Forum Discussion
Using OneDrive for a team of creatives – central storage rather than individual owners
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.
Mike Williams Sorry I may have used the wrong terminology – I meant if we were to use your suggested SharePoint solution, but synced via the OneDrive desktop client.
I definitely want multiple people working from one shared location, this is big for us as we are trying to encourage collaboration and consistency, and tidy up a lot of chaos caused by individual people sharing individual folders without any clear view of the entire team's work. If Microsoft can't offer that solution I will need to look at alternatives; that's why I'm asking these questions.
Types of files we will be using: Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and other creative software files, as well as your typical Word docs, spreadsheets etc. The design files are typically collected into a folder containing multiple versions of the working file (v1, v2 etc), any assets linked into the working file (JPGs, MP4s etc – often numerous), and exported final files (high-res PDFs or MP4s. Generally a user would need the entire folder, which might be several GB. I also have roughly a TB of archived files that currently exist on hard drives and need to be migrated to the cloud to make them accessible across locations.
