Is it dangerous to use both Sky Drive and Dropbox?

Question

I'd like to experiment with Sky Drive, but keep using my Dropbox account unless I decide to switch.

This answer gives instructions for how to set up both at the same time, but I'm a little worried about data integrity. Is there any danger involved here? Will Sky Drive and Dropbox fight each other? Note that I am using Sky Drive/Dropbox on multiple computers, so they will be writing data as well as reading it.

Is this safe?

Edit: I can use them with different folders if necessary, but I'm particularly curious what would happen if they sync from the same folder.

Answer 1

There's no problem at all, they could be even pointing to the same folder via NTFS junctions and they'd both sync the same data.

This is actually one of the setups I have for added reliability, here is how I did:

• Install them both and let them sync if you already have files backed up in them.
• Stop one of the clients, say Dropbox.
• If the files you have in Dropbox are not synced in SkyDrive too copy them over to SkyDrive's folder.

• Delete Dropbox folder and create a junction with its name pointing to the SkyDrive one (CMD):

  mklink /J Path\To\Dropbox Path\To\SkyDrive
  
  e.g.: mklink /J C:\Users\Alex\Dropbox C:\Users\Alex\SkyDrive
  

• Start Dropbox again.

EDIT:

Maybe this is what you wanted to know: You'll notice is that Dropbox would be unable to sync a file called ".lock" that SkyDrive uses, and in SkyDrive you'll notice a folder called ".dropbox.cache".

Those things are metadata used by each application, ".lock" is just a lock file, ".dropbox.cache" contains cache of some sort for Dropbox, if I recall correctly it was for some deleted files in order to recover them faster, but files in that folder are deleted. Other than that I never nothing anything else, nor experienced data loss due to using both services at the same time.

Answer 2

It should be fine to do this but there may be a problem and here is a possible workaround:

You can make SkyDrive sync the contents of the Dropbox folder by making a link between the two folders.

You can do this by, opening cmd (you should run it as administrator) and running the following command:

mklink /d C:\Users\User\Dropbox C:\Users\User\SkyDrive

Replacing the two directory paths with the ones for your actual Dropbox and Skydrive folders.