Apparently the Onedrive API is done using HTTP or HTTPS, so the opportunity for killing the API for a given “obsolete” OS appears limited.
Another update is that a program called Syncdriver works for winXP (and later) as a Onedrive client. It syncs nicely, just like Dropbox does. The only thing which it doesn’t seem to do is a right-click on a path within the “local synced directory” giving you a URL (copied to the clipboard) to send to somebody. Dropbox does that very nicely. Instead, to get the URL, you have to go to the Onedrive website, login, and then you can pick up the URL there.
The other option, Google Drive, doesn’t seem to work well at all, for various reasons.
However, having been digging a bit into this stuff, there seem to be solutions which are practically equivalent but where you self-host the storage i.e. the stuff lives on a network drive at your house. You then need to
There is an obvious security issue in that all 443 packets will end up on your internal network, so there is the usual malformed packet etc vulnerability. I guess there are complicated solutions (DMZ?). And you need a few megabits UP speed… even my village has got that now 
The advantage is that you can have terabytes of storage for peanuts whereas Dropbox gives you 2GB (plus 50GB for a year when you buy an android phone), Onedrive gives you 15GB (?) (plus 100GB for 2 years when you buy an android phone), etc i.e. all with strings attached and presumably they will pull the plug on your data after the trial has expired.
I think the greatest risk in this is not opening port 443 in itself, but that you have a server/NAS running inside your network or at least with access to your network, which hosts the files. This can have vulnerabilities and then serve as a kind of “launchpad” for further attacks on other devices inside your network. This is one attack vector you can see in critical systems – one “forgotten” host which is regarded as non-critical because it has nothing sensitive running on it, but which opens up some other path if hacked.
Sure… I don’t want to do this at home, and hosted space is too expensive because it is priced in small GB chunks. You get huge bandwidth but limited storage – example where peter2000.co.uk is hosted. I have just 48GB.
The other day I heard of a bigger case of corporate arrogance: Adobe products from the last X years will stop working if your machine changes significantly e.g. you install a new hard disk, or motherboard, etc.
Windows has done this hardware change detection since winXP but you could always revalidate the installation, and now that XP is finished as far as MS is concerned there are hacked installation DVDs which include all the updates and block the hardware change check. Still, I doubt MS are blocking XP validation; there would be an uproar because the person’s entire computer would stop working.
The problem is that Adobe are shutting down their validation servers. According to some reports they have already shut down the validation for CS5 and older. They are moving to continuous payments – c. €10/month. Their last non-continuous-payment major product was IIRC CS6. So, and this is where the problem lies, your installation will work until you need to change or update your computer hardware, and then they have you by the balls. The only current solution is a bootleg copy of CS2, for which Adobe released a version with the validation disabled and just using a straight serial number, because so many users were having validation problems at the time!
The world has gone mad. You should be able to use a standalone software tool – especially as it wasn’t exactly cheap at the time – a few hundred € – for ever.
So I predict someone will develop a hacked CS6… because while most professionals are happy to pay monthly, most private users don’t see the value for their much more occassional usage, especially with so many free alternatives which do mostly similar jobs.
Admittedly this problem existed in the past, with hardware dongles, which would break…. but everybody knew that and everybody hated them, so they disappeared.
Dropbox has actually done this – they killed the accounts.
Peter wrote:
Dropbox has actually done this – they killed the accounts.
Killed what accounts? Wasn’t the thread about dropping support for Windows XP?
In case anybody finds this thread one day and needs dropbox functionality for some mission critical machine which can’t be upgraded from XP, I solved this rather neatly with a NAS drive which has a dropbox app:
The user interface is fairly horrible to configure but it does the job, and if you access it from the said computer as a network drive (by a UNC path, or a mapped drive letter) then key presto you get dropbox.
It also has the M$ onedrive, and others, google drive IIRC, etc.
There are probably much cheaper and smaller versions of this box which have dropbox…
The “6TB” one comes configured as a 2.7TB mirror RAID so you get only 2.7TB, but this can be changed in the config to give you 5.4TB. My experience of these is that the power supply blows up as often as an HD failure, so RAID isn’t worth much, at this price/sophistication level.
The only issue, for some users who want to access their dropbox from a scheduled process e.g. at night, for backup purposes, is the usual one: network drives are often inaccessible from a scheduled process, even if a UNC path is used (I know user-mapped drive letters are nonexistent inside a scheduled batch file). The internet is full of people tearing their hair out over this… – example and I have just such a case right now at work. Works on one PC and not on another.
I’ve got it working on XP and hope the following helps you all. Basically go to C/program files/dropbox/client (if C is your main drive) You will see two blue dropbox logos in there. One is the EXE file. The other is the uninstaller. Right click on the EXE file (top one in my folder) and select properties. Click the compatability tab and change it to run in compatability mode for Windows 2000. Job done. Worked for me so hope this is helpful. I, like many others – will fight tooth and nail to keep running XP. My favourite Windows bar none. Good luck! :-)
Just tried it… I get the “computer not supported” message when I try to login.
However I did reinstall dropbox (because I deleted the original installation) and the reinstall downloaded what looks like a new client.
My main machine runs win7-64 but I have a few XP ones around so this would be useful.
So, I tried restoring the \pf\dropbox folder from an image archive and it still didn’t work.
Then I looked on my win7 machine and found a huge number of files (way more than was in the winXP version – later I realised that the Control Panel uninstall process removed most of them) in the \pf(86)\dropbox folder, so I copied all these to the winXP machine, setting dropbox.exe to the win2k compatibility mode. Then started dropbox.exe manually. Can’t possibly work…!
It does work!
@Noizyneighbour you are a genius.
So the arrogant twats at Dropbox check for winXP but nothing earlier.
Looks like Skype just joined that bandwagon too. Doesn’t work under XP anymore (it will as long as you are signed in, but won’t once you have to re-sign in.) Well,they did abandon older Android systems as well. Time to look for something else.
