Is OneDrive a backup?
No, it's not.
Hear me out.
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. Here's a question I got not that long ago.
I wanted to let you know about an issue
my sister had with her computer. Several months ago I
pursuaded her to back up her pictures, documents and photos to OneDrive.
All good, she did that.
But a month ago her computer crashed.
When I remotely installed her new computer, all her data was there.
But she also had software that was not included.
Here's the problem,
and this is going to be somewhat controversial and counterintuitive because
we talk about using tools like OneDrive a lot.
OneDrive is not a backup.
It is not by itself a backup.
This is really important to understand because if you don't if you don't
understand exactly what it is and what it is not tools like OneDrive are giving you.
You actually run the risk of still losing the data that you think is backed up.
Now to be clear, this is not just about OneDrive.
I'm not picking on OneDrive here.
What I'm about to talk about actually covers all of the similar tools
that you're probably already familiar with, be it OneDrive or Dropbox or
Google Drive or any of a number of other cloud synchronization services.
These are the tools that you install
something on your PC and when you put a file in an appropriate place they're
automatically copied up to the cloud and possibly onto other machines.
There are two problems with considering OneDrive a backup.
One OneDrive is really only one place.
Now I get that that's counterintuitive because we talk about how OneDrive
and the tools like It automatically make copies of your files.
They copy them up to the cloud, they copy them up to other PCs.
In a sense, yeah, those are kind of sort
of backups and we'll talk about why they are in a moment.
But more importantly, they're not.
OneDrive is just one place.
By that I mean it acts like one place.
If you lose access to your Microsoft
account, you lose access to everything in OneDrive.
If someone hacks into your Microsoft account and deletes all of your files,
all of your files are gone exactly as if they had been in one place.
If you delete a file, it automatically gets deleted in all those
other quote unquote places in the cloud on those other machines.
In other words, it's behaving exactly as if it were just one place.
And I think that that's really,
really important to understand and to take into account when you consider using
a tool like OneDrive with any intent of having it be a backup.
There is another problem that's more directly addressed by the question we got.
And that is simply that OneDrive doesn't operate on everything.
It only operates on those things,
those files that you put into your OneDrive folder.
Which means, yeah, the installed programs
on your PC, they're not even close to being backed up.
If you're just relying on OneDrive because
they're not in OneDrive, they're outside of your OneDrive folder.
There are some things that OneDrive's own, quote unquote backup can do that will
cause things like your default Documents folder or your default Pictures folder
to be moved into your OneDrive folder so that OneDrive will operate on them.
But even then, OneDrive is still just one place.
The things that are stored in OneDrive can all be lost in an instant due
to an account hack or other kind of mismanagement.
Everything outside of your OneDrive folder is not operated on by OneDrive.
So regardless of whether or not you think OneDrive is backing up or not,
it is definitely not backing up everything that's not inside of OneDrive.
Now, OneDrive is, as I put it, part of a healthy breakfast.
I'm not ragging on OneDrive or the tools like it.
I love them, I use them.
They are really good components
of an overall backup plan, but they are not a backup plan by themselves.
A more appropriate plan actually consists of multiple layers of backing up.
And if you follow me for any amount
of time at all, you know that the base layer.
The most important part of backing up is a daily image backup of absolutely
everything on your PC to an external hard drive.
This can be automated, it doesn't have to be a lot of work.
And the nice thing about this is that it includes absolutely everything.
The programs you've got installed, the settings that you created,
the files that are in OneDrive, and the files that are not in OneDrive.
On top of that, then yes,
a tool like OneDrive can actually provide a very comfortable additional layer
of safety for the data files that you're working on.
If you are working on files that you store in OneDrive, every time you make a change,
those files are automatically uploaded to the cloud.
That way, if something happens to your PC, if something happens to your home and all
of the equipment in it, the files are still offsite in your OneDrive cloud.
And then finally, of course,
you can enable File History, which once again does more frequent
updates of files as they change and stores them also to an external hard drive.
But at a minimum, that image backup that is underlying all
of this is the most important part of your backup strategy.
OneDrive, it's useful for many, many different things,
but when it comes to backing up, it's really only a part of a larger strategy.
I hope that helps clarify something that I
know really is is kind of not all that obvious.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is askLeo.com. Thanks for watching.