Skydrive WebDAV Access - Updated

Somehow there is very little information about WebDAV access to Skydrive, which is upsetting, because with 7GB (or 25GB, if you're lucky) of storage it becomes a very nice place to store your files.

Now, Microsoft officially claims Skydrive does not support WebDAV at all, which is sort of funny when you consider that it is exactly what the new Office 2013 uses to allow you to save your files there. Basically, when you save a document to Skydrive from one of the Office apps, it mounts your Skydrive account to a folder, saves a document there and then dismounts it.

Doing this yourself is very simple, and while some older tools (like Skydrive Simple Viewer or Skydrive plugin for Total Commander) don't seem to work, Office is going to help us.

First, connect enter your Skydrive account details in Office 2013 to enable all related capabilities.

Second, open any document, click Save As, select your Skydrive and click Browse. The following window should come up, showing the contents of your Skydrive.

All you need to do now is to click on the address bar and copy all its contents - this is the WebDAV address of your Skydrive account.

Now you can use this address in any WebDAV enabled application in any operating system. The simplest way to see if it works is to map a network disk in Windows. Use your Microsoft account email as username and your password when prompted.

Overall, WebDAV access might be a bit slow at times, but I find having direct access to my files very convenient for certain applications where Dropbox-like syncing might be an overkill.


UPDATE: Having to use Microsoft Office just to get your WebDAV address is highly inconvenient - for Linux users it means they have to have access to a Windows box. Fortunately, as I have just found out, there is a very simple way to get your Skydrive WebDAV address from any OS.

Just log in to your Skydrive web interface at skydrive.com, click your name in the top right corner and select "Edit Profile". When the page opens you should have a similar address in your address bar:

https://profile.live.com/P.mvc#!/cid-5190000000013e3c/

Now take the part after "cid-" (in this case "5190000000013e3c") and add it to the following address: "https://d.docs.live.net/". In our example it becomes:

https://d.docs.live.net/5190000000013e3c

And voila - here is your Skydrive WebDAV address. Again, you can try it out by mapping it as a network drive in Windows Explorer.


UPDATE2: Unfortunately, while the above solution works well in Windows and allows you to access your Skydrive via a mapped network drive, it doesn't seem to be possible to do the same in Linux.

Despite many efforts to mount Skydrive with davfs2 in Linux, I kept getting the "Found 302" error, meaning that the provided WebDAV URL redirects to another page. It turns out, davfs2 currently is unable to handle any redirects, which Skydrive (unlike many other WebDAV storage providers) uses. There is a related davfs2 bug that was filed over 2 years ago, yet it seems no progress has been made since.

Effectively, until this is fixed, there seems to be no way to access Skydrive via WebDAV in Linux.


UPDATE3: To be completely fair, it turns out it is possible to access specific folders of your Skydrive via WebDAV but only when using KDE's Dolphin file manager. This is made possible thanks to the fact that Dolphin uses Konqueror's (Rekonq's) cookies to establish a session, thus if you have previously logged to skydrive.com with Rekonq, it will use the same session and allow you to see your files.

To do that you have to log in to the Skydrive web-interface with Rekonq, open a folder you want to work with and note it's number in the browser's address bar. The number will be the digits after the "!" in the address. Now, insert the following addres in Dolphin's address bar and you should instantly see your folder and work with it normally:

webdavs://cid-5190000000013e3c.users.storage.live.com/items/5190000000013e3c!12345/

In this example "5190000000013e3c" is your ID we've found in the steps above and "12345" is the folder number.

Unfortunately, this only works in Dolphin and you can only work with one folder at a time.