Moving back from the Cloud

Back in August I mentioned moving my critical files to the cloud so I’d have them available from both home and at work.  At the time I selected OneDrive to be my cloud storage provider, and mapped a network drive on both machines so all of my shortcuts would work.

While it solved the problem of losing a very tiny thumbdrive, it introduced some serious lag to Tasks, my custom-written task management app.  Every time I needed to create a new task, update an existing one, or reprioritize the things on my todo list, there was at least 2-3 seconds (and sometimes a lot more) delay in committing that change to OneDrive.  Very soon after I began using OneDrive like this, I started to think through how I could hide more of this lag in the background of Tasks so it would be less noticeable.

Then last week I started getting permission errors from OneDrive.  After some tinkering, I found that I could no longer even drag files into the drive letter I had mapped, or directly modify files through the drive letter, without it complaining about permission issues.  If I did everything through the browser, it was fine, but not through my drive letter.

I spent a night troubleshooting it, and then I pulled out my old thumbdrive as an interim solution.  I went a week like that, hoping that Microsoft would sort out whatever it was they had changed.  This weekend I retested it, and found it was still misbehaving.  I took another look at using Google Drive, but apparently you need some third-party software to map a drive letter to it, so I abandoned that idea.

That’s when I took a hard look at what I had in the cloud, and found that I either didn’t really need access to those files at work, or came up with alternatives (like the occasional email to myself).

Today was my first day 1) not carrying a thumbdrive, and 2) not relying on the cloud for anything relating to my todo list.  To my surprise, I barely noticed the difference.  I felt just as productive, and no longer experienced any of the lag I was seeing with saving things to OneDrive.  I still use Tasks at home, though, but the files are now stored on my local server, rather than in the cloud, so again – no thumbdrive and no lag.

Am I annoyed with OneDrive for ceasing to work?  A little, but being forced to give it up allowed me to ditch the lag at the same time, so I won’t be annoyed for long.