Skydrive aims for heights but plunges the depths

I'm sure I am not alone in fielding a rash of hesitant queries from people who have picked up on the recent update to Microsoft's Skydrive service.This is a consumer cloud service that comes in free with Windows Live Essentials and certainly has an attention-grabbing statistic riding along with it: 25GB of free cloud storage.

People looking to get over troublesome backup histories, or wanting to say "yes I'm using the cloud too" will be only too keen to get that kind of weight behind them: it sounds a lot like the reality behind those BT adverts from a year ago, where the mother loses the toddler's pictures off her flakey old laptop but BT's Cloud Store backup was there to help...

You can see this coming, can't you: the reality when you hit this service hard is nothing like that. And let's be clear about what hard really means: I mean, as hard as the people I see sitting working at the old, local tech every day.

My first trial was to see how I could upload files to the SkyDrive storage pool -  the interface for file uploads owes a lot to the web world of picture uploads. There's an upper limit of 100MB per uploaded file, and 5 files per input page. Let's say you have 25GB of pictures (there's a clear picture bias,  the little box at the bottom of the uploader talks about a display resolution of 1600 as the default) and you want to keep the whole lot safe in SkyDrive.

I'll start by guessing that it takes 40 seconds per 5-file upload control to pick the files by mouse, change the drop-down to "original" and fire it off. I guess the average photo might be 5MB: if I have the maths right that means it's 11 hours of solid work at 40 sec to run the dialog box (assuming perfectly fast upload speeds) to populate your 25Gb. In reality, given likely upload speeds, we are looking at a couple of weeks to use this method of upload - and that's for any type of file, not just pictures.

SkyDrive includes options for opening and creating Word and Excel files. I confess, I thought this was a way of spawning a local task on the PC and sucking the file back up to SkyDrive when you're done but no. It runs a web app instance of the program within the SkyDrive window. Response times are frankly disappointing: getting that first Excel sheet up took between 20-30 seconds - and in case you think that's a busy connection or a low-spec local machine, I should point out I get a stable 10Mbps download here and the machine has 8 cores, 8 GB of RAM, 64-bit Windows 7 and runs off a mirrored pair of SSDs as the boot volume. It loads Excel 2010 locally in under a second.

Anyway: it was long enough for me to get bored and start writing the first couple of sentences of this blog in another window. In an idle moment I made a two-column Excel spreadsheet locally in Office 2010, copied the block of numbers & formulae I'd made and hit "paste" within the Excel app inside the Skydrive window: I got a pasted single cell of the value results of my fomulae, not the underlying cell structures and maths I'd entered.

I thought I'd look around the marketplace for utilites to sync my local storage with the SkyDrive account. http://www.gladinet.com/ " target="_blank">Gladinet offers Cloud Desktop - and it includes SkyDrive in it's list of compatible Cloud Storage options.

Oh, if only it were that simple: the free version of Gladinet is ringfenced with all manner of bizarre restrictions, starts up in a 3-day trial mode of the paid-for version ("Professional") and in any case, refused to sign in to my SkyDrive/Windows Live environment and sync anything.

There are other options to Gladinet, to be sure - like Synctricity for use with Google Documents - but I cannot shake the feeling that everyone in this field, Microsoft included, have an astonishingly mismatched idea of just how much data lurks out there on the disk drives of small business computers.

SkyDrive ought to be a whole new way of working that would suit the kind of small business that lives in more than one office - that fits the description of my work style and certainly would suit me if it was to be usable, durable and trustworthy - but the means of getting to grips with it don't inspire confidence or promote easy, fluid day-to-day workflow.

I certainly think that the 25GB figure is a sensible one for ultimate storage needs from Azure Storage via SkyDive: however, the tools and technologies to present that information really need to get in some hard knocks from some everyday, straightforward, no-nonsense users.