What if OneDrive Is Too Big for My Hard Disk?
Hi everyone Leo notenboom here for askleo.com. Let's get right to the question I was asked. “I
have a Surface with limited storage I want to keep data in OneDrive and not on my local drive unless
I need it. I don't know how to arrange that. When I delete items from my computer OneDrive
seems to want to replace them. Is there any easy way to set it up so that doesn't happen?”
This is actually a relatively common scenario that I expect to become more and more common.
Particularly with Office 365 now giving you a terabyte of online storage, if not more,
depending on how you use it. It's very common, and certainly it happens to me,
where I actually have more data in my online cloud storage that I have room for on my hard disk.
Fortunately OneDrive has a couple of different ways to approach this problem.
Let's have a look. So on my Windows 10 home machine the first thing I’m going to do is open up
the OneDrive folder on my machine. And you can see that I’ve got three different folders of my own in
addition to a document and the personal vault. I also want to look at those folders in the cloud
because there's an important distinction that's going to happen here. So I’m going
over to OneDrive.com and we'll see there that I’m actually looking at the same information.
If I instead look at a compact list we'll see that it actually looks very similar to what I have
up above. Now you can see that the article images folder down below has five and a half gigabytes of
information in it. Let's say that that's too much. And let's also say that I never ever ever use that
folder or its contents on this particular machine. We're going to go over to OneDrive settings.
I’m right clicking on the icon and I’m clicking on settings to bring up that dialog in the account
tab, which is the default tab. We're going to click on “choose folders”. Now you can see that
all of these folders are visible all these folders are available in my OneDrive folder. On my pc
I’m going to uncheck “article images”. Now pay attention to this little message down here.
“If you stop syncing files or folders they'll stay on OneDrive but they won't be on this pc.
If they're already on this pc they'll be deleted”. That is pretty much exactly what we want. We want
those files to be in the cloud and not on that pc. I’m going to click “ok”, and you can see that in
the file explorer view the article images folder disappeared. But you can also see that it is still
present online in the cloud in the lower window. That is a wonderful way to manage disk space,
if you have things organized appropriately at the folder level. You can make entire folders
disappear from specific PCs. If you take a look at that top view there in file explorer
it's like that “article images” folder doesn't even exist in OneDrive. It does
of course and we could go back to choose folders and turn it back on if we wanted to.
But this is the only place that you would know on that pc that this folder exists.
This is a great way to manage large amounts of data. You can basically say this for any
folder. You can certainly go into subfolders if you like and turn them off specifically,
but I like to do this at the top level wherever possible simply because it gives me the greatest
amount of space savings. So that's one approach to managing space. And as you can see here it saves
us at least 5.6 gigabytes. Those 5.6 gigabytes will not appear on the pc. Another approach is
a feature called Files on Demand. Now that is over here in the settings tab of the settings dialog.
You'll see that there is an option here called Files on Demand Save Space and Download Files As
You Use Them. What I’m going to do is take a look inside of this transfer folder here we're
going to work on a couple of these individual files. It doesn't matter that they're small the
concept still applies. You'll notice that each has a status icon that is an outline of a cloud.
What that means is the file is not physically present on this machine. The name is the folder is
but the actual contents of the file have not yet been downloaded. And is not yet taking up space on
the machine. I’m going to right click on this file and say “always keep on this device”. The file
is then synced and downloaded. You'll notice that it's changed to a green check mark. That green
check mark means that the file is a present and synchronized with what's in the cloud.
If you were to double click on the file to, say, run it or open it in its companion application or
something else that requires the files data to be downloaded, that would cause the file’s data to be
downloaded. Now as you can imagine for large files that could take some time. You could double click
on say a very large document and it would have to be downloaded before it can be opened in its
application. That could add a little bit of extra time. But as you've seen here we can simply right
click on the file and say that, yeah, I want this on my machine all the time. Let's say now that
you've decided that this file is not something you need on your machine all the time. Well you can
uncheck “always keep on this device”. That means that the file is only downloaded when needed and
if you don't need it you can clean it up. You can see that the actual status icon has changed to a
check mark in a green circle which means that the file is synced and is something that was
downloaded only on demand. If I now say “free up space”. In other words that's instructing
OneDrive that for all of the files that are not “always keep on this device” you can go
ahead and remove the actual data. If we need it again later we'll download it again later. So
I’ll say “free up space”. That icon changes once again back to the cloud icon with nothing in it.
That is another approach. In fact it's the default approach these days when you install OneDrive it
means that OneDrive could represent gigabytes and gigabytes of files in the cloud but those files
don't take up any space on your machine until they are actually used. Now you can, if you like,
do that at the directory level at the folder level. If you'll notice that the transfer folder
here also has that outline of a cloud icon. I can say on transfer to “always keep on this device”.
You'll notice its icon changes it now to a green check mark. And if we go into it we'll see that
all of the files within that folder have been downloaded. Had there been subfolders all of
them would have been downloaded as well. So that's a great way to manage the amount
of space that's being taken up with files that you really only need if you need them.
You really only need to download them if in fact you need them for some reason.
Now there is another approach to this entire problem and it's not something I’m going to show
you here but it is something that can be done. And that is simply that you can change the location
of your OneDrive folder. The way to do that is to click on “unlink this pc”. It will remove
the OneDrive folder from your pc and everything in it freeing up that space. Then you would be
prompted to reconnect your OneDrive account. When you do that you will have the option to change
the location of the OneDrive folder. If you have multiple drives as I believe this machine does.
You can see I have a local disk C and a local disk G. I could, if I wanted to,
tell OneDrive to move its folder to the G drive so that whatever we decide to do with OneDrive
it would take up space on that other internal drive. Now this only works for internal drives.
You can't do this with externals. But it is another way of managing your OneDrive
disk space by having it be part of a different drive. Finally OneDrive has what it calls “backup”
and this actually turns out to be a somewhat confusing feature because it can actually result
in at least the appearance of duplicate folders. I’m going to go ahead and say “manage backup”.
Now it currently has everything backed up it's selecting my desktop my documents and my pictures.
If I say “start backup”. Those folders whatever they happen to currently contain in Windows will
also be part of my OneDrive. Which is fine. You can view the sync process and you can see that,
yep, there's all sorts of things that have synced. That's great. If I now go back to OneDrive online
you'll see that there are a few additional folders in the online storage. There's my desktop,
there's documents. Well that was already there, but we're using it and there's pictures. So these
folders that are part of my desktop experience are now being backed up to my cloud online. If I go to
my Desktop you'll see that there's a desktop.inI. That's actually these files over here.
If I go to documents you'll see that I have couple of different versions of that. Here's what's
confusing. Notice that the path for the documents folder that we're looking at here is actually
users/my-username/OneDrive/documents. I’m going to open up another instance of Windows file explorer
because what we'll see is that if I now explicitly go to C:/users/my username there's another
documents folder there. It's a different documents folder. And depending on which application you're
using, and how it has encoded the documents folder to use, it could be using either one of these.
When you specify backing up with OneDrive all of the Microsoft applications not just OneDrive but
Word, Excel, all of the others. We'll end up starting to use this OneDrive documents folder,
but other applications may not be so smart. So it is very much worth understanding that when
you back up using OneDrive, which is a totally valid thing to do, you may end up with duplicate
document folders. And using one when you might think you're using the other? It's something to be
aware of. And if you find yourself using the wrong one you'll need to go into the application that
happens to be doing it and change the location that it happens to be using as its default for
documents, for photos, or potentially, though there are few for your desktop.
Now I said lastly… but I lied. There is one other option and that is: there's nothing that says you
actually have to have OneDrive installed on your machine. You can completely
access one drive online only. So if I now unlink this PC - poof! OneDrive is no longer a part of
my usage on this PC. None of the OneDrive files and folders are taking up any space. They've
been removed. Everything still remains online. I can access the documents that I care about
by using them here. I can explicitly download them if I want to. I can do whatever it is I want to
using the OneDrive online interface entirely without having OneDrive installed on the machine.
I find it less useful because you don't get the benefits of automatic synchronization,
but it is another approach that works really well for online
access when you've got a real disk space crunch. I hope that was helpful. I hope that gives you some
ideas of how to manage disk space in OneDrive. As always the original article on which this video
was based is askleo.com/129954. You'll find any updates, related links, comments and more there.
As always thank you for watching I’m Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.com.