Like most of the cloud services, SkyDrive lets you save, share, and access files, but on most operating systems, you must use it through a browser — IE by choice, but it will work with others. However, SkyDrive does work hand-in-glove with the Windows 8 file manager. It also works well in partnership with Microsoft Office. Like Google Drive, it comes with its own cloud-based office software: Office Web Apps.
It also has a feature that troubles me; SkyDrive will let you grab files from any PC that's associated with your account and pull them into the cloud remotely. That's great if you left your PowerPoint presentation at home. That's not so great if someone gets your Microsoft account login information and your phone for SkyDrive's two-factor authentication code and decides to start downloading your Quicken finance files. You can turn this function off, but it's set to be on by default. This seems like a potential security hole to me.
On the plus side of the ledger, SkyDrive, with 7GB of free storage, offers more free storage than many of the other services. If you want 20GB more, it will cost you $10 a year. 50GB is $25, and 100GB is just $50 annually. Price right SkyDrive is a bargain, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Microsoft's business cloud service Azure just suffered a major cloud storage failure .
For Windows users, SkyDrive has become the cloud storage solution of choice. The price is great, it works really well with Windows 8 and, along with Box, it's the only service that works natively with Windows phones. Just be very careful when you use that ability to download remotely from your PC.
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