How one drive works.
The Very Basics. Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. We talk a lot about OneDrive,
its various features, its quirks, its pros, and its cons.
But it's important, important to understand,
I think at a very fundamental level, just what the heck it does.
What is OneDrive?
How does it work?
It's reflected kind of in the question that I got the other day.
"I want to understand the ramifications
of copying files to OneDrive versus moving files to OneDrive."
And that's a great case where we can
examine just what it means to use and not use OneDrive.
So let's flip over to Windows 11 here.
I'm using Windows 11 as my example machine.
You'll see that it has a Windows 11 style File Explorer.
That's fine. Everything that I'm talking about applies
equally to Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7,
Whatever version of Windows you're running that happens to have OneDrive installed.
I'm also assuming that you have OneDrive running and you're signed into your
OneDrive account, so that OneDrive is in fact set up and working on your machine.
So what we have to do first, I think,
is talk about what it means to be a file on a machine.
If you take a look at Windows File Explorer as I have it open
right now, I have it set to a very specific folder.
This is my Documents folder.
In fact,
the Documents folder here on the left actually ends up going to the same place,
even though it says This PC, Documents, that is a folder on your machine
and that folder is in your users folder, your login ID folder.
And then in there is the actual true Documents folder.
If we were to take a look at that in full path notation,
because of course Windows Explorer tries to make it look a little bit pretty here.
But in reality, what we're looking at is
c:\users\askle\documents, and that's the location
of the folder on this hard drive.
Now, I've got nothing in it right now,
so what I'm going to do is go ahead and create a text document.
Example.txt
So there's nothing in it.
It's an empty file, and that's fine.
It could have a bunch of data that doesn't really matter.
The point here now is that we have a folder
Askle\Documents, and that folder has a file example text.
That file exists only on my machine.
It's in one place and one place only
unless I do something like back it up or make a copy of it somewhere else.
This is the one and only copy of the file.
Now let's take a look at OneDrive.
Onedrive also starts with a folder on your machine.
If I click on OneDrive Personal here,
you can see it gives you this OneDrive Personal, along with some kind
of information about maybe what is or isn't in the folder.
But the bottom line is it doesn't tell you where on the disk the folder is.
We happen to know that. If we go to again
C: Users Login ID, there's a OneDrive folder here.
So if I double click on that,
this is the true location of the OneDrive folder on this machine.
As you can see, I've actually got a few things in here.
I'm going to get rid of them because I don't need them.
So once again, we have a folder on our machine.
It is C:users\askle\onedrive
and I'm going to put a file here. Once again.
I'm going to put a new text document and I'll call this secondexample.txt.
Now we have a file on my machine in the OneDrive folder.
Again, the full path to that would be c:user\askle\onedrive\secondexample.txt.
and indeed, if we go over to the OneDrive
folder here on the left, we'll get to it directly.
It's basically a shortcut to avoid having
to go through that folder structure every time.
I personally find this much more explicit
and much easier to understand exactly where things are stored on your machine.
So far, so good.
It looks very much like the file we
created in our Documents folder, except it's not.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to move this window off to the side.
I'll see if I can do that...
So it's taking up half the screen and I'm going to fire up Edge
if it'd be the other half of the screen and go to OneDrive.com.
Now this is where the first and perhaps
most important part of OneDrive's magic comes from.
The mere act of creating that file in the OneDrive folder on my PC
caused that file to then be automatically uploaded to OneDrive.com. My Cloud Storage.
That cloud storage is of course available to you anywhere.
As long as you can log into your OneDrive account online.
You can access all of the files that are
stored in your OneDrive from any computer, even mobile devices.
So there is one of the big differences.
The original Example file,
which sits only in My Documents folder, is only in my Documents folder.
There's just one copy.
The second Example file that exists
in my OneDrive folder has been automatically uploaded
to the OneDrive Cloud Storage without my having to do a thing.
You saw that I did exactly the same thing.
All I did was create it.
What mattered was where. And the fact
that it exists in the OneDrive folder within the OneDrive folder,
then that is what caused OneDrive to notice and upload the file.
So it's important to understand then that only files within the OneDrive folder,
Again, this is the folder C:users.
in my case, askle that's my login
ID OneDrive. Only the files within this folder are managed by OneDrive.
You can have subfolders, those subfolders can have files.
Those subfolders can have subfolders.
It's all managed by OneDrive,
which means that it will all be automatically uploaded when you make
a change when you add a file or when you delete a file.
So now
we can actually get to the question, what's the difference between copying
a file to OneDrive and moving it to OneDrive?
If I now go to my regular Documents folder
where I've got the original example text, if I now right click
Copy,
go back to OneDrive and paste.
In other words, I've copied that file
to the OneDrive folder, a couple of things have happened.
One is there are now two copies of that file on my PC.
One in the Documents folder where it
started, an additional copy, an independent copy
in the OneDrive folder where I copied it to.
And since OneDrive noticed that a new file had appeared within the OneDrive folder,
it automatically uploaded that file to OneDrive online.
And you can see in the left hand side here that it magically appeared a few seconds
after I copied and pasted that file into the OneDrive folder on my PC.
Now let's delete that file real quick.
Click on Example.txt and just hit the delete key.
You can see it disappeared from my machine
and it's about to disappear from OneDrive online on the left hand side.
But it did not disappear from My Documents because that was an independent copy.
Remember, I had two copies on my machine, one in OneDrive and one in Documents.
I only deleted the one in Documents.
Now what if we move the file?
There's a bunch of different ways to move things.
I will in this case, right click on it and hit Cut.
Now I'll go back to the OneDrive folder.
I'll hit Paste.
Now the file is back here in the OneDrive
folder and a few seconds later it shows up online as well.
There it is.
However, this time because I moved it, it's no longer in my Documents folder.
So there is now only one copy of that file on my machine.
It lives in only the OneDrive folder
on my machine, and because it's in the OneDrive folder,
it has been uploaded to OneDrive.com and is available in my cloud storage.
Finally, if I now go back to OneDrive,
you'll notice it's not in Documents anymore.
If I go back to OneDrive and this time I delete it,
it gets deleted from the folder and it gets deleted from the cloud.
Now the file doesn't exist at all.
I moved it out of Documents so that there was only one copy in OneDrive,
and I then deleted that copy from OneDrive.
That is perhaps the most important concept to understand is that
whatever you put in OneDrive is automatically copied to the cloud.
If you move a file there, then the file in OneDrive on your machine
is the only copy of that file on your machine.
It gets replicated to the cloud,
but it's the only copy of that file on your machine.
If you copy a file from a different folder
that's not in One drive, and put it into one drive.
You now have two.
That's the nature of copy.
You're making a duplicate copy of the file.
One of them will be in whatever folder you started with.
Documents was our example
and the second one will be in OneDrive because that's where you copied it to.
But every change, every delete, everything that shows up all within
that OneDrive folder, anywhere within that OneDrive folder is
automatically reflected in OneDrive in the cloud.
And that is an incredibly, incredibly powerful and fundamental
concept to understanding how a service like OneDrive can work for you.
I hope that was helpful.
I hope that gets some of the basics across.
There's a lot more to OneDrive, there's so much more to OneDrive.
But if you recognize or understand only
this, you'll have understand the most important thing of all.
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I'm Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.Com thanks for watching.