Half a dozen uses for a OneDrive.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
I'm gonna cut right to the chase.
If you don't trust Microsoft, this is not a video for you.
If you've already decided that you
will never trust the cloud, this is not a video for you.
On the other hand, if, like me,
you know how to work with Microsoft and you know how to use the cloud safely,
or at least you're willing to learn, then I have some interesting ideas for you
on exactly how you can make use of OneDrive, especially since it's
probably already on your machine and for that matter, probably already running.
So what is OneDrive?
Onedrive, at its core is really nothing
more than a way for files you have on your machine in a folder called OneDrive to be
automatically copied up to Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage.
You can do more with that, and we'll talk about some of those things.
But the bottom line is it's a very simple, very easy way to have copies of your files
placed in the cloud where you can do things with them.
What kind of things can you do?
Well, let's start number one offsite backup.
If you do nothing else, it's a great way to automatically have
your files saved somewhere safe that isn't the same place where your computer is.
We often talk about backing up and making sure that you've got backups of everything
that you're doing, but most of the time, those backups are usually in the same
place or at least nearby, wherever the work is taking place.
For example, my backups are here in my house.
Off site backup is one additional layer
of protection should something really bad happen.
If my house were to burn to the ground,
all of my backups would probably go with it.
However, anything that I've got stored
in One drive automatically got backed up to the cloud.
It's still in the cloud.
It's still there.
I can access those files from somewhere else when I get my replacement machines,
when I recover from whatever the disaster happened to be. Continuous backup.
This kind of dovetails on.
That because all you really need to do
to back up something using OneDrive is to place your file in your OneDrive folder.
Once you do so, then it gets copied to the cloud.
If you make your OneDrive folder your working folder say you fire up your word
processor and you start editing a document that is in the OneDrive folder.
Every time you hit Save, that document is written to disk.
Onedrive says, hey, that file changed.
I'm going to upload it.
In other words, it's backing up your work every time you hit Save.
That's actually pretty cool, and I do that fairly regularly.
It is something that I've come to almost rely on as a way of making sure
that whatever I'm doing in between my official backups,
in between the nightly backups that I do here also get saved so that the worst I
might lose is like the last few minutes of work.
I can always go back to OneDrive to get the most recent copy of the file.
Now, I did mention that so far we've only
been talking about having your machine and OneDrive up in the cloud.
What if you had another machine?
That's really where OneDrive got its big start.
What happens is you have two machines.
Each of them are signed into the same OneDrive account.
When you create a file and place it in your OneDrive folder on one machine,
it gets uploaded to OneDrive online, but then it also gets downloaded
to the other computer that happens to be using the same OneDrive account.
A change in any of those three places causes the other two places to be updated.
So if I change that file on the first
machine, it automatically goes to the cloud.
It changed in the cloud,
so it automatically comes down to the second machine.
If I make a change in the second machine
that same file, then it gets replicated backwards.
It goes back up to the cloud and copied back down to the first machine.
One of the side effects, irrespective
of all the backing up that we've talked about so far. This becomes a really,
really easy way to copy a file from one machine to another.
As I've said in other articles, networking is kind of hard.
It's kind of difficult
on a local area network, but Onedrive side steps all
that. Everything it's doing is to the OneDrive servers in the cloud.
So the fact that the file might be going
up to the cloud and then back down to the other machine doesn't really matter.
The net effect is that you have copied a file from one machine to the other.
Simple. Number four.
Copying entire work environments between machines.
A lot of us who do a lot of work on our PCs have what I would call environments.
I'll use Word as an example.
You may have a set of document templates.
You may have documents that you refer to all the time.
Pile them all into OneDrive subfolders if you like, organize it appropriately.
But as long as it's within the OneDrive folder, then not only will it get copied
to the cloud, but it's also getting copied to that other machine or any number
of other machines that happen to be signed into that same OneDrive account.
It's a great way to make sure you've got the same templates, the same documents,
the same reference material all on those different machines.
It's a very convenient way to replicate your work environment across lots
of different machines without having to really think about it.
Now here's an interesting one.
One of the things you can do with OneDrive
is you can share files with people that don't have OneDrive.
When you have a file in OneDrive,
you can right click on it and File Explorer and one of the options
will be to create a shared link, a link that actually shares that file publicly.
There's various parameters you can set with that share.
But the bottom line,
the simplest one is yeah, anybody with this link can see the file.
And in fact, in the companion article
for this video, I have an example of exactly that.
I've shared a photograph that I took some years ago.
In OneDrive, all you need to do is click
on the One Drive link that I created, and you'll be able to see that picture.
You'll be able to download that picture.
Okay, so we've got files going between machines.
We're sharing files with others.
We're getting files backed up.
One of the things that this really kind
of highlights, one of the things that I look at it and I look at all of this
functionality that we've talked about so far, it's a recipe for collaboration.
And in fact, that's exactly what we do here at Ask Leo.
For example, one of the things I maintain is
a spreadsheet of the articles I'm working on, the articles in the publishing queue,
the articles that need updating, all that kind of stuff.
That spreadsheet, which is in Excel,
is shared with one of my assistants, and they make updates to it as well.
We are collaborating on the same file, often at the same time.
And I can see the work that she's doing as she's working on the file.
She can see what I change as I do so.
And that's all by virtue of the fact
that it's in One drive that we both have access to.
It actually makes online collaboration
really, really interesting and distance independent.
She's in a completely different state than I am.
So one of the concerns I often hear when I
talk about cloud storage in general, certainly.
But one drive and some of the other competitors is, what about sensitive data?
What is the deal?
Well, there's a couple of different things.
Remember that I did say you kind of sort of need to trust Microsoft.
There's not going to be some rogue
Microsoft employee, for example, who's poking through your data.
That's an assumption that I make.
I do the files that I have uploaded, the spreadsheet that I just talked about.
Yeah.
Anybody with access to the OneDrive servers can see that information.
But it also gets a little bit weird
because, for example, if my account were to get hacked, well,
then the hacker would be able to see all the files that I have in my OneDrive.
There are three approaches to dealing with this.
One is the head in the sand approach.
You don't do anything, you use it, or even worse, you don't use it.
You don't use online or cloud storage services at all.
That's really putting your head in the sand because you're not using any
of these services and features and functionality that could really make
a lot of different aspects of your life so much easier.
It's a choice. I get it.
It's not one that I recommend. The limit.
Your exposure approach, I think is what a lot of people end up
doing and that is they will not upload anything into the cloud.
In other words, they will not put any
files into OneDrive that they wouldn't be okay with having been exposed publicly.
So for example, my spreadsheet yeah, it's kind of odd.
It wouldn't really mean much to anybody
else but if it got exposed publicly, It's honestly no big deal.
You'd be able to see what articles were coming up next week.
But there's another level and that's
the level that I call the I've got this approach and that is encryption.
The tool that I happen to use is called box crypto and it is used to transparently
encrypt all of the information that I put into my OneDrive.
Now I could choose which I want to encrypt
and which I don't want to encrypt but the bottom line is that sensitive data
and I do have sensitive data in the cloud Is automatically and transparently
encrypted by Boxcrypter So that Onedrive itself never sees the unencrypted data.
Only I do, and only when I specify the master password to access my Boxcryptor
vaults. The bottom line there is that you get
the benefit of just about every feature you can imagine as long as you make sure
that you're using a tool like a Boxcryptor.
There are others. You could do this with Veracrypt.
You could do this with 7zip.
You could do this with Kryptomator which is kind of a Boxcryptor equivalent.
There's a lot of different ways to do this but you can use the cloud safely
for sensitive data by making sure you're using an appropriate encryption tool.
I hope that gives you some ideas of how you might leverage OneDrive.
Like I said with a Microsoft account.
You've already got it.
You've got something like at least 5GB,
maybe more of storage you could start leveraging right away for backing up
for sharing files for collaborating, for whatever you can think of.
For updates.
For comments, for related links and more, visit Askleo.com/43669. I'm Leo Notenboom
and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.