

This may seem like a dumb question, but please bear with me. How does Skydrive on Windows 8 work?

My experience with the skydrive client for Windows 7 is that I have a folder on my harddrive called Skydrive, and everything in that folder sync's with the cloud. Is it still this way in Windows 8?

Here is my situation:
I want to buy a new laptop, but most of the laptops I am leaning towards only offer 128GB of SSD storage. That is not enough. After the OS and Apps, I will be lucky to have 30GB-40GB of free space for storage.

Then I thought "Well I could buy the 100GB of Skydrive storage for $50 a year! That seems reasonable, and it will more then double my available storage space!" But if Skydrive works the same in Windows 8 as it does in Windows 7, I can only upload as much to the cloud as I can sync to my desktop. So if I don't have 100GB of free space on my desktop, there's no way to utilize the 100GB of space in the cloud, which eliminates the usefulness of the cloud for me.

This has a huge bearing on what type of laptop I get, whether I get the ultrabook that I really want with an SSD, or am stuck with a more traditional, heavy and slow laptop with a HDD.

Please don't suggest I get an external harddrive. The last thing I want to do with my new ultrabook is carry around an additional harddrive just to access my files.

Thanks for your help explaining this.

 

[Coreldan]

Well, at least on my Skydrive on Windows 8, I have several files in the cloud that I don't have on my desktop. I can also upload to the cloud from any folder. This is with the dont-call-it-Metro built-in Skydrive app, not the desktop version.

Not sure if this helps at all, I'm not totally sure how I could test this for you.

 

[chriscookz]

So on the built in Skydrive app for Metro, it just opens up like any other app and looks like a file browser (maybe a metro-styled Explorer)?

When you want to do something with one of those files, say listen to an mp3 or type on a word document, does it download the file to your computer before you can do that?

It seems like, from your description, that the metro app allows you to see files in your skydrive account without them actually taking up space on your harddrive, which is exactly what I want. But I'm curious how it handles files when you want to USE them for something.

Thanks for the fast reply btw, I wasn't expecting a reply for a couple days with how empty this sub-forum seems to be lol

 

[Coreldan]

As someone with an order going for both Lumia 920, Surface RT all while using Windows 8, I'm currently living on these forums.

Your description above seems to be what I'm experiencing here. I'll see if I can get a song uploaded there elsewhere than from my Win8 and see what happens, I'll get back to you then

 

[HeyCori]

The SkyDrive app that comes bundled with Windows 8 allows you to upload files from any location on your hard drive or from an external hard drive. Upload any files you don't need/want stored locally to SkyDrive.

If they're already on an external HDD then you can upload to SkyDrive straight from there. If they files you want to upload are stored locally then you can upload them to SkyDrive and then delete them afterwards.

The Windows 8 SkyDrive apps works one way. It can upload but doesn't sync with your HDD so if you delete the file from your HDD it doesn't delete from your SkyDrive account.

And if you haven't already, I would still recommend buying an external HDD to backup your files.

 

[Coreldan]

I uploaded the only song I was able to find from my fiancees computer (Gangnam style -_-) to SkyDrive and then open it on my computer.

It seemed to download it off SkyDrive first (didnt seem to stream it, but just fully download it) and then play it. However I tried serching my computer for any traces of the song afterwards but couldn't find it, which makes me believe that when opened like that it just saves it into some temporary cache kind of thing, as when I closed it and opened it from SkyDrive again it opened instantly. EDIT: Yeah, I found it from some temporary cache folder, whatever you want to make out of that.

On my WP7,5 it did just stream it instead of downloading it first.

Should I also try getting the normal desktop Skydrive software?

 

[chriscookz]

It sounds like skydrive will work exactly the way I need it to thanks for all the help!