How do I back up OneDrive files?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com.
Here's the question that I got from a friend recently.
I have a question about OneDrive and backups.
The files actually exist in the cloud, right?
So if I want them to be backed up when I
back up my PC, I have to bring them down to the hard drive, yes?
I find the whole setup for OneDrive confusing.
Indeed, it is confusing.
The files are in the cloud, yes,
but they're also on your PC, except when they're not.
And that's the key here.
That's what's so incredibly important to understand about how OneDrive works,
especially when you want to back up the files you have contained in OneDrive.
Now, a lot of people think of OneDrive as a backup.
I consider it a part of a backup strategy, but by itself, it is not a backup.
Why is that? Because it acts like one place.
And if something is in only one place, it is not backed up.
What do I mean by it acting like one place?
Well, if you delete a file in your
OneDrive, it gets deleted from the cloud and from all the other machines that you
happen to have that same OneDrive account synced to.
If you make a change to a file, well, that change happens on all of the other
places that that file might live in your OneDrive account.
If you happen to corrupt a file, say, by ransomware,
then that change is replicated to the cloud and to all the other machines.
In other words, it's as if they were only one thing,
because every time you make a change, it happens everywhere.
Now, yes, I understand that OneDrive
and some of the other solutions that provide this synchronization will
occasionally have for accidental deletion and even ransomware in some cases.
But that doesn't change the fact that if you lose your OneDrive account
for some reason, say, a hacker gets access to it and they
delete everything in your OneDrive and you never get your account back, well,
all of your files are gone, unless you have them backed up somewhere else.
And in fact, backing up your PC regularly,
which is what I recommend is one way to ensure that all of those files
are backed up in addition to being in OneDrive.
So why might the files not actually be on your PC?
There are two features in OneDrive that are designed to save you disk space.
For example, I have a terabyte of pictures in cloud storage.
I have a laptop that has a half a terabyte hard drive.
I can't put those two together, right?
I can't use that cloud storage
on that laptop because there's not enough room for everything it contains.
There are two features that allow me
to manage this, and I want to go over those two features so that you understand
exactly where your files are, which ones are on your PC,
which ones are actually getting backed up by your PC's backup,
and for those that aren't, what you need to think about doing instead.
So let's have a quick look at OneDrive here in Windows 11.
I'm going to right-click on the OneDrive
icon in the notification area, and then click on settings.
The very first feature is right here in the account tab.
It's this thing called Choose Folders,
and the name implies exactly what we're going to be looking at.
If I take a look at the list of the top level folders in my OneDrive right now,
everything is checked, which means that everything in all
of these folders exists on this PC's hard drive.
If I back up this PC,
I will be backing up everything that's contained in my OneDrive.
All the files are there.
But if I need to save space,
like my photos, for example, well, I can do that.
For example, let's take this transfer folder here at the bottom.
If I now uncheck that and hit OK, okay.
Two things will happen.
One is the transfer folder still exists in OneDrive on the cloud.
But if I take a look on my PC
at my OneDrive, you'll see that the transfer folder is nowhere to be seen.
If I go online, it's still there.
And if I go to other PCs
that have it marked as being downloaded on that PC, they're all still there.
It's just this specific PC that no longer
sees the transfer folder because I have it unchecked.
Now, of course,
I can come back here and check it so that everything will get downloaded again.
But if I'm managing space, that may not be what I want to do.
So this is the first place.
Files that are in this Choose folders scheme that are explicitly not being made
available on this PC will not get backed up when I back up this PC.
Okay, great.
We'll click on OK, we've got the transfer folder.
It's gone. It's not on this PC, it's elsewhere.
The other feature that we need to talk about is buried a little bit deeper.
If I click on Sync and Backup, and I go down to the Advanced Settings
here at the bottom, you'll see that there is something called
files on demand, and the default for files on demand is on.
What does that mean?
Well, what it means is if I go to my Word
documents, I'll just go to this folder here.
You can see that these three files,
they're here in my OneDrive, but they have this empty cloud icon.
What that means is while the file is listed here on my PC,
the data for that file has not been downloaded, doesn't exist on this PC.
It's in the cloud.
It's in any other PC that has to have it downloaded, but it is not on this PC.
So if I were to back up this PC,
I would not be backing up the data associated with each of these files.
Now, there's two ways to resolve that issue.
One, the way the feature works is if you were to open the document,
which I can just do here, double-clicking on it,
and I'll close that, you'll notice now that the icon has changed.
It's now a circled checkmark, a green circled checkmark.
What that means is that the file,
which was on-demand, was downloaded when I tried to open it.
That's the on-demand part, right?
The file's data is downloaded when you try to use it, which is fine.
And in fact, in some cases, by being in this state,
if you don't use it for a very long time, my understanding is that there may be
scenarios where it will go back to this cloud-only state.
But the bottom line here is now, if I were to back up this PC, I would get
the full contents of this test example one file because it's been downloaded
on-demand, but I would not get the contents
of examples two and three because they're still cloud-only.
Now, I could open each one and get the data downloaded that way.
The other thing I could do is I could
right-click on the file, and down here with OneDrive,
just above here, I can say, Always keep on this device.
What that means
is the data will be downloaded and will always be present on this device.
So even without opening it and without doing anything other than
that, this file will now always be
on the device, and when I back it up, it'll be backed up in its entirety.
So you can see here now, I have the three possible states of files.
Test example one is on my machine, but it's only on my machine because I
tried to open it and it was downloaded on demand.
Test example two is on my machine because I said always keep it on my machine.
And test example three,
it's listed on my machine, but the data is not yet on my machine.
And if I back up this machine,
I will not get the full contents of test example three.
So you can manage it at that level.
You can do individual files,
and everything that I've just done here will actually apply to folders as well.
If you mark a folder as always be on this machine, then everything in that folder
and all of its subfolders will be always on this machine.
But honestly, for most folks
where you've got enough disk space, you're not really trying to manage your
disk space that hard, there's an easier solution.
I'm going to go back to my OneDrive
settings here, and I'm going to click on this thing that says download all files.
So what's going to happen
is for all of the files throughout my OneDrive,
everything is going to be downloaded to this PC.
And you can see that once it stops synchronizing, all of these icons turn
into the solid green with a white checkmark.
That means that all of those files are here.
That means that when I back up this
machine, everything in my OneDrive will be included.
If I take a look at my Word documents,
they were in those three separate states earlier.
And in fact, you can see the previous
instance of File Explorer has also changed.
But they are now all always on this machine.
I believe that for most people, ther the right thing to do when you set up
OneDrive, is to come to the settings, Sync and backup, advanced,
go to files on demand, and click on Download all files.
That way you know that everything will be
on your PC, and when you back up your PC, it will include everything.
Fairly straightforward and doesn't require
that you keep track of or even understand this whole on-demand thing at all.
It just means you need enough space
on your hard disk to contain your entire one drive, and you're good to go.
Now, if you don't,
if you're in that situation that I'm in where I've got a cloud storage that is
larger than the hard drive I happen to have.
There are a few solutions, but the two are one, realize it.
Be aware that if you're not doing something else to make sure that those
files are backed up, they're not backed up.
They're in one place, and you're running that risk of losing them.
The solution that I take is to use a second machine.
I have another machine. In fact, the machine that I'm using right
now to record this video has actually a few hard disks associated
with it, but one of them is a five or six terabyte external spinning metal platter
hard disk on which I have my OneDrive, my Dropbox, my Google Drive, my Proton Drive.
All of them are on that drive,
and all of them are set to download everything all the time.
There's no on-demand associated with any of those things.
And what that means is when that drive
gets backed up, by definition, it includes everything in those services.
Now, of course, you're probably not using five different cloud services like I am.
That's fine.
All you really need somewhere is a computer with a hard disk,
and it can be external, big enough to hold your entire OneDrive.
You don't even have to use that computer for anything else, to be honest.
It just has to be running, and it has to be backing up regularly.
Once you've got it backing up regularly, and you know that you've got all of your
OneDrive files downloaded because they are not on-demand, you're done.
You have your OneDrive backed up completely.
I hope that helps clarify what's happening
when you use OneDrive and these fancy space-saving features.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.