OneDrive is a powerful and useful tool from Microsoft, and yet I often find that people either aren't using it or aren't using it to it's full potential because they don't understand it. The purpose of this set of blogs is to demystify this tool and show you why you should be using it, whether you're a business or consumer.
OneDrive is a cloud service from Microsoft that provides storage space in their data centres on the internet and synchronises changes between that cloud storage and devices such as PCs etc...
So what do you get?
When you create a Microsoft account, you are automatically assigned storage in one of the Microsoft data centres (for Business OneDrive the data centre will be in the same geographic region as your businesses registered country, it's probably safe to assume that personal OneDrive is in the same geographic region your account is registered in).
Even with a free Microsoft personal account you get 5GB of OneDrive space (correct as at time of writing) and the paid personal accounts go to 100GB then 1TB.
Paid Microsoft business accounts that include OneDrive come with 1TB of cloud storage.
This may all sound a bit technical, but essentially 5GB is not very much and you will fill it quickly, 100GB is a fair amount if just storing standard documents ()photos will fill it quickly) and 1TB is a lot of space!
So how does it work?
Let's talk PCs and Macs.
Modern versions of Windows come with the OneDrive application installed as part of Windows. Mac users can download an application from the Apple Store.
When you install the OneDrive application on your machine, an area of the storage on your machine will automatically be set aside for OneDrive.
The OneDrive application running on your computer continuously monitors both your OneDrive storage in the cloud and your OneDrive storage on your computer to make sure that they both stay the same.
- Any files added to the computer are automatically added to your cloud OneDrive storage.
- Any files added to the cloud OneDrive storage will appear in the computer OneDrive folder.
- Any files deleted from either location are automatically deleted from the other.
- Changes you make to any files in either location are automatically applied to the same files in the other location.
But this is where it gets just a little more complicated!
Most computers come with less than 1TB storage, so you might be asking how can OneDrive copy all the files down to the computer? Surely, there are going to be space problems?
The explanation I've given above is mainly OK if you're using just one PC (I'll explain the mainly later), but if you have two computers connected to your OneDrive (or tablet, phone etc.. which could be uploading files) things are a little different.
In this situation, OneDrive will recognise that new files have been added and you will see an icon on your computer to show the new file, but it won't actually copy the file down to the local storage on your computer!
In effect, it just puts a tiny placeholder there to show the file exists. It will only be downloaded onto your computer if you open or edit it.
Notice the small cloud icon against the file in the image above. This icon denotes that there isn't a copy of this file stored locally, but it is on OneDrive and can be retrieved by opening it.
In the next post I'll examine the different statuses files and folders in OneDrive can have, what they mean and the icons that are displayed