Hi all, looking for a bit of advice re cloud storage for tablets.

The missus has an Asus tablet running Windows 8 and needs online/cloud storage for a few GBs of files. She needs cloud storage as the tablet has only 32gb of internal storage, not enough space for all her stuff, given the OS takes up over 12gb.

I had signed her up for Microsoft’s OneDrive thinking it would solve the issue, but it appears that it only syncs between local and cloud, like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive etc. so the files are still using up space on the internal storage.

I could uninstall the OneDrive app from her tablet (and delete the local files), but then she would only have access to her files via a web browser. Viable but not ideal.

Is there a cloud storage service with on-demand access to files, similar to how smartphone cloud storage apps work? Preferrably free, with lots of storage?

dropbox on iOS only hold’s local copies of files that you tell it to.

That’s not my experience with OneDrive, My Phone and Tablet automatically upload photos (but it’ll do other files) to OneDrive, I can then delete them from my devices and they remain in OneDrive – but it doesn’t automatically do that.

jam bo – yeah, Box, Dropbox and Drive all work this way on my smartphone, but Windows 8 tablet tries to keep local copies of files – which is crazy as Windows should know that tablet internal storage is teeny tiny.

P-Jay – she uses Flickr to auto-upload all photos. Do you use it for other files/folders?

Maybe I’ll just buy a massive USB stick and plug it into the side 😕

She has 20Gb of “stuff” on a tablet that she needs live access to? I don’t think I believe you. That’s not a storage issue, it’s a quality control issue; move all the crap off there onto a PC / NAS storage.

Haha Cougar, very good. This is my question; Recommend me a free, high capacity (<20gb), cloud or NAS which syncs across Windows OS and Android. Cheers.

leelovesbikestoo – Member

P-Jay – she uses Flickr to auto-upload all photos. Do you use it for other files/folders?

I don’t at the moment as I don’t really have much to upload – but one drive will take Documents, Music and Pics and Videos.

What are we talking about here data wise, Pics and Vids are usually the bulk of it – if it’s apps/programmes you might his a brick wall.

OneDrive in Windows 8 lets you mark files and folders as ‘online only’ and then they appear in the folder but are literally only online. Well, they take up a few bytes to show a placeholder on the computer but basically they’re not stored locally but look like they are. A great feature.

However Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to cripple this feature for Windows 10. They removed the feature basically. Their excuse was that people were getting on planes and then complaining their files were not on their computer because they’d not marked them for offline use. So instead of sorting it out by making it much clearer and educating those few numpties, they just removed the feature entirely.

So in Windows 10 you now get an option to choose which folders to sync locally, but that’s it. You can still store and access things online only but you have to go to the OneDrive web page to do that.

They got a serious kicking for this during the Win 10 Preview but didn’t change their mind. Though they have said they’ll address it on a later update.

Anyway, has the tablet got an SD slot? If so you can add storage. Problem is OneDrive really doesn’t like working on an SD card. Though there are ways around it. Mind you SD access is very slow. A USB stick could do the same, but again it won’t like working with any removable media basically.

One or two albums and the odd video, photos are auto backed up to Flickr, just documents (Powerpoints, Word docs, spreadsheets etc). Couple of random large files, that’s about it.

Thanks deadkenny, I didn’t know you could do that. That what I’m looking for. It’s not very obvious how you mark them online/offline, but I’ll have a play around later and see if I can get it working. If so, problem solved 🙄

Pretty Sure GoogleDrive will do that for you, 15Gb free. Used to use that to back stuff up from my Mac (by using all my free allowances and spreading it around … before iCloud storage worked right and I paid for 200Gb).

brassneck – nah Drive works like Dropbox: a local copy is synced to the cloud, not moved to the cloud. I use it on my Mac, and it’s a right pain in the a*se. Much prefer Box.

leelovesbikestoo – Member
Thanks deadkenny, I didn’t know you could do that. That what I’m looking for. It’s not very obvious how you mark them online/offline, but I’ll have a play around later and see if I can get it working. If so, problem solved

Right click on a file or folder and there should be an option to make available offline if you want it local or online only to be in the cloud only.

Make sure you’re on Windows 8.1, not 8

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/onedrive-online-available-offline

As I say, if you upgrade to Windows 10, you’ll lose this feature. It’s the worst thing about Windows 10, particularly for tablet users 🙁

brassneck – nah Drive works like Dropbox: a local copy is synced to the cloud, not moved to the cloud. I use it on my Mac, and it’s a right pain in the a*se. Much prefer Box.

This suggests different. You have to explicitly enable sync.

Pretty sure I moved a bunch of stuff there I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep or not, and there is no trace on my hdd. Mac as well. I’ll double check this evening.

Thanks brassneck. The missus has a Drive account, but only for backing up Google account/Android settings stuff. Think I’d rather use OneDrive as she has a Microsoft account and (it pains me to say) OneDrive seems like a better product for her use.

Cool deadkenny, didn’t see that earlier. Will wrestle with it tonight.

One Drive is going to be better integrated for sure if you’re using Windows – I wouldn’t look further than that either if you can make it work as you need.