For those of you on Windows 8.1 Preview, you will notice a deep integration with SkyDrive. But did you know that SkyDrive was designed to cater to devices with limited storage space? In an official blog post, Microsoft highlights some of SkyDrive’s new features in Windows 8.1
“With Windows 8.1, we’ve taken a big step towards that goal. SkyDrive is deeply integrated into Windows. Opening and saving files to SkyDrive is now as easy as saving to your hard drive, but with SkyDrive, your files are also available to you on your phone, tablet, desktop PC, and via SkyDrive.com. In addition to the basics, we’ve come up with some creative and unique ways to address the needs of the increasing number of people who have tons of files but relatively small device hard drives,” Microsoft stated in an official blog post.
Flipping through photos in SkyDrive on Windows 8.1 is simple. When flipping though your picture album, you will actually be going through large thumbnail images rather than the actual image files. These thumbnails are also pre-fetched to enable fast and smooth scrolling. However, once you decide on editing an image, SkyDrive will then download the actual image to your local disk.
You can also see your entire library locally, but it wont take up much space thanks to placeholder files. “Placeholder files look and feel like normal folders and files. You can tap or click a folder and see all the folders and files inside it. You can tap or click a file and it will open, you can edit it and close it. You can move, delete, copy, or rename placeholder files just like you would any folder or file. But we only download the full file when you access it,” Microsoft explains.
You can also set up offline access and have that document or file uploaded to SkyDrive once you have internet connection enabled or you disable offline access. On top of this feature, Microsoft has also added the ability for every Windows Store app to save files directly to SkyDrive with ease. “If you were working in a desktop app, you get the same functionality using the Windows common file dialog – opening and saving to SkyDrive is as easy as saving to your PC,” Microsoft explains.
According to the company, 3TB of data was uploaded to SkyDrive per day from devices running Windows 8.1 Preview in just the first week of Build 2013. Are you using SkyDrive?
