In short: slow as hell and totally unreliable.
I use SkyDrive just as a backup tool. I happen to have 25 GB for free (I don’t remember why), so I installed it on this very webserver and scheduled a script to dump relevant data to the SkyDrive folder for backup purposes.
The script works well – it’s the same I’ve used for years to backup via FTP, but I figured that an automatic sync tool would be better. All it does is xcopying data to a temporary location, compress it with 7zip, and then move the zip file to the SkyDrive folder.
On the server, it happened not once but twice that SkyDrive simply stopped responding – and thus syncing. I had to kill it. The first time, it recovered cleanly. The second time, for reason unknown, it decided to resync everything, deleting 3GB worth of data in the process. It’s just backup, so it was not a big deal, and I was able to recover the files via SkyDrive’s recycle bin, but still it’s not a reassuring experience.
On my desktop PC, a few days ago it happened that, out of the blue, SkyDrive showed a message that read something like “Cannot access E:\SkyDrive”, which is my local sync folder. I clicked one of the two buttons provided, honestly I don’t remember which one, assuming it would just quit or stop syncing for a while. Instead, it logged out, so basically it had to redownload 10 GB from the Internet at stone age speeds.
Now, I don’t keep my PC on all the time, so today I went to see the progress – which is not reported in any way – and double-clicked on the tray icon. The animated icon froze for a few minutes. Now it’s not responding, and all it does is showing this blank thing:
In Windows Explorer, all SkyDrive files and folders are marked with the little blue syncing icon, meaning (I believe) that SkyDrive is resyncing everything. Task Manager shows this:
I mean, 1.5 GB of used RAM and 545 threads? I suspect it’s not normal. Moreover, right-clicking on the tray icon shows an empty context menu. Unfortunately PRT SCR doesn’t work, otherwise I’d provide another screenshot, but trust me, it’s hilarious.
I’m tempted to kill the process, but I’m afraid that it could wipe my data out upon restarting. Perhaps I can just kill it, and reinstall from scratch.
Summing it up, just use Dropbox (referral link). It’s fast, rock solid and reliable.