OneDrive App Reviews

I’ve generally had a great experience with OneDrive, however the current version has been consistently hanging on my two 13-inch MacBook Pros (Early 2015 3.1 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM). I use both a Personal and Business account, so there are two icons in the menu bar (one for each account). The business account appears to be the problematic one as it shows the “sync” version of the icon, but will not open or allow me to quit. Instead, I have to go into Activity Montior and force a quit. In addition, I installed this version of the App Store. When I check for updates in the App Store app, it doesn’t show any update available. However, when I go to this page, it’s prompting me to update - however, it just spins as it apparently tries to update something. From what I can tell, the installed version and this version are the same (0415), so not sure why it’d display “update” vs. “open” like every other app I have. Very frustrating. Hoping Microsoft fixes this soon as I am generally a fan and advocate of OneDrive (and they’re getting harder to find).

Completely freezes up my mac and does not sync. What the hell happened to this app? It used to work really well and now its worthless.

OneDrive continually gets into either “scanning” or “processing” stuck state. Perusing through the Microsoft Forums, the posts are prevalent, but the help is void. Clearly the OneDrive team is still floundering with this app. Wish they’d toss in the hat.

I have been using OneDrive since it was called SkyDrive to sync personal files. With this version, I am also syncing files with OneDrive for Business, and would like to rely on it for work files. However, this version is very unreliable, because it locks up from time to time unpredictably. The clear sign that OneDrive has hung is that, if you move the cursor over the OneDrive icon on the right side of the menu bar, the cursor turns to the rainbow beachball. When OneDrive hangs, the keyboard no longer responds in any application (or the Finder). I can still use the mouse/trackpad and click, but I can’t type anything. It took me a long time to figure out that it was OneDrive that does this, but it is confirmed on a Microsoft support form as an open issue in Office 365. Their suggested work around is to: (1) kill OneDrive in Activity Monitor and (2) remove OneDrive from System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Login Items. In other words, OneDrive is currently completely useless for automatic file sync. Worse, it will make your system unusable. And Microsoft suggests that you disable it. I hope they fix this soon because if/when it works, OneDrive for Business is very useful. Unitl then? Do not install.

This is no longer working on Mac and there is little if any support. I used to love and recommend OneDrive, but this experience has really soured me on it. going to find another alternative.

I can’t use the app because everytime I try to open it I get the rainbow wheel. I can’t even quit the app because it just keeps turning the wheel. What the heck, Microsoft?

You’re out of luck if you need OneDrive for Business and your company uses SharePoint site libraries or on-premises instances of OneDrive. Here’s the response I got from OneDrive support when asking for the previous version that DID support on-premises instances: "Hi, Thank you for contacting us for help on OneDrive. Let me help you out with your questions installing an old version of the Business App. Unfortunately, we would not see a link for an old version of the app to download, as the build will be unreliable on multiple fronts and not supplied to download through Microsoft anymore. Regards OneDrive Team"

Installed this for personal and professional use. For personal use it’s ok. Does the basics of providing a cloud backup. However for Business it falls significantly short of the promise on its website. The collaboration features are non-existant. You can not sync shared folders, which is frankly the cornerstone of collaboration in an a business. In addition, there isn’t an integration into the finder to share files or create shareable links for them - while not an everyday item, it is frankly a time saving feature others provide. Recently, it has even started locking up the keyboard when the syncing gets stuck. The only option is to force quit the apps to get control of your computer again. At the end of the day this should not be marketed to businesses as a collaboration tool, this is simply a cloud based backup. Once they get their act together we’ll revist, but for now very disappointed.

There are huge limitations to this software that neuter its usability. There is a file size limitation of 10GB. In today’s day and age, this is too small. You cannot ‘Share’ stuff via a right click. Google Drive and DropBox are way ahead in this arena. You cannot map your OneDrive to an external drive. This was a capability in the Enterprise version that was removed. So, if you have a 100GB hard drive, and 100GB of contents in your OneDrive, OneDrive will attempt to eat up as much of your HD as possible. Mapping this to an external drive (like an SDCard) makes sense. But you cannot do this. And that last part is not just a ‘feature’ that was left out. There is code in OneDrive that specifically prohibits this. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried mounting my drives in places other than /Volumes. I have even tried setting a normal, default OneDrive location on the HD, letting it initialize/sync, and then moving that folder to an external drive, and putting in a symlink where the original folder existed, linking to the external drive. OneDrive even detects the symlink! They legitimately, deliberately don’t want you to be able to put your files where you want to put your files. The ludicrous thing is that I can park my OneDrive inside of my Google Drive. How dumb is that? I can’t put OneDrive on an external disk, and they wrote code specifically to prohibit this. But they’ll let you map OneDrive to your Google Drive or DropBox. O365 and its offerings, especially from an Enterprise perspective, are limited. If you can, you are best to stay away from them until Microsoft cleans up their act.

I’m forced to use it because my company is pushing it. Pretty basic in functionality. Something broke in the app few days ago. Now I can’t log in because the app thinks I don’t have internet connectivity. I have to either quit the app or try again and end up in a loop. It broke mysteriousl so I am hoping it gets fixed mysteriously.

This app has been broken for several months with constant freezing and lock-ups since their update on April 19th. It’s now almost two monthe later, and we haven’t seen any kind of fix yet. The closest thing we get to an official response is don’t start OneDrive up with your Mac because it won’t work. Unfortunately once again OS X users are not their primary base, so we’re left in the dust even if you’re paying for Office 365 or OneDrive for Business or for other premium storage. Probably best to switch to something else if you can.

As some of the other previous reviewers mentioned, this update essentially does not work. After doing a complete uninstall (removed all application support as well as deleting the app) and reinstalling, it did begin to work again without a problem. When the updates are working correctly, onedrive tends to work well and efficiently across all my devices using my Office365 (business) account, syncing instantly once I leave the application. Usually, a high recommend.

Why would a Microsoft app be making connections to modpim.com or some random AWS S3 site? Did a malware-infested version slip into the App Store? The odd outbound connections initiated by OneDrive.app were detected by the Little Snitch app.

Get your act togther Microsoft! You should be ashamed of yourselves with the amount of resources you have to make software! Isn’t software what you specialize in? I’ve had to delete and re-install One Drive going on 6 times now! Really?! It’s slow and unreliable. - I’m my humble opion.

I have invested much time in getting a cloud based storage solution and started to integrate Onedrive. Big mistake, this software is NOT ready for showtime. Attaching to the server is problamatic. The little download star is going round and round on apple download as you read this. Yesterday hung up on install on Windows 7 machine. Solution, run trace software and give output to service provider and have them debug the reason it is not attaching. Life is too short. Software to me is binary, it either works or doesn’t work. This one doen not. Expected more from Microsoft. I think the root cause of this problem is all the hooks they installed to be sure you pay a monthly fee for their services. Microsoft Id requirements, office ID requirements, package options. Bect of all third party resellers who do not have a clue (go daddy) . One drive business or regular one drive??? E3 E2 E4 . If you have at least one head count for your organization whose job it is is to make office 365 and one drive work as it should then this is for you. I am going back to buying CDs with keys and paying one time fees.

OneDrive works great and fast… Now I can share files with my Windows 10 friends and family.

I found that OneDrive used to work pretty well. I used to be able to put the files in the desktop file and read them on my iPad. But over the past month, it doesn’t sync and now it crashes when I try to open it. I’ve moved all of my files to an external drive (which I had to buy) because I’m afraid of losing them.

I use this app on all my devices, including a couple of virtual machines. All my files are in sync as long as I have a reliable internet connection and the machine allows data transfer when asleep. This is awesome for me as I can save something at the office leave my machine there and continue working on one my home or mobile machines. Likewise when on-location (with internet connection) I can put all my RAW files in the OneDrive folder and they will be saved to the cloud. I don’t worry about something happening to my machine or the SD card. I cannot atest to the issues other people are having. I have not experienced the keyboard lockup, or slow transfers, etc. I simply save, it syncs and done. The one thing I have noticed on OSX is that sometimes the app closes and then I have to reopen it when I notice that it’s not running on the background. Overall I’m pretty happy with it.

My biggest complaint about OneDrive is it’s inability to sync files or folders that have certain characters in the titles. Drag a link from the web and throw it into OneDrive and it won’t sync because of characters that OneDrive can’t handle - then you have to find the character or characters and rename the file. Maybe it’s a Windows issue but it’s a factor that keeps me from using OneDrive more. OneDrive’s best feature is that I can easily access files that it will sync from the browser via Microsoft Office online. That’s a nice feature. I rely mostly on Dropbox because it works far better. Forget Google Drive.

OneDrive simply doesn’t work. It never stops scanning files. Dropbox works seamlessly. When I try to sync the SAME files with OneDrive I get two dozen error messages or more about filenames (they are probably using SharePoint which has notorious filename limitations they’ve NEVER fixed) and WORSE the sync never gets more than 10% of the way through ~100GB of files. What use is 1TB when I can’t get past 10GB??? Microsoft, just when you think they’ve done something right (Office365) you find out they haven’t. That was my earlier review. Now, several months later I’m trying to use it again and once again I find it unusable. CPU usage by OneDrive is always 90-100%. This is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. Dropbox doesn’t do this. Box doesn’t do this. Microsoft, please buy one of these companies (or both) and provide a usable product. OneDrive (and almost certainly OneDrive for Business) should be scraped. It is AWFUL.