Why use skydrive

You can either get a link to copy into an e-mail or IM message yourself or you can send a link via email using SkyDrive. Start by opening a folder and clicking the Share menu for either a file or the folder. Another sharing feature is the ability to embed folders on a Web page by copying and pasting some HTML code.

This is great if you run your own website or blog. Then you can copy and paste the URL into a feed reader. The feeds will contain preview images of the files and links to download them.

Just install the Windows Live Toolbar on your computers, sign in with your Windows Live ID, and your Internet Explorer favorites will be synchronized among all the computers. Plus you can view them on the SkyDrive site from any computer.

Like with documents, you can also share favorites with select people, your friends, your friends and their friends, or everyone. The sharing settings are just like with documents. You can set the permissions, get or send links, embed, or view the RSS feeds. You can also use SkyDrive to store and share your photos. You can create different albums, which behave similarly to regular SkyDrive folders. Plus you can tag people in the photos and leave comments. It also keeps the EXIF metadata, such as camera info and the date taken.

You can also view the photos in the SkyDrive site by browsing through them or viewing as a slide-show. Now you should be familiar with SkyDrive and how to use it. Between Dropbox, Box. The Windows 8 SkyDrive app is prominently displayed on the Windows Store, and Windows Phone 8 is expected to seamlessly integrate your SkyDrive account with your smartphone. Once the download is complete, simply double-click on the downloaded file to launch the SkyDrive installer.

SkyDrive offers users 7GB of storage space for free; you just need to download the app and sign up for a Microsoft account. If you want or need more space, Microsoft offers different levels of additional storage for an annual fee. By default, inside the parent SkyDrive folder, the app creates three more folders—Documents, Pictures, and Public. Using SkyDrive on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets is equally simple. For example, if someone shares pictures with you in an email, you can save them to SkyDrive from the Mail app.

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. You can drag folders and files from your PC or any other attached device to SkyDrive. Many people use search to quickly access their files. For example, if you have a document in your SkyDrive, we extract a few lines of text from the document and provide that to the search indexer on your device so that it can return search results that are more relevant to you.

It goes without saying that search works across your entire SkyDrive including placeholder files. And in just the first week after Build, we saw over 3TB of data uploaded to SkyDrive per day from those devices running Windows 8. We look forward to hearing more of your suggestions and comments here on the blog and in the Windows 8. Download our new infographic to learn how IT can help the business before business users help themselves. Skip to main content Skip to main content.

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