Microsoft OneDrive

[SteveRhyne2]

I'm looking for some feedback on a scenario. I've encountered GIS users using DropBox as a means to manage their GIS files to make them shareable with other users and to improve data access efficiency. How DropBox works is when you point to a file location on a server, it uploads the files to your local drive under the DropBox folder. ArcMAP works more efficient accessing data locally versus having to VPN into the server which is very slow. At the end of the project it requires someone to manually update the server files. This process concerns me. The new scenario is to end using DropBox and go to Microsoft OneDrive which I think has similar functionality as DropBox, but I'm not 100% sure. My question is anyone using Microsoft OneDrive with your GIS files to manage data? If so, how are you using it? I also would like to hear from others why this may be a bad idea too.

Thanks for your feedback. 

[NorthPark]

Let me know if you want any help setting up robocopy scripts.

[RandyKreuziger]

Steve,

  Can you share what you'll learned?  It's been a year since your last post, have you gotten ArcGIS working with OneDrive?

Thanks,

  Randy

[SteveRhyne2]

Hi Randy,

We are not using OneDrive with ArcGIS. We have users that are testing virtual machines and WorkSpot as a potential solution. I'm not sure what the performance has been so far. We are suppose meet soon and see what the results are.

Thanks for checking.

Steve.

[RicLawson]

Actually, microsoft has built-in syncronization between a local user address and a cloud (OneDrive or Sharepoint) location. Changes are automatically synced and files can be kept locally or just on the cloud location. We recently moved everything from a on-premise server to this type of cloud structure, and hope to retire the server (and its maintenance issues and costs). I'm not fully sure we will use this method permanently or not (which is why we are keeping everything synced with the server for now), but it seems to work on our early tests. It can take a bit of time to download data needed for a new map/project, but once it's set it works locally, so faster than when we were on the server. Also makes the project more portable.

My main concern is concurrent editing. We have not tested this yet. Not sure how ArcGis and OneDrive sync will function together. I'll post an update when we get a chance to test.

As a small, non-profit with no SQL database pro, we don't want to go the enterprise route. 

Curious what others think of this approach.

[RandyKreuziger]

I have been testing OneDrive with ArcCatalog / ArcMap for two weeks and I'm sorry to report that I've find it unusable when mapping it as a drive letter even with the data set to "always keep on this device."  For some reason there is a lot of chatter with OneDrive running AC/AM that I don't see when it isn't mapped as a drive letter.  According to our network staff they haven't setup any restrictions or changes to our OneDrive (for Business) that we get from the Washington state Technology Solutions (WaTech).

Opening and viewing a single large 2.5GB raster (USGS 100K Topo raster in File Geodatabase)

Unmapped       Mapped As A Drive

  6 Seconds      Cancelled after 8 minutes

Opening an MXD containing a single polygon layer of Washington state city limits

Relative Pathing     Mapped As A Drive

  4 Seconds            2 minutes 45 seconds