I’ve been a user of Dropbox for some time now and really like its simplicity, plus the way you can easily shared folders amongst other users. The only limiting factor was the free space they provided you which wasn’t too much trouble as if you were clever you can increase this through their Beta program or invite your “friends”.
When Microsoft released SkyDrive I wasn’t phased and it would have taken a lot for me to review my Dropbox loyalty however this was certainly tested when Microsoft offered long time Live account holders to upgrade to 25Gb of free space, so I took the plunge.
I’ve been using Dropbox and SkyDrive in parallel now with some mixed results, more so now that I am using Windows 8, but I will leave my main frustration for a little later.
In all SkyDrive worked well on Windows 7 as it was a single install which ran in your system tray synchronising files in the background. SkyDrive on Windows 8 is another matter entirely.
In fairness my problems may not just be related to SkyDrive on Windows 8, as I have decided to also upgrade to Office 2013, however putting my other issues aside I am trying to focus on the Windows Application, the basic SkyDrive application.
It seems that nearly every single time I load up a document that is in my SkyDrive folder to either review or print without making changes you would think I should just be able to close the file and all in well in the world, however I get the nagging flag on the SkyDrive systray icon and SkyDrive moaning that the file I just accesses requires my attention.
Upon loading up the error list I am greeted with SkyDrive saying I need to open the file for more information.
So I open the file and it appears the file is now flagged as “Offline”, this seems to be due to me opening the file, not editing anything and closing it again. 
.
So to resolve this issue I am forced to “Save” my unedited file so that SkyDrive can push the “changes” to SkyDrive.
Why can’t the SkyDrive application work in the background to upload and synchronise files and folders, more specifically why am I now forced to “Save” changes to a file I have clearly not edited just so I can get rid of this stupid message.
My patiences is wearing thin with SkyDrive and I will most likely take a subscription out with Dropbox as this appears to just work, and they have a very nice shared folder features which is hugely useful for me between clients and friends.
Dropbox 2 : 0 SkyDrive