why is my onedrive full
hi everyone leo notenboom here for
askleo.com with what turns out to be a
surprisingly common question
i haven't put anything in it yet and i'm
told my onedrive is full i need to buy
more storage what the heck
honestly
it's a feature
i know i know it's a silly stupid thing
that it happens so frequently but yeah
it's a feature and in some light it's
actually a good feature but it's not
something that's for everybody
and unfortunately it ends up getting
turned on for too many
with that very vague description let's
just go right into it it's the one drive
folder backup feature now if we go
quickly to my windows 11 machine here
i've got one drive installed i'm going
to go ahead and right click on it right
or click on settings click on the backup
tab and then click on manage backup
and you'll see here manage folder backup
i want to be clear i do not have this
feature turned on and yet
kind of looks like i do
each of those items is checked
and of course start backup is seemingly
the only option to make this go away
i suspect that that's what's causing
people to
occasionally
turn it on without realizing that
they've turned it on
let's have a quick look before i turn it
on because the way onedrive manages this
feature
can be really
really confusing
so i'm going to bring up windows file
explorer and if i take a look at
documents you'll see that i've got a
document in documents.txt in other words
i just have a file that's in my
documents folder and if i take a look at
the full path to that well it doesn't
show this way but if instead i go to my
local disk users my login name and i go
to the documents folder there that's the
documents folder that's what this
document's shortcut is really all about
it's about this specific folder on the
hard drive so we can see it's on c users
askly
documents that has this folder what you
may or may not realize is that
one drive may have its own documents
folder
which has nothing in it that's quite
confusing but it's there you may not
have this you may not have this folder
yet
so with that being the normal condition
your documents are in
your user folder
and onedrive in fact if we take a quick
look here you'll see that we've got
desktop
documents
pictures and onedrive all as subfolders
of
this folder that is your user directory
let's turn on the feature
i'm going to go ahead and say start
backup
now windows does something one drive
does something and it starts
synchronizing the files that it found
i've turned it on for all three of these
folders i'm going to go ahead and close
the settings for now
and you'll notice that things kind of
sort of changed here a little bit there
was a bit of a repaint when we weren't
looking
if we take a look right now documents it
looks a little different
but it's empty
what happened to my documents
they got moved
they are now in
the onedrive documents folder
if you look at this pc it's still a
shortcut but in fact it's a shortcut to
the onedrive documents folder
so all of the shortcuts that have been
created here your quick access i believe
now goes to this documents folder again
in this pc
which is in your onedrive folder look at
that carefully you'll see that it's not
askly documents it's askly onedrive
documents now the reason this happened
the reason that onedrive does this is
that by moving
your documents folder your pictures
folder and your desktop folders into the
onedrive folder rather than alongside
your onedrive folder
is that
putting it in your onedrive folder
causes it to become part of onedrive
causes it to be automatically backed up
to the cloud
it's confusing because we now have two
different document folders we have this
onedrive documents
and yet
still on this pc
in your users folder you have this
documents folder
the old documents folder
that is now empty
in some cases the old folder
will have this where are my files in
this case because i've done this
previously my desktop folder which has
disappeared here has a
where are my files a shortcut on it that
may help explain where your files went
but the bottom line is that your
original documents folder where you may
have had everything is now empty because
everything's been moved over to the
documents folder that was created within
onedrive
okay so things got moved around that's
okay-ish
it's not what i would have preferred
it's not the solution that some other
cloud storage services use but it is
what it is
everything within your onedrive folder
is now being backed up to the cloud and
your documents desktop and pictures
folders have been
placed there instead of where they were
originally
what if you had over five gigabytes of
data in your documents already
remember the free account the free
onedrive storage account
has a five gigabyte limit
what that means is
as you then synchronize what you just
turned on your system is going to try
and put more than five gigabytes into
the cloud
it's going to fail
you're going to end up with
the error that says
yeah your onedrive your your onedrive
isn't big enough to hold everything
you're trying to put into it
all you did was turn on backup and it's
because you're trying to back up more
than five gigabytes worth of data
so what do you do what do you do if this
happens to you well
there are two solutions
one
is to
move things out of your documents folder
in other words the documents folder that
now lives within one drive has a bunch
of stuff in it it's got five gigabytes
or over five gigabytes worth of data
make folders elsewhere
move some of the data out from within
the onedrive folder
that'll free up space within your
onedrive
it does mean that you now need to keep
track of
these files or in my documents folder
that are in onedrive and these other
files i had to move out so they're in a
different folder somewhere else
it also means those other files that
aren't in onedrive you need to take
responsibility for backing up some other
way i'll touch on that in a minute
it gets confusing again it gets
confusing in a different way now you
have some files that are in documents
some files that aren't some files that
are getting backed up some files that
aren't
it's not the solution that i generally
recommend
my recommendation
is to not enable this feature to begin
with
my recommendation is to not use the
storage the file and folder backup
that onedrive offers
so if i go back to managing folder
backup you can see that it now says stop
backup on each one of these
if you happen to have it turned on
click each one of those
stop the backup
yes i mean it
stop the backup
yes i mean it stop the backup
yes i mean it
now
when you do this
onedrive will not undo what it did
it did not move the files back
from the documents folder in
onedrive to your old documents folder
you still need to do that in other words
you're still going to be
out of space until you move your files
and folders back to their original
location in the documents folder in the
pictures folder in the desktop folder
whichever folder has your data
that's unfortunate
but it also kind of sort of makes sense
from their side because they could
actually end up doing damage if they
randomly started undoing this work
so
turn that feature off
if it's been turned on
if it's not been turned on
and you encounter this dialogue which i
believe you will also encounter
if you're setting up one drive for the
first time
there are two ways to deal with this
one
is you can simply click the x and skip
this entirely this will not turn the
feature on
this simply bypasses managing file and
folder backup completely
the other thing you can do is uncheck
these individual folders
this little checkbox is actually
something you can click on so this way
for example i'm only backing up pictures
if i'd elect to turn this on
since i don't want it on any of these
folders i'm going to uncheck that as
well and now you can see i can't start
the backup because i'm telling it not
there's nothing to back up
in which case the only thing to do is to
click the x in the upper right hand
corner and make this dialog go away
and once you've done that then yeah
you're back to where you were before
onedrive started backing up
if you had it enabled i have to remind
you if you had it enabled for a while
you'll still need to go back in and move
the files and folders from the onedrive
documents folder to your regular
documents folder from the onedrive
pictures folder to your regular pictures
folder and potentially from the onedrive
desktop folder to your regular desktop
folder but
once you've done that this is something
that you shouldn't have to worry about
again
so we just turned off backup but isn't
backing up a good thing absolutely
back up
is more confusion than it's worth in my
opinion for all of the reasons that's
probably left your head shaking as it is
right what i've gone through is very
confusing i understand that and that's
one of the reasons i don't like this
feature
instead
you should be backing up your entire
machine anyway you should be backing up
every day you should be using an image
backup program be it a monthly full
backup and a daily incremental or
something right you should be doing
something that's causing your machine to
be backed up on a regular schedule
anyway and that should include not only
what's in your onedrive folder but
what's on your entire machine which
would include all of your documents
regardless of where they're stored
that's the solution
that's the solution that won't confuse
you with all these random folders
getting created in your onedrive folder
that's the solution that will save you
from almost anything for losing files
whether they're in onedrive or not
that's my recommendation don't use
onedrive folder backup but instead use a
backup of your own devising and that
typically is an image backup using a
tool like macro reflect or eases to do
or any of a number of other good
solutions i hope that's helpful
the companion article for this video
goes through this again in more detail
and might be a little bit easier to
understand in conjunction with watching
what i'm describing on screen so go
visit askleo.com 138 559 for that for
related links for comments and more
until next time i'm leo notenboom and
this is askleo.com
thanks for watching
you