All drives in one Drive/Sharepoint/Teams no on site storage ?

[JamesParker]

HI All

 

Can anyone tell me if they have gone down the route of transferring all their drives in to the cloud with one drive/share point/Teams and if so what issues have you had if any ?

 

i can see this working well in a small primary but not sure if it would work for a large secondary school!

 

the benefits would be no on site storage to worry about or backups but would it work in reality !

 

thanks

James

 

sorry if this is in the wrong forum

[Danp]

I was in the process of doing this in my last school, started this time last year and had got about 60% through by the end of Summer this year. The last 40% were not day to day subject areas so needed a bit more planning about what to do with them.

 

In my current job (Prep School, started last week) all their drives are cloud (Google), we have no local shares.

[Sonic007]

Th main issue with any of these is making sure they have good backup options.

[supportman]

Yep working our way towards it. whole School Shared drive has been on Sharepoint for a while now, no real issues.

 

Moving staff to onedrive one by one, seems to work so far. We use the client on windows 10 so it looks the same as their old personal drives we used to map.

[JamesParker]

is that all drives not just local users home drives ?

 

I'm talking about general shares for staff, teaches students etc as well so as we would have no on-site storage

we have a media drive that has around 2TB of videos so this may be an issue

[Katy]

We moved everything a couple of years ago. Started with "My Documents" moving to OneDrive (with the sync client/files on demand running so they can still access it via File Explorer). Then we moved the shared drives to Teams/Sharepoint - pupil drive went to one massive Sharepoint site, staff site was split into departments and then went to separate Teams. No more mapped drives.

 

It takes some organising but people get used to it. The fact we did this over a year before lockdown, and then everyone teaching from home during lockdown where they find all their resources are accessible (as they are on Teams/OneDrive), has helped a lot with the people who were trying to resist.

 

We stuck our 6TB video and photos drive into its own Sharepoint site and they just access that in the browser.

 

We've retained a little bit of on site storage for Art and Design - for them to store large files whilst working on them (i.e. videos and photos), rather than expecting Photoshop etc to constantly be writing large files to OneDrive without anywhere local to work on them, but this "isn't backed up" (it is, but they are told it isn't backed up to discourage them using it as actual file storage).

 

Years R-3 still have "local storage" instead of OneDrive as we don't give them Office 365 until Year 4, however that's just mapped over the VPN to a disk on an Azure VM.

[paulkerton]

Th main issue with any of these is making sure they have good backup options.

Is it?

Or is it about learning to work with new ways of working, that don't necessarily need backups anymore?

[TechMonkey]

Yep, we are nearly there. Personal drives to OneDrive was the first thing we did. General Staff area was meant to be completed by last Summer but with COVID getting in the way I'm not going to get rid of it just yet. The local shared area is Read-only so no one can add to it.

Finance team were the slowest to do any thing but COVID helped as they realised it was a real pain to access their departmental documents compared to their personal documents.

 

The only local drives we have left are a mail merge dump area, as Office doesn't like doing merges from Sharepoint or OneDrive, a few IT ones for Applications and tools, and our Media drives.

[Sonic007]

Is it?

Or is it about learning to work with new ways of working, that don't necessarily need backups anymore?

 

 

I've seen many users share files with others via Drive or other services and then someone overwrites the file or something gets deleted.

Or if a user is deleted and work is shared with someone else then they suddenly cant find the work anymore.

 

In an ideal world users should be careful and know what they are doing but they dont.

[Katy]

I've seen many users share files with others via Drive or other services and then someone overwrites the file or something gets deleted.

Or if a user is deleted and work is shared with someone else then they suddenly cant find the work anymore.

 

In an ideal world users should be careful and know what they are doing but they dont.

 

With 365 you can change the default retention policies to keep deleted data for as long as you want, and for general user foolishness the recycle bin (and 2nd stage recycle bin) are quite good.

[TechMonkey]

I've seen many users share files with others via Drive or other services and then someone overwrites the file or something gets deleted.

Or if a user is deleted and work is shared with someone else then they suddenly cant find the work anymore.

 

In an ideal world users should be careful and know what they are doing but they dont.

 

We have hammered it into users that their OneDrives are not for sharing work that is 'live', but letting others look or collaborate, with exactly your examples as reasons. Sharepoint is where live work is placed and if you want to update you take a copy and work on it elsewhere first.

[dhicks]

we have a media drive that has around 2TB of videos so this may be an issue

 

Our media drive is around 3.5TB and was the first thing we moved to be Google Drive only, it doesn't seem to have been an issue. We sync the files from Google Drive to a local server for backup as we had the hardware available, but at some point that will probably move to a cloud-based backup solution of some sort.

[maxrebo]

Could someone point me in the direction of how to map a Onedrive account in explorer?

Is this possible or do you just link it through the OD client?

[Katy]

Could someone point me in the direction of how to map a Onedrive account in explorer?

Is this possible or do you just link it through the OD client?

 

You can do it with the onedrive mapper powershell, or a paid for product, but as far I can tell they both just use WebDAV which I've found awfully slow - we just use the sync client so it appears in Explorer (not as a drive, but just as "OneDrive" in the tree).

[AJWhite1970]

There also appears to be a 50mb file size limit on WEBDAV with the OneDrive mappers, tried everything to change it but it appears to ignore the reg key that controlled it.

 

In the end we gave up and went to known folder redirection

[thimon]

We map user’s OneDrive areas using a small login script. I’ll see if I can find it.

[thimon]

net use O: “\\localhost\c$\Users\%username%\Onedrive”

 

You may need to edit the end part of the path, depending on the name of your user’s OneDrive folder name.

 

We also run a small power shell script after this that renames the label of the drive. The default label of the drive is the folder location, from memory, so not that user friendly.

Edited November 4, 2020 by thimon

[Katy]

net use O: “\\localhost\c$\Users\%username%\Onedrive”

 

You may need to edit the end part of the path, depending on the name of your user’s OneDrive folder name.

 

We also run a small power shell script after this that renames the label of the drive. The default label of the drive is the folder location, from memory, so not that user friendly.

 

We do something similar - mapping to %username% fails if you have a broken profile taking up that name, and your actual profile is eg Katy.DOMAIN.0.1.2.3, we use subst and the %OneDrive% variable to achieve the same thing - an N drive showing OneDrive contents, but we only have this for programs that can't see OneDrive sync client (e.g. finance software that runs as a Remote App with different usernames on a different forest with no trusts)

 

You'd also still need the sync client running for that path to exist on disk.

[thimon]

we use subst and the %OneDrive% variable to achieve the same thing - an N drive showing OneDrive contents, but we only have this for programs that can't see OneDrive sync client (e.g. finance software that runs as a Remote App with different usernames on a different forest with no trusts)

 

You'd also still need the sync client running for that path to exist on disk.

 

Using the %OneDrive% variable sounds better, will test this, thank you.

 

Same, we mainly use it for Hosted SIMS.

[supportman]

I just tried it but no good, whats the exact mapping command you are using?

 

U:\>net use O: "%OneDrive%"
System error 67 has occurred.
The network name cannot be found.

[thimon]

I just tried it but no good, whats the exact mapping command you are using?

 

U:\>net use O: "%OneDrive%"
System error 67 has occurred.
The network name cannot be found.

 

Ours will be %OneDriveSync% as that’s what we’ve got setup. However I have not tested this yet as not in school.

[Katy]

I just tried it but no good, whats the exact mapping command you are using?

 

U:\>net use O: "%OneDrive%"
System error 67 has occurred.
The network name cannot be found.

 

You won't be able to do it that way, as %OneDrive% contains "C:\Users\Katy\OneDrive - MySchoolHere". You'd have to parse that to swap the colon for a dollar, then stick "\\computername" on the front. I do it using subst instead of mapping a drive, so:

 

subst n: "%onedrive%"

 

It appears as a local drive rather than network.

[maxrebo]

net use O: “\\localhost\c$\Users\%username%\Onedrive”

 

You may need to edit the end part of the path, depending on the name of your user’s OneDrive folder name.

 

We also run a small power shell script after this that renames the label of the drive. The default label of the drive is the folder location, from memory, so not that user friendly.

 

That's great - Thank you.

 

I wondering if there's any way of automating the setup of the sync client?, or at least have this run upon login (if it hasn't been setup before) ?

[thimon]

That's great - Thank you.

 

I wondering if there's any way of automating the setup of the sync client?, or at least have this run upon login (if it hasn't been setup before) ?

 

There’s a group policy setting for that. However I’ve also set OneDrive.exe to run on user logon as the setting is not consistent.