As part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 changes, Copilot in OneDrive became available for all commercial customers on 8th October 2024. Let’s check it out and see what it can do.
When first logging onto https://www.office.com/onedrive I was greeted with two prompts, the notice that Copilot is now there, as well as the reminder that you need to verify the results that Copilot provides – just like any LLM AI.
From the front Onedrive page, I do see the Copilot icon as indicated:
The Summarize option does as you’d expect, providing a less than 1 pager with key points that Copilot has found out from the document:
The ‘Ask a question’ button will break out a Copilot side window which will then provide answers based on the content of the document, and show the reference of the document itself as the source of the answers it generates:
‘Create an FAQ’ is quite a handy one-click option. I can see this being useful in many scenarios – any documentation being shared that could be a lot to take on, and the question/answer format can be a better way for people to absorb information compared to a summary.
If you select two files, Copilot in the top bar will have the option ‘Compare files’:
I made a copy of the above file and changed 3 words, let’s see if the changes are picked up when using the ‘Compare files’ option:
This is a good expectation setter. If you wanted to actually compare differences between two documents and see what’s exactly different, use Word’s native Compare option. Copilot on the other hand will give a summary. It’s picked up that there’s possibly minor differences in wording or formatting
If I make another copy of the original, make no changes, and run another ‘Compare files’, the results come back suggesting that the content is most likely identical:
I can see this contextual Copilot being useful when you target the file or files you want summarised, or want to ask questions about. Contextual questions relating to a project or a piece of work is where this would shine.
It’s still early days for Microsoft 365 Copilot, but it’s good to see the product’s feature set expand as we all learn what large language models can actually do and how they can help us be more efficient in our jobs and lives.
Getting files from A to B is sometimes easy, sometimes not so easy. As I’m writing a blog post on this topic, guess which category this falls into?
I recently purchased a Canon EOS R10 camera, and it’s been quite a while since I’ve done anything beyond a smartphone device in this space. It’s actually for my wife, but I still get to play with it.
Anyway, the simple concept of ‘I take photos on a camera and want them in OneDrive for Business the easiest and most automated way possible’ seems like it shouldn’t be a complicated ask, but the answers I’ve found aren’t as straight forward as I was expecting.
At a basic level, the camera takes photos and saves them onto a removable SD card (in this case, a Micro SD in a standard SD card adapter). Here’s the options that I found and didn’t like:
Remove the SD Card from the camera, put it into a computer, and copy the files off. This is the old school way and although not a terrible option, it’s rather manual and requires the steps to take the photos off each time, with another device handy. From the computer it’s quite easy to sync the files using the OneDrive client, as the destination of the copied files could be an already syncing folder.
Plug in the camera via USB to a computer and copy the files off. About as tedious as the first option, you’re still opening a flap on the camera, and doing all the heavy lifting on a computer.
Use the Canon Camera Connect app to connect a mobile phone to the camera, and download all the images to then sync up to OneDrive for Business. I was leaning this way until realising that it didn’t support resume – so if the camera went flat, or you took more photos before deleting, it would sync all the photos again.
On the camera itself, connect to Wi-Fi and then use the image.canon service. This will sync each photo to Canon’s cloud service. Free, but it’s for up to 30 days storage and max 10GB, and then there’s no easy way to get the files from image.canon to OneDrive for business. It is designed as a file transfer gateway to services, but those services are quite limited; Google Photos, Google Drive, YouTube, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Frame.io, and Flickr.| Frame.io was paid, Flickr wasn’t listed as a supported app on Power Automate, and Adobe I don’t want to even look at the price. If I was in the Google or Adobe ecosystem for file storage already I’d probably be happy, but I’m not. I first thought – after some investigation that there’s no support on Google Drive to detect a file creation on their APIs, so I can’t trigger a sync using something like Power Automate to take files from Google Drive and put them in OneDrive for business – but I then found this from the community that was close to what I wanted: Copy files from Google Drive to Onedrive on a daily basis
Using that solution and cutting it back a bit to an 8 hour sync and just deleting all the files found, I’ve now got a clunky but working solution:
1. Camera auto uploads to image.canon
2. image.canon syncs to Google Drive (free tier) as they come in
3. Power Automate checks every 8 hours for new files in Google Drive, copies to OneDrive for Business, deletes Google Drive files (and for 30 days I’ll still have a backup in image.canon, plus the files on the SD card in the camera until I delete them)
4. Synology NAS on-premises syncs files from OneDrive for Business to local storage
5. Plex locally scans the OneDrive for Business backup path and indexes images to play anywhere via Plex
I don’t like how many moving parts the solution has, plus the camera’s upload speed isn’t great (also a mid-range camera built in 2022 only has Wi-Fi 4 standards from what I’m seeing on my Ubiquiti equipment which is a bit disappointing), but it is an automated solution end to end. Sometimes the camera may go flat doing it’s long sync, but thankfully it keeps a record of where it was up to and continues on power on.
Backing up mailboxes in Exchange Online as a part of the Office 365 or Microsoft 365 suite is always a debated topic – some will argue that Microsoft have enough redundancy and backups in their own environments so you don’t need a third party solution and you’ll always be able to get your data back. However, this hasn’t been proven yet (thankfully) in a real world event where mailbox data has been lost by Microsoft. It also doesn’t cover scenarios where there’s outages, account problems or other connectivity problems that can delay your access to your cloud based data. Is it a risk each company will need to decide if it’s worth an investment into reducing.
Altaro asked me to have a look at their product – Altaro Office 365 Backup – to provide a quick run-through on setting it up and seeing what it does. Their solution is fully cloud based, so you don’t need any extra hardware to get going. You can set up a 30 day free trial here. Once signed up, here’s what to do:
After logging in from the link you’ll be emailed, you’ll be presented with this screen:
The wizard here will take you through the setup required, starting with a Company Name and your domain configured in Office 365 (which you can get from https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/Domains) – I had to use my primary:
Next, you’ll need to grant access for Altaro to be able to access data in your tenant, which makes sense since you want them to back it up:
Following the links you’ll get the standard window advising you what permissions you’re granting and to whom:
If it worked, a successful message will show and you can go back to the setup wizard:
After doing this three times, you can go to the next step where you can choose which users to back up – which as it says, will be this data: “Office 365 User Backups consist of Emails, Calendars & Contacts within Mailboxes and Files stored within OneDrive accounts.”, then “SharePoint Backups consist of Files stored within SharePoint Document Libraries.”
If it all goes well, you’ll then get to the final screen showing a successful setup:
That’s it – backup has been set up. Of course your data won’t be in there instantly, the first backup happens over 24 hours, and then up to 4 times a day ongoing. You can choose if new users are automatically added to backup plans or not, which should turn this into a set and forget backup system.
Set and forget only works if you’re alerted around issues, which is possible in the Alert Settings – you can choose what sort of alerts you receive, such as if a backup job failed:
Restoring is also an easy process – for example if you want to restore an entire mailbox, the Mailbox Restore wizard will take you through the steps and ask where you want to restore – onto that user’s mailbox, another user’s mailbox, an Outlook PST file, or a ZIP file containing each mail item as an individual file:
You can also use the Granular Restore option, to search and restore particular items rather than entire mailboxes and accounts. The granular restore has the same options as the full restore for destinations, so there’s a lot of flexibility based on what you’re after:
If you can’t find what you’re looking for, the ‘Advanced Search’ option lets you define what you’re looking for:
Pricing for Office 365 Backup by Altaro is available at https://www.altaro.com/office-365-backup/#faqs and is a per user, per type (either mailbox or mailbox + OneDrive + SharePoint) model. This also includes 24/7 support and unlimited storage for backups.
After setting this up and trying out all the options, I’m confident in saying this is as good as you could hope for, from a turn-key solution. Setup is literally a few minutes, there’s no software to install anywhere and no infrastructure requirements. The data Altaro backs up is held forever (yes, infinite retention!) assuming you still have a valid subscription. The data is stored in Microsoft Azure, but only in West Europe at the time of writing – so if you have data sovereignty requirements, you’ll need to assess this.
Synology sent me a new DiskStation to review after I’d acquired an older one myself to look at it’s ability to back up Microsoft 365 data (the updated name for Office 365). Being a Microsoft MVP in Office Apps and Services category, so I was very interested to see how it worked.
After reading up on and seeing that it was a completely free piece of software available as part of owning a DiskStation, I was hoping this would be a good solution at an incredibly low price – buy your DiskStation and disks, some time to set it up, and you’re done. To me, that’s already a very appealing offering, along with Synology having a good reputation for maintaining and supporting their hardware several years on – which was proved by the 7 year old DS1813+ I set up a few months ago.
I’ve left the new Intel-based DiskStation 1618+ – Quad Core CPU and 4GB RAM (expandable) running for about a month now, backing up my Microsoft 365 tenant’s data. I ticked ALL the options to see how it went. This tenant is just for me, so the data set is smaller than most tenants – but I do run a few live things through it like email and OneDrive. There’s also a little SharePoint Online data from Micrsoft 365 Groups and Teams I’ve played around with.
Here’s what the dashboard looks like now:
Some useful information there around what’s being backed up and how big it is. You might notice there’s a few errors on the summary. I drilled into those and each was because ‘The Microsoft Server is busy’, and a few minutes later it would try again successfully.
This is likely because I used a backup option to get incremental changes, rather than at a set time. Maybe I’m hitting it too much and getting blocked occasionally.
I know I’ve gotten ahead of myself here, so let’s go back to how to set this up. Assuming you have yourself a Synology DiskStation of some sort that supports ‘Active Backup for Office 365‘ – and which models are those? Here’s the list:
From the DiskStation desktop, open Package Center and follow these steps:
Find and click ‘install’ on the ‘Active Backup for Office 365’ package
Click ‘Activate’
Click ‘OK’
Choose the endpoint – for most it’s the default ‘Office 365’ option
Accept the very long list of permissions required using an admin account for your Microsoft 365 tenant
‘Agree’
You need a shared folder to save the backups to – ‘Go to Control Panel’
Enter a name and description for the shared folder
Encypt the data if you like
‘Next’
Make any user permission changes you like and press ‘OK’
Again choose the Office 365 option applicable to your tenant
Pick the user(s) you want to back up, and what data
Choose the ‘Site’ tab to select which SharePoint sites you want to back up
Press ‘OK’
Choose your backup schedule – I used Continuous
Review all the settings and click ‘Apply’
This was a very easy setup to do – I took screenshots of every step involved, but it barely needs an explanation for anyone who’s an admin of a Microsoft 365 Tenant.
The program will then go off and start backing up what you told it. The ‘Activities’ section of Active Backup for Office 365 will show any backups running, and you can also use the inbuilt ‘Resource Monitor’ to see upload/download speeds, disk utilization etc.
It’s also worth noting that the backup you created has an ‘account discovery’ option where it’ll find any new accounts created and automatically add them to the backup, which is great for not having to change backup settings each time you have a new user start.
Running a backup is great, but how do you restore the data? There’s a second app you’ll need, ‘Active Backup for Office 365 Portal’. Launching this will take you to a web interface where admins can browse all data, and users can browse just their own (user access can be disabled if you prefer).
On this web interface, you can then find the file(s) you want to restore, and restore them. You also get a nice timeline down the bottom so you can move backwards and forwards to see a snapshot of a certain time.
Although Mail, Calendar, Contact, and Site (SharePoint) support searching across all backups for names and contents, at the time of writing this isn’t possible for OneDrive backups. It’s worth being aware of this – if someone requests a file restore you’ll need to know exactly when from. I don’t see this as too much of an issue though, as OneDrive has great version control natively, and an automatic recycle bin – so you’d probably rely on the native solution for finding a file, but still it’s worth knowing this existing limitation.
That was the only slight negative I could find while testing. Everything else just worked, was quick to browse and restore, and incremental backups appeared to be on the DiskStation within several seconds after creating a new file in OneDrive.
Again, this is an incredibly cheap Office 365 backup solution. Some may question if you need to back up Office 365 at all. You could set up infinite retention against all content, so why take a backup? To me it’s a definite grey area, and partly depends how much you value the data. Microsoft may never lose your data, but will it be available 100% of the time? What if that important document is in your OneDrive and hadn’t synced down, and there was an outage? We’ve seen a few outages lately, including ones that have broken authentication – your data is still there, but you can’t get to it. In that scenario, having a local copy of something time sensitive could be worth it. Considering the relative low cost of buying a Synolgoy DiskStation – your disks are probably going to cost more than the unit itself, I consider it a pretty easy sell.
If you haven’t come across these file formats already, you probably will soon. Created by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and adopted by Apple amongst others, it’s looking like a replacement for the old JPEG image format.
The format was added in iOS11 and created when doing things like taking a photo. Early on the files were being converted back to JPEG in many situations, including OneDrive Photo Roll syncs.
I expect something else has changed recently, as I’m seeing the files turn up over email from other parties where I’d never seen them before. If I find out more I’ll update this post.
.HEIC and .HEIF files ‘appear’ to be the same thing, but at this stage I can’t clearly find information explaining if there’s a difference, and if so what that is.
These files can’t be natively opened on Windows 11 or earlier, but there’s a few options you have to view them.
OneDrive
If you have access to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business (which doesn’t take much, a free Microsoft account will do), you can copy these files into OneDrive, right click and ‘View Online’. Via your browser, you can then view the image in OneDrive without any extra software required. However, Microsoft documentation currently does not list the formats as being supported, and I’m also asking questions about this in a few areas. (Update 3rd March 2020 – Microsoft updated this page after I asked :) )
Windows 10 & 11
The native Photos app was supposed to have support for this as per these Insider Build notes. I’ve tested on a few different PCs including a fully patched standard Microsoft build laptop, and Photos doesn’t recognise the files. I’ve been told the support of the files needs the two Windows Store apps, and that matches my testing:
Both are created by ‘Microsoft Corporation’ so they’re not third party, and both are free. Once installed, HEIC and HEIF files work everywhere I’ve tried, including in the native Photos app.
There is also a paid HEVC Video Extensions version from Microsoft that costs $1.45AU, I’m not sure why you’d need this one over the one ‘from the Device Manufacturer’.
Frustratingly, the ‘HEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer’ app doesn’t seem to be available to add in Windows Store for Business, but the HEIF Image Extensions is. I’m asking around to try and have that resolved, if I can find someone to listen to me :) (Update 3rd March 2020 – this probably won’t change anytime soon for licensing reasons)
Converting
One final option is to convert a HEIC to JPEG. Here’s a quick guide using Linux via a Debian WSL image, installed from the Microsoft Store (thanks Purana for the tip!)
I’ve got a lot of unanswered questions in the above, but hoping this at least helps others that might get stuck in finding a working solution in the meantime.
