This is usually presented as a choice between the old way and the modern way. It is not. A mapped drive and a shared online workspace are good at different things, and plenty of organisations are right to keep both.
What matters is which files go where, and deciding that on purpose rather than by accident.
What a mapped drive is still good at
Speed with large files, when everybody is in the same building. Opening a two gigabyte design file from a server in the next room is faster than opening it from anywhere else, and no amount of synchronisation changes that.
It also suits software that expects a drive letter. Older line of business applications, design tools with linked assets, anything that writes a database file to a path. These often behave badly when the path is a synchronised folder, because the synchronisation client and the application both want to control the file.
The cost is that the drive only exists where the network does. Working from home means a connection back in, which is another thing to maintain and another thing to go wrong.
What a shared workspace is better at
Being reachable from anywhere without anything extra. Two people editing the same document at the same time. Version history that goes back further than last night’s backup. Sharing a single file with somebody outside the organisation without attaching it to an email.
The one that matters most in practice is leaving. When somebody leaves and their account is disabled, their access to everything goes with it. With a mapped drive plus a laptop full of local copies, it does not.
The cost is discipline. A workspace with no naming and no owner becomes a hundred sites nobody can navigate, which is its own kind of lost file.
Five questions that settle most cases
- How big are the files, and how often are they opened? Large files opened all day, from one place, argue for a drive. Documents opened a few times a week do not.
- Does anything other than a person open the file? If an application or a scheduled job touches it, keep it where that software expects it.
- Do two people ever need it at once? If yes, a workspace, because a drive gives you a read only copy and an argument.
- Does anybody outside the organisation need it? If yes, a workspace, because the alternative is emailing copies around.
- Would you need it back if the building were unreachable? That is a continuity question, and it usually points away from one server in one cupboard.
The middle ground, and its trap
Synchronising a folder to the desktop looks like the best of both. Files appear as a normal folder and live in the cloud as well.
It works well for ordinary documents. It works badly for two things: very large numbers of small files, and files that an application holds open. Both produce conflict copies, and conflict copies are how people lose confidence in the whole arrangement.
Use it deliberately, for the folders it suits, rather than switching it on everywhere and hoping.
Whatever you choose, write down where things go
The real cause of lost files is not the technology. It is that nobody told people where to save. If the answer to “where does this go” is not obvious in five seconds, it will end up on a desktop.
Name the two or three correct locations. Say plainly that nothing outside them is backed up. Put that in the induction for new starters, because week one is when the habit forms.
If you are thinking about moving
Measure before you plan. How much data, how many files, and how deep the folders go. File count and folder depth cause more migration trouble than total size does, and both are easy to check in advance.
Then clean before you move rather than after. Old projects, duplicates and anything nobody has opened in years cost time and money to carry across, and nobody thanks you for bringing them.
We help organisations decide this and then do it. There is more on our Microsoft 365 page and on cloud and Azure, and the continuity side is on backup and disaster recovery. If you would like a view on your own file store, tell us roughly how much data you hold and where it sits today.