I have at least five OneDrive accounts, four personal and a Business all connected to my Odrive. In the Odrive Manage Storage screen I initially could not tell the personal accounts apart. To manage this I have renamed them as I determine which OneDrive they relate to, but there is one account I don’t know the username. So whatever this account is, I put a bunch of important stuff in it but have no idea the username, and tonight Odrive asked me to reauthenticate it at OneDrive! The username was blank, so I could not complete that. Most my content is still available, but I don’t feel in control of that OneDrive. Can Odrive tell me anything about how I originally authenticated an account? The email address used to log in would be the trigger I need. I use a lot of email addresses.
FYI, I had no idea I had more than two OneDrive accounts, until recently I didn’t care to use them but Odrive has made them useful.
While stabbing away at every possible username/email address at the OneDrive login I discovered not the answer to my problem, but that I have two more OneDrive accounts than I mentioned above. See, Microsoft bought Skype and turned those usernames into Microsoft accounts too, giving them OneDrive accounts. With such business migrations, woe to us if we expect the login domain to clue us in to what the password is! Fortunately I had these documented as Skype logins.
I have simply no idea how to make use of a OneDrive which is only accessible to my Odrive. If I ever unlink it it would be forever gone. Therefore I migrated everything from it to another cloud.
Part of the “Link Storage” step should be an automatic prompt to load some useful login information. I have to rename each of them now, otherwise my name appears for each cloud service, looking like duplicates.
On the Manage storage screen you should see your list of links and an ACCOUNT column as well.
If this ACCOUNT field is not populated, try clicking on the dropdown to Edit this link and then hit the “Save Changes” button without making any changes. See if this repopulates the ACCOUNT field.
Unfortunately, even if you get this information, for a linked OneDrive account, you will only see a User Name (e.g. John Doe) since that is what OneDrive returns to us as the identifying piece of information about the account… most other services return the actual login id (usually an email address). So for example, it’s very easy to tell 5 Google Drive accounts apart since the ACCOUNT field will show the 5 actual different login id’s that were used.
So if the User Name is the same on each of those 5 OneDrive accounts, then that isn’t going to be very helpful.
Let me know if that helps get you unstuck. If not, let me know and I can check and see if there’s anything possibly more we can do.
I appreciate your reply, although I solved my OneDrive problem, discovering I had yet even more unknown/unecessary OneDive accounts. I went through the process to close the duplicate account using my business email address after I determined its login credentials.
Yes, Odrive shows email addresses on most my other accounts but the OneDrive ones are simply my name repeated for all 7 of the accounts. Again, I have solved my access problem but I think Odrive needs to provide the user a bit more proactive flexibility at the time the account is linked.
Similar problem with one of my other cloud links: just now I was required to reauthorize one of my Box accounts. I have three linked to Odrive. I was presented with the Box login with no indication which account was required. I had to guess.
I am offering these comments now as feature needs, evidently needed only by those users who have too many linked accounts.
We’d definitely like to do something about the Box issue you’ve described (it should be easier to identify upfront which account needs reauthorization).
The OneDrive issue isn’t something we can do anything about yet, though, since OneDrive’s API only ever gives us back a displayName… it never lets us know the login id (email address) of the account you logged in with, and there’s no call we can make to ask for it, so we have no way of making it easier unless they provide us with a way.
My recommendation in this situation is to immediately rename the top-level link folder name in odrive once you’ve linked the OneDrive account to give it identifying information. That is at least in the control of the user right away. Hopefully OneDrive will update its API at some point to give us access to more user info other than displayName.
Thanks again–heavy cloud storage users with multiple accounts are definitely the kind of users we want to satisfy. Let us know if you see anything else we can make better, too!
After posting above I went through the process at Otixo. They do exactly what I suggested, giving an aware user a proactive flexible naming option as the link is created – not offering the rename after the link has been created. Try it, I know you have heard of them
I like your desktop integration way, way, more than theirs, but your lack of Android means I have to use Otixo or someone else on Android.
Well, we figure that in most cases (OneDrive aside), creating the link faster would be the best experience since you can get going faster.
Mobile clients are definitely on our roadmap for this year, but for now people will have to use the webclient on mobile, use the mobile apps of individual storage providers, or use something else.
