Onedrive on Mac: do other cloud storage solutions have Windows filename prohibitions?

[eclipse]

Attention Mac users: if you end up getting Microsoft Office 365 for Mac and want to use the 1 terrabyte online / cloud backup of all your stuff:
1. FILENAME LIMITS: make sure your files are compatible with Windows file name restrictions.
Don't include: " * : < > ? / \ |
So I recommend dragging smaller folders without too many files across bit by bit, rather than a whole hard drive full of stuff across. It will do error reporting for you of all you Mac-formatted files that might be named wrong.

But it makes me wonder, do other online cloud storage solutions have the same syncing problems and filename sensitivities? I kind of have to use Microsoft Office, and am happy to use a 1 TB online backup as well. But maybe one day I'll break free of Office 365, and it would be good to be forewarned....

2. FILESIZE LIMITS: 15Gigs is the limit of each individual file being uploaded. That's great for office workers, but not so good if you're into huge family movies. If doing higher resolution movies it means organising all your clips into maybe 10 minute chunks and uploaded them one by one, and recompiling into the one half-hour family movie later on.

3. HOME FOLDER ISSUES: Your Home Folders like "Documents" and "Movies" etc doesn't sync properly yet. Remove those from your sidebar, and create your own folder names in the Onedrive folder on your computer. Then drag these new Onedrive compatible "Documents" or "Movies" folders into your sidebar and you're done! Although I suggest calling the folders something different, like "Family movies" or "Admin" or something that instantly shows you you've filed something in the wrong place. You don't want to think important work is safe and secure on the cloud, only to find in an emergency that it really isn't!

Indeed, to avoid confusion does that mean actually DELETING the Home folders called "Documents" and "Movies" folders so you don't file something there and find later on it wasn't backed up to the cloud?

Any Mac experts know if that will create other problems down the track?
https://support.office.com/en-gb/ar...arepoint-64883a5d-228e-48f5-b3d2-eb39e07630fa

 

[Shirasaki]

While I agree with file name limits, I think OneDrive will check compatibility during upload and notify errors on the way. At least that’s what OneDrive for business does.

Regarding file size limits, back in old days when OneDrive gave user unlimited storage to promote their online storage service, a couple users tried to exploit it by backing up hundreds of GB or even multiple TB of family videos to OneDrive, eventually making Microsoft very unhappy. Microsoft then punished those users and reduced cloud storage to 7GB for free user. My account got a few promotional offer that gave me 40GB space for free, back when OneDrive was called SkyDrive.

With that being said, I believe this 15GB limit is to prevent people from backing up huge files to the cloud, though I don’t think this makes too much sense nowadays. Anyway, other than splitting a whole video into multiple chunks, you can create archive chunks using WinRAR or 7-zip. That way, you can add password to protect your video or add recovery record to protect data from a failed download.

Regarding your home folder issue, I am not quite sure what’s your use case so I don’t comment.

 

[chown33]

You can avoid filename and file-size limits by making a sparse-bundle disk image in Disk Utility, and storing that on OneDrive. You'd then put all the files onto the disk image.

This works because a sparse-bundle keeps 8MB "bands" files, which are only named with safe filenames. Since none of the bands is ever greater than 8MB, you also won't ever hit the file-size limit. There can be many, many bands files, so make sure OneDrive doesn't have a limit on the number of files in a directory.

I realize it's an extra step to work from a disk image, but if the alternative is to manually split large movies, or to manually go through and rename what may be 100's or 1000's of files, I think a sparse-bundle is a simple and reliable one-step solution.

Also note that a sparse-bundle can be initially created with a size that's many 100's of GB, yet it will only occupy as much space on disk as is needed to store the actual files on the sparse-bundle, plus the initial directory-creation overhead. For example, if you create a sparse-bundle with a size of 750 GB, its initial size on the disk is around 650 MB, which is under 0.1% of its total size.