Why always keep on this device doesn't
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com
with something that I think is a very
common misconception or at least misunderstanding.
And it's of a nature that's actually
causing people to lose data by accident. Because always keep on this device doesn't
do what you think it does when it comes to one drive.
So what I want to do is explain what
the feature really is, what it's supposed to do,
what it doesn't do and what you should do instead,
depending on what kind of a problem it is you're trying to solve.
Let's have a quick look here
at Windows Eleven and I'll walk you through the feature.
So I've got one drive running on this
Windows Eleven machine. I'm going to right click on it.
Click on Settings and you'll see here
that under the Settings tab is this feature called Files on Demand.
What that feature is is a way to save disk space.
Now
the keep files on this device,
which we'll show you in just a moment, relates only to this feature.
It has nothing to do with anything else.
It is just this feature.
So you can see I've got the feature turned on.
If you turn off the feature, if you turn off save space and download
files when you use them, then all of the files in your OneDrive
will be downloaded to your machine and actually take up space.
So if you've got 5GB of data stored
in OneDrive online, then with this feature turned off, you'll have 5GB of space taken
up on your machine because all those files will be copied down to your machine.
With this feature turned on,
all of those files will still be accessible on your machine,
but they won't take up any space, at least not until you actually try and use them.
So let's have a look at what that means.
I'm going to go ahead and open up my OneDrive folder
and you can see that. I've got some things here.
The interesting thing to look at is this status icon.
This is telling you exactly where the data for the files referenced here lives.
This first one.
The status is a little cloud icon.
What this tells me is that the files
that are in here and you can see the individual file also has a cloud icon.
The file is accessible on this machine.
There's even enough data there for it to generate a thumbnail.
But the actual data for the file, however big it is and I'm going to go
ahead and switch over to a details view so we can see just how big that file is.
So it's five megabytes, but it's not taking up five megabytes on my machine.
That file exists.
The data for that file exists only online.
It exists only in my OneDrive account online and not on this machine.
It may exist on other machines,
but for the purposes of this discussion, we're just talking about this one machine
and comparing it to what is stored in my OneDrive.Com account online.
So the file you can see it's listed like a normal file.
It's present.
I could double click on it and open the file.
However, when I do that, then there will be a delay.
The delay is OneDrive saying, oh, this file is online only.
He wants to open it.
I better go get the data.
The data is not downloaded to my PC until I actually need it.
And the way it determines whether I need it is if I try to do something with it.
If I try to open it, if I try to edit it, if I try to do something with the data
in that file, then after it's been downloaded.
Yes, it's taking up its five megabytes or
whatever on my machine, but not until then.
So it's a space saving feature.
Now, if I right click on this file, you can see then that in the pop up menu
is this item that says Always keep on this device.
What that does.
The only thing it does is download the data for the file.
The file is still listed like it was before.
The file is usable like it was before, but the data is already on my PC.
The data is actually on my PC.
The best way to think of it is that by saying Always keep on this device,
you've turned off that space saving feature for this file only or for any
other files that you may have done this too.
So if I click on this, always keep on this device.
Now all of a sudden you'll see that after a little bit of a refresh.
Now this status icon has changed to be a check Mark.
That means the file is actually on this machine.
It's been downloaded, and if I open it or change it or edit it
or do anything, it'll happen more quickly because it doesn't have to download it.
It's already there, that's all the feature does.
And of course, if I want to change that,
I can right click on it again and I can Uncheck this.
Always keep on this device and that will
then change it so that it will be optionally
removed.
The data will be optionally removed from my machine to free up space.
And you probably saw there was this other item there that said free up space
that will actually cause the data to be removed from the PC.
It won't take up space anymore.
The file still present. It's still listed.
You did not delete the file.
All you did was free up the disk space so that it would be only in the cloud.
It's only online once again.
As soon as I double click on it to open it, it'll get downloaded.
Or if I once again go in here and say Always keep on this device,
then poof it gets downloaded again and it's ready for us to use instantly.
I want to be clear that this feature
is only about space saving within one drive,
most particularly.
And the reason that I'm spending time on this is because if you say keep on this
device, it does not prevent the file from being deleted.
What do I mean by that?
Well, let's go ahead and fire up OneDrive online
OneDrive.com.
And here are these files online.
And if I go take a look at askleo
examples, there is the file that I've been talking about.
This is the file that I currently have marked as Keep on this device
in Windows File Explorer, but it also, of course, exists in OneDrive online.
That's the point of OneDrive.
I want to be really clear.
I'm trying to be very clear about this.
This file is marked as always keep on this device.
And yet if I go over here to OneDrive online
and I could open the file, I could look at the file.
If I hit delete,
the file has been deleted and it's been deleted from one drive, always keep on.
This device has nothing to do with whether or not the file can be deleted.
If you delete the file in OneDrive, it will be deleted from your machine.
Those are two separate things.
Now let's say I'm going to cheat here,
use the recycle bin and use the restore function to put it
back, which is another handy thing to know about
OneDrive is that it has its own recycled bin.
So I've got the file here.
What if I actually wanted to remove it from OneDrive?
But I wanted to keep the file.
I actually want this file to persist, just not in one drive.
Well, if you'll notice it's within a OneDrive folder, right.
This is how OneDrive works.
Everything within OneDrive be it files folders.
Whatever.
This is all mirrored and copied to your online OneDrive account.
So move it outside of the OneDrive folder.
In other words, let's go ahead and take a look at the documents folder here.
Right. There's a documents folder.
It's got this old thing. Where are my files?
I'm going to go ahead and delete that because we just don't need it.
I'm going to go back to my Askleo example.
I'm going to right click on this document this image.
I'm going to copy it,
which is one way of moving a file or making a copy of a file somewhere else.
I'm going to put it in documents and I'm going to paste it here.
What I've done is I've made a copy
of the file in my local documents folder that is not within OneDrive.
So you'll see if I look at this documents folder, the actual location.
Is it's a little bit obscured by Windows here.
If I go to c:user\
my username documents, that's where this file exists.
Ask Leo documents. And you'll notice that one drive is not part of this path.
Onedrive is not involved in this path.
If I take a look at the OneDrive
documents, if I take a look at the example here that I've started with,
that's a different location that's within the OneDrive folder.
So I've copied it outside of my OneDrive folder.
Now, if I go online and I delete the file here,
the file disappears from my Examples folder as it did before.
But if I go to my Vispc Documents folder,
it's still there because we made a copy of it.
We moved that file to a different location
on my PC that is not managed by OneDrive, and that's how you keep the file on your
machine and still be able to delete it for OneDrive.
The magic here is that everything
that exists within the OneDrive folder is managed by OneDrive.
Everything that exists outside of your OneDrive folder is not.
So when you make a change to OneDrive,
if your files are outside of the one Drive folder, they're not affected.
But if they're within OneDrive, then yes, they're going to be affected.
If you delete a file online within
OneDrive, it's going to get deleted within OneDrive on your PC.
Now I'm going to once again go back
to my recycle bin and restore that file because again,
I want to reiterate the importance of what we're talking about here.
I go back to my examples.
The file has been restored.
It is in fact, cloud only.
And if I delete it again, it'll be deleted.
The important thing to realize here is
that this feature always keep on this device had nothing to do with whether or
not deleting the file would delete the file.
The only thing that feature does is save
you disk space while keeping the file within one drive.
It still takes up space on one drive online.
It's only saving you space on your PC
on this specific PC for which this is not checked.
I hope this helps.
I hope this clarifies.
If you've got questions, if it's not clear to you, please do leave a comment.
Visit the article it's
askleo.Com/138874. Four related links, for updates,
for your comments and your questions and more.
I'm Leo Notenboomoom, this is
askleo.com