2 Linux clients for Microsoft's OneDrive. Yes, they work, but...

The Linux notes from DarkDuck blog has recently published a How-to guide for using cloud storage from the Russian company Yandex with native Linux support: Yandex.Disk.

Of course, Yandex is not the only company that offers free and subscription-based cloud storage services. There was even a discussion about one of the alternatives in the comments for that article. You can also check the other alternatives.

My take on that discussion is that I would not trust my files to a company that only receives revenues from the cloud storage. It is like putting all your eggs in the same basket. That's why I would recommend you use a company with a diverse set of cash cows. How many of them are there? Not that many, I am afraid.

Yandex is a Russia-based company. There is another Russian company Mail.Ru that offers web storage with 25 Gb of free space per user by default. Unfortunately, its site interface is mostly in Russian, that's why I would not talk too much about it here.

Global technology companies also offer cloud storage. The most famous of them is Google Drive, of course. You all are aware that Google does not provide an official Linux client for its Google Drive. There are some unofficial alternatives including JDrivesync that you can read about.

However, there is another cloud storage from a global company. It is OneDrive from Microsoft. You can think of me being a Devil's Advocate here, but let me continue. OneDrive gives you 5Gb of storage space by default that you can extend later on. However, if you use the referral link, you get 0.5 Gb extra, and so will I. Of course, it is less than the 10 Gb you can easily obtain from Yandex, but still enough space for many who prefer US-based Microsoft to Russia-based Yandex.

There are no official clients for running OneDrive on Linux. But there are two unofficial ones.

Let me talk you through installing and using them and compare the features running Xubuntu 16.04.

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Onedrive-d by Xybu92

The first option I am going to talk about is onedrive-d by Xybu92. You can read about this project at https://github.com/xybu/onedrive-d-old. As you can see from the link, even the author recognises that this onedrive client is "old". The last update is more than a year old.

You need run the following commands to install that client:

sudo apt install git (only if you don't have git installed)
git clone https://github.com/xybu/onedrive-d-old.git
cd onedrive-d-old
./install.sh

When installation is over, the command onedrive-pref should be started to configure the client.

While configuring, you will be asked to authorise your client. To do so, copy the URL from the terminal session into your browser, follow the on-screen instructions until you reach the empty white web page. Then copy the URL of that page and paste it back in the terminal session.

And finally the command onedrive-d start starts the client daemon.

Unfortunately, the GTK GUI client that is mentioned on the project's page did not start for me in my Xubuntu 16.04 installed OS. It means that you need to make all the config in the onedrive-d client manually either through onedrive-pref command or through configuration files.

onedrive-d does not start automatically after you restart the computer. In order to make it start every time you reboot, you need to put that command onedrive-d start into the autostart routine by the method most suitable for your OS and desktop environment.

OneDrive by Skilion

The second option for a OneDrive client is OneDrive by Skilion. This project gets updates from time to time.

In order to install OneDrive, you need to run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev
sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev
sudo wget http://master.dl.sourceforge.net/project/d-apt/files/d-apt.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/d-apt.list

The project's site recommends to install the DMD (a programming language, alternative to C) package via a pair of commands. They did not work for me, so the workaround is to download the same package through the official site. Assuming you downloaded the package to ~/Downloads, the commands will be:

cd ~/Downloads
sudo dpkg -i dmd_2.071.1-0_amd64.deb
(your file name may be different)

Now you can download the ZIP file with the OneDrive client from the project site and unzip it, for example in your home folder ~/onedrive-master.
Run the following commands:

cd ~/onedrive-master
make
sudo make install

The installation is now over. The next step is configuration. Copy the configuration file into your own home directory:

mkdir -p ~/.config/onedrive
cp /usr/local/etc/onedrive.conf ~/.config/onedrive/config

You can edit the file now, for example specify the local directory to be synchronised with the cloud storage.

And finally you are ready to run the client. It is just a command onedrive. If you run it just like this without any parameters, the synchronization will run one-off. During the first run, the authorisation process will also start. The authorisation process is the same as for the onedrive-d client described above.

If you want to run the client in the monitoring mode, you can start it with onedrive -m key. Unfortunately, you cannot close the terminal session while the client is running. Of course, this command does not start automatically after the system restarts, you need to take care about the autostart routine yourself.

Comparison

There are two clients available for you to use OneDrive on Linux.

First, both of them are command-line interface based. Both installation and use of them requires the CLI. There is no GUI for configuration or running the clients. That already makes them lose the battle with Yandex.Disk where the GUI client is available. There are many downsides of a CLI-only interface for this use. Just to list few:

• you cannot quickly jump into the local folder or web-storage on OneDrive's site.
• you cannot generate the sharing links.
• you can only configure clients via special commands or files.

Second, both clients work with the current state of OneDrive API. Even the "old" onedrive-d client successfully synchronises the files both ways. This is good news.

Third, though the onedrive-d project from Xybu92 has not gotten updates for a longer time than OneDrive project from Skilion has, the installation and use of Xybu92's client is way simpler. In particular, onedrive-d does not require an open terminal session to run.

Fourth, you need to take care of creating an autostart routine yourself in both cases, as neither client has an option to configure autostart.

Do you use OneDrive and any of its clients in your Linux operating systems?