Forum Discussion
Using OneDrive for a team of creatives – central storage rather than individual owners
Hi all, I've recently joined a new organisation as a digital design lead. My team of designers and video editors are spread across two different cities, so we need a cloud-based file storage system that we can access from anywhere.
Historically the organisation has used OneDrive for file storage and sharing, but have encountered the following issues:
1. Due to files being owned by individual team members, the only way to access another person's work is by them sharing the folder with you. This leads to a chaotic jumble of folders in the "Shared with Me" tab, rather than one central location for everything (as you would have if using a local server). It also leads to access issues when staff are away sick or leave the organisation.
2. Downloading large folders (e.g. working files for video editing projects) is sometimes problematic. I have yet to test whether this applies to syncing, or just to downloading from the browser.
What I would like to have is something akin to a local server, where files are stored together and owned by the team rather than by individuals. Team members should be able to access all areas easily and quickly, although they might only sync their own current projects to their computer. This also needs to be able to support very large file sizes, not just as an archive but for daily work.
Two questions:
1. How do I create this shared location, not owned by an individual but by a team?
2. Is OneDrive the best fit for dealing with massive files to be accessed remotely for daily work?
Note: our organisation also uses SharePoint and Teams if that's relevant.
dz1na A Teams/SharePoint approach is much more appropriate to a group of people. OneDrive is designed for a single user.
You have a choice of using the SharePoint storage built into Teams, or having a separately administered SharePoint site which is linked to your Team. You can have multiple Teams linked to external SharePoints.
SharePoint folders (document libraries) may be synced to your local computer just like OneDrive folders. You also get extra flexibility to split up files into different document libraries with different permission sets, including say the ability to make some files read-only to specific audiences.
What do you mean by "massive files"? SharePoint/OneDrive supports files up to 100GB but the suitability depends on how you work with those files.
dz1na A Teams/SharePoint approach is much more appropriate to a group of people. OneDrive is designed for a single user.
You have a choice of using the SharePoint storage built into Teams, or having a separately administered SharePoint site which is linked to your Team. You can have multiple Teams linked to external SharePoints.
SharePoint folders (document libraries) may be synced to your local computer just like OneDrive folders. You also get extra flexibility to split up files into different document libraries with different permission sets, including say the ability to make some files read-only to specific audiences.
What do you mean by "massive files"? SharePoint/OneDrive supports files up to 100GB but the suitability depends on how you work with those files.
Mike Williams Thanks for your reply. For the purposes of saving local hard disk space, will team members be able to selectively sync specific folders, but also access the other folders when needed? How much lag should I expect when accessing un-synced files?
The specific problem I have encountered with downloading large folders (not syncing – couldn't actually get that to work at the time, which is why I had to download) is that the zip folder would download but when clicked would say it was empty. In the end I had to download the contents of the folder in many small batches to get it to work. Took me 3 days of attempts.
In terms of how the files will be used, in an ideal world I would have my team working directly from the files stored on OneDrive, via local syncing. Is this suitable? Or would they need to work locally and then upload? Speed is critical – we cannot have design or video files lagging while working on them.
dz1na SharePoint sync works through the OneDrive sync client, so you shouldn't see any performance difference, other things being equal. Performance is going to be largely due to your internet speeds and local client machine capability.
"in an ideal world I would have my team working directly from the files stored on OneDrive, via local syncing. Is this suitable? Or would they need to work locally and then upload? Speed is critical – we cannot have design or video files lagging while working on them. "
Again, having multiple people working from a single OneDrive account is NOT desirable for all sorts of administrative reasons. Working from local sync files should be fine if your network performance is adequate, but it will depend a bit on the nature of the files you're working with. It's up to you to test that this will meet your requirements.
