Quick Sysadmin Sanity Check: Mixing MS logins for OneDrive and Office365 (w/o AD)

[DaveBkk]

I retired in January as a university professor (with Professor Emeritus status). I have gotten myself a very high-end retirement desktop computer and a decent new laptop (I sitill have my university laptop and desktop but they are pretty old and limited). I am going to migrate my files in a sensible way that does not cause problems over time. A pillar of this is I hope to use the 5TB OneDrive allocation that any faculty (even retired) gets. This is obviously with my university login.

However, I can't get Office365 stuff from my university for my personal machines, so I will buy a Family Office365 subscription for $99/year. That of course comes with 6 logins, each which gets 1TB OneDrive. I need more than 1TB for my files (a lot of family photos and stuff, backups of all of the DVD and BluRay movies I have purchased,etc), but my family only needs 3-4 logins. So, yes, I could do kludgy "DavePix" accounts or whatnot to segment my files.

I have a buddy who is a sysadmin at my university, and he thinks it is no problem to have my OneDrive on my university account and my Office365 logged in on my personal family account, though I doubt that he has ever tried to do this.. However, to me that seems like hugely asking for trouble. MicroSoft is using to not keeping clean boundaries, and I can almost guarantee that with a login they assume that is YOU, period. And it wants to CONTROL everything you do under that login: "MicroSoft: noun, verb, and adjective".

Do you have any experience or insight here? Any clean solutions that leap out at you? The family version of Office365 lets you pay more, but only up to 2TB/login, which over time won't be enough. (I guess if I'm lucky by the time I need the full 2TB, they will have increased that. But I try to not rely on luck.)

Thanks in advance for any help here. As is hopefully obvious, I will NOT be using Active Directory at home.

 

[DaveBkk]

Sorry: I forgot to mention my new machines run Win10. Hopefully that was obvious!

 

[Walldoo99]

Google drive give you 15gb

 

[Cat Herder]

I retired in January as a university professor (with Professor Emeritus status). I have gotten myself a very high-end retirement desktop computer and a decent new laptop (I sitill have my university laptop and desktop but they are pretty old and limited). I am going to migrate my files in a sensible way that does not cause problems over time. A pillar of this is I hope to use the 5TB OneDrive allocation that any faculty (even retired) gets. This is obviously with my university login.

However, I can't get Office365 stuff from my university for my personal machines, so I will buy a Family Office365 subscription for $99/year. That of course comes with 6 logins, each which gets 1TB OneDrive. I need more than 1TB for my files (a lot of family photos and stuff, backups of all of the DVD and BluRay movies I have purchased,etc), but my family only needs 3-4 logins. So, yes, I could do kludgy "DavePix" accounts or whatnot to segment my files.

I have a buddy who is a sysadmin at my university, and he thinks it is no problem to have my OneDrive on my university account and my Office365 logged in on my personal family account, though I doubt that he has ever tried to do this.. However, to me that seems like hugely asking for trouble. MicroSoft is using to not keeping clean boundaries, and I can almost guarantee that with a login they assume that is YOU, period. And it wants to CONTROL everything you do under that login: "MicroSoft: noun, verb, and adjective".

Do you have any experience or insight here? Any clean solutions that leap out at you? The family version of Office365 lets you pay more, but only up to 2TB/login, which over time won't be enough. (I guess if I'm lucky by the time I need the full 2TB, they will have increased that. But I try to not rely on luck.)

Thanks in advance for any help here. As is hopefully obvious, I will NOT be using Active Directory at home.

Microsoft allows a user to link to work accounts from a personal computer / account & to personal accounts from a work computer.
Providing your “work” account (ie. your university account) remains active & valid (ie. the university admins don’t purge your account as part of a procedure or cost cutting exercise) there should be no issue with accessing both OneDrive accounts from the same computer.
You can also do this on multiple computers if, for instance you have a desktop computer, a travel laptop and another computer at the beach house or cottage.

As a matter of good practice, you should also back-up ALL of the files on your OneDrive accounts. Protection against file corruption, ransomware & loss of account.

 

[Cat Herder]

Google drive give you 15gb

He has a 5TB OneDrive account! 15GB won’t cut it. Although Google do offer paid accounts with much larger space allowances, the MS-Office 365 Family Plan is a good deal. I’ve been a subscriber for 5 or 6 years.

 

[Walldoo99]

He has a 5TB OneDrive account! 15GB won’t cut it. Although Google do offer paid accounts with much larger space allowances, the MS-Office 365 Family Plan is a good deal. I’ve been a subscriber for 5 or 6 years.

Sorry I read it as 5gb split 5 ways

 

[DaveBkk]

Google drive give you 15gb

Thanks! But then I have to have the file transferred from the cloud each time I use it. I really strongly prefer it to already be there on my local disk, by automatic file synchronization.

 

[DaveBkk]

Microsoft allows a user to link to work accounts from a personal computer / account & to personal accounts from a work computer.
Providing your “work” account (ie. your university account) remains active & valid (ie. the university admins don’t purge your account as part of a procedure or cost cutting exercise) there should be no issue with accessing both OneDrive accounts from the same computer.
You can also do this on multiple computers if, for instance you have a desktop computer, a travel laptop and another computer at the beach house or cottage.

As a matter of good practice, you should also back-up ALL of the files on your OneDrive accounts. Protection against file corruption, ransomware & loss of account.

Great, thanks O' ye shepherd of felines! This is what I need, my sysadmin friend and the local university help desk can help me find the nitty gritty details to pull this off.
4x6TB disks set up in a RAID-5 configuration with 1 failure tolerated and striping 3 at a time, so 18TB useable. I actually will have files of more than my 5TB+1TB OneDrive space in the cloud: I'll store stuff there that I will periodically manually back up to an external drive of my own.

Yes, all my files will be backed up on One Drive. Automatically: if OneDrive works like i think it should, the I simply use the file directory tree underneath it (perhaps it is "pointed" to a particular subtree on my disk system). I have LOTS of space to work with --

Thanks again!