GRcade

I'm on windows 10, and want to backup certain folders to onedrive and have it sync. How do i do this?

I always seem to have to manually copy over the additional files i have created and its a bit annoying.

Only things inside the one drive folder will sync.

You get very little storage with OneDrive now as well. All free accounts have been cut back to 5GB.

There are a few ways to do this, are these folders normal folders you have made or are they your "Documents" "Music" "Pictures" folders, if they are you can move the location of these folder to the OneDrive folder, they would look in Windows like they are in the same place but they would by synced by OneDrive.

If they are other folders you can do this using Microsoft SyncToy here which will let you set up folder pairs, you can then set up a scheduled task to fire the sync of the folders on a schedule, it wont be instant to when a change happens but it will push the changes to the onedrive folder which will then upload on the schedule Schedule Guide

Alternatively you could use Symbolic Links, these would be used if the folders need to stay where they are an you want "instant" sync of changes, they are a bit more complicated so I wont go into details, drop me a PM and I'll help if you want it.

Cheers sounds a little challenging. May drop you a pm next week if i cannot figure it out.

Everything Errkal already suggested (of course!) but there is also a sync service called SugarSync that will let you sync any folder anywhere to their service.

Otherwise yes you have to use symlinks or some backup thing or move folder locations.

I would also say 'synchronisation' and 'backup' should not be confused. IMO, one drive is pretty unreliable for backup purposes as its synchronisation updates all copies to the most recent version, so if anything goes wrong such as anything being deleted, for example, that will be synced and copied into the cloud. The annoying thing is that MS themselves keep touting "backup" as one of the main reasons to use One Drive and I believe this is fundamentally misleading. Windows 10's File History feature is much more useful in this regard as it periodically saves previous versions of files to a separate drive that you can recover if anything goes wrong. Still not as good as some third party options though.

That's true however Dropbox for example includes versioning and undelete. Provided nothing wrong happened with indexing and sync, it's fine.

OneDrive is awful at sync in my experience.

Anyone who heads reliable backup should have local sync or versioning depending on their need. Myself I very rarely need an old version of a file. For that automatic file versioning in software is a better idea or just regularly using Save As when you make major changes.

Meep wrote:I would also say 'synchronisation' and 'backup' should not be confused. IMO, one drive is pretty unreliable for backup purposes as its synchronisation updates all copies to the most recent version, so if anything goes wrong such as anything being deleted, for example, that will be synced and copied into the cloud. The annoying thing is that MS themselves keep touting "backup" as one of the main reasons to use One Drive and I believe this is fundamentally misleading. Windows 10's File History feature is much more useful in this regard as it periodically saves previous versions of files to a separate drive that you can recover if anything goes wrong. Still not as good as some third party options though.

One drive does count as backup as anything deleted is stored for 30 days in the online trash bin and can be restored and things that are uploaded are subject to version control allowing you to revert to a previous version.

Green Gecko wrote:That's true however Dropbox for example includes versioning and undelete. Provided nothing wrong happened with indexing and sync, it's fine.

OneDrive is awful at sync in my experience.

Anyone who heads reliable backup should have local sync or versioning depending on their need. Myself I very rarely need an old version of a file. For that automatic file versioning in software is a better idea or just regularly using Save As when you make major changes.

I don't have any issues with the sync on 10 it works great even for backing up things like the GR app project that has gooseberry fool loads of changes on a compile (not that it is stored there now but still).

Also as I said in my previous comment it keeps coming on for a month on the docs I use a lot of previous versions so is covered from that front.

It did used to be awful but it has come ona long long way in the last 12 months.

Wow, you are right, I logged into OneDrive through my browser and was able to access versioning. I previously thought they only had that for the Business service. I had assumed the versions I was accessing on my PC where from my File History drive...? Oh well.

I still like File History has my main backup system. That, combined with copies of files being held remotely in OneDrive has allowed me to pretty much abandon using system images; which is good because they were a pain in the neck. The only exception is when I am making some major changes on my PC like changing OS, in which case I will always make an image to restore back to if things go tits up.

why dont people just use dropbox? pretty flawless as far as i can tell...

I have office 365 so get 1tb of space and I just prefer one drive.

fair enough

OneDrive is really well integrated with Windows things but yeah I'm platform agnostic so I use Dropbox on OSX, multiple windows machines, Android and iOS and rarely have problems provided you are regularly connected to the Internet to avoid giant sync disparities. I also use "selective sync" a lot. One annoying thing is that new folders get automatically added to all devices.

In 2013 skydive as it was known was just really slow and had annoying illegal characters in filepaths. I used it a lot as a company but people mostly preferred using the local network. Dropbox always resolved a lot faster because it uses clever hashing techniques to only upload parts of files that have changed.

I did a huge comparison of them all which is probably put of date but Dropbox was consistently good.

Unfortunately the director wanted to be tied into the MS ecosystem from the off so that was that.