SkyDrive Explorer

I've been hoping and looking for some kind of solution that would let people access their 25 GB of free storage space on Windows Live SkyDrive using simple, Explorer-based drag and drop. It's been kind of a tough slog all year, however, with only one solution, Gladinet, which is hard to configure and buggy in use. But now a new contender has arrived, and while it's not perfect, it's much better than Gladinet. It's called SkyDrive Explorer, and as promised, it does provide Explorer-based drag and drop access to your SkyDrive account. The only issue I've seen is that you can't drag and drop collections of folders into SkyDrive. Instead, you can only drag files (at least that I've seen), while manually creating folders on the cloud side.

Anyway, I was hoping to hold off on this one for the podcast, but I've easily gotten 100 emails about it already, so I guess the cat is out of the bag. Thanks to everyone that wrote in about this tool.

Discuss this Article 9

Spiggy73
on Nov 4, 2009
I too have been wanting something like this. Thanks for finding it. I used Gladinet and just couldn't get it to work well.
anonymous
on Nov 4, 2009
This post was mentioned on Twitter by thurrott: SkyDrive Explorer: I've been hoping and looking for some kind of solution that would let people access thei.. http://bit.ly/2GVm2L
techfan
on Nov 4, 2009
Nice! Hopefully in the future, let's hope it's in the NEAR future, Microsoft will add a Explorer-based upload mechanism to Windows Live Essentials. Something like Windows Live SkyDrive Uploader. Looking forward to hearing you talk about it on WW. Thanks Paul!
gfryesc1
on Nov 4, 2009
I've used skydrive since Paul says it makes mobileme storage look ridiculous but it's a terrible experience. Hitherto, it was web only access. You still can't upload a folder structure and you can't really upload bulk data with the 50MB per file cap! Mobileme hasn't had these limitations even on the windows side. It sorta makes skydrive seem kinda pointless to really use.
anonymous
on Nov 4, 2009
SkyDrive Explorer is in Beta and will let you access your 25G of SkyDrive storage from the explorer. There are...
Andreas J
on Nov 4, 2009
Darn. I read this just after I bought Gladinet. Actually, i'm not so sad, because Gladinet has built in backup to multiple cloud services. And it's awesome.
jctierney
on Nov 4, 2009
This sounds pretty promising, I'll have to try it out. I never really used Gladinet, and from what I can tell, I'm Glad I didn't, no pun intended, well, maybe some. Microsoft should come up with some type of system similar to Live Mesh for SkyDrive. I use Mesh all the time, and love being able to just drag and drop folders to and fro. I very rarely use SkyDrive anymore, primarily because I cannot simply drag and drop files and folders using Explorer. However, Mesh only offers 5GB of data storage. So, I would like to use the 25GB of storage that SkyDrive offers. Thanks for the heads up on this, Paul!
Waethorn
on Nov 4, 2009
A few things: 1) "SkyDrive Explorer for Windows Live SkyDrive. Ads by Google." Ya, that makes sense. 2) "No Spyware. No Adware. No Viruses. Certifed by Softpedia." Does anybody actually trust this website? You know, the same company that uses an ad provider that links to malware websites in their banner ads, and generated search result pages on their download pages? (Not to mention, they even posted Microsoft Security Essentials beta when Microsoft had a strict no-distribution clause in the beta EULA) 3) How much can you trust a developer that uses the same icons as scareware authors? (ie. the multicoloured shield, designed to look like the UAC icon) 4) Turning comments in ads, Paul? That's low!
panache1023
on Nov 4, 2009
Waethorn, "4) Turning comments in ads, Paul? That's low!" Agreed!

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