Adobe have recently said that they’re discontinuing the Creative Cloud Synced files service by February 2024. As the Microsoft 365 account for Office includes 1 TB of free storage, what do you think about it as an alternative?

It works – assuming you have a Microsoft 365 account – but it’s a bit opaque in how promptly it will sync non-MS Office files, though until now I had sufficient cloud space from Dropbox and Adobe and have only really used OneDrive for specific projects which mainly involve MS apps.

One advantage is that MS Office files are continually being saved in the background while you’re working on them, and another is that apps like Excel can reopen recently-opened or pinned files even if you’ve used Explorer to move the files around in OneDrive. You’ve also got browser-based access to these files. I suspect there are more little tweaks for MS apps, but these are valuable to me yet may not be to others.

As a general point I wonder how much trust one can ever place in these “bonus” cloud storage services. After all, you may have received the email telling us that “Adobe is modernising the Creative Cloud storage experience” – in this case “modernising” means discontinuing the Creative Cloud Synced files service entirely. Dropbox could do something similar, reducing the allocation or making it too-annoying with ads. Would Microsoft, maybe, but they’re probably expecting that it’ll be used for MS content rather than for the big bytes that Adobe’s customers would generate, and 1tb means you’ve got plenty of headroom if they ever did decide to reduce the space allocation.

So while I’ve already moved stuff from Creative Cloud folders – some to Dropbox, some as Photoshop Cloud files – I’ll probably move the rest to OneDrive.