How to migrate files without confusing One Drive

benj79 said:

I appreciate that - I've never used 'placeholder' files anyway, all my files are stored locally and all available offline. I can see that placeholder files can cause confusion (although I do think they are very useful if you have one device with more limited storage, like my surface pro) but I don't use them - so it really would just be a case of copying all the files to an external drive and moving them across.

Your money is on this being a relatively hassle free process?

I copied my local backup of Onedrive files to my Windows 10 build 10130 version of Onedrive without difficulty. Admittedly only 6.5GB in total. The Windows 10 local version of Onedrive synced files with the cloud - it did not copy them all up again.

benj79 said:

I appreciate that - I've never used 'placeholder' files anyway, all my files are stored locally and all available offline. I can see that placeholder files can cause confusion (although I do think they are very useful if you have one device with more limited storage, like my surface pro) but I don't use them - so it really would just be a case of copying all the files to an external drive and moving them across.

Your money is on this being a relatively hassle free process?

To be honest, one never really knows what it might decide to do. But regardless, the worst case situation is that it re-uploads the files.. it would not create multiple copies of them (unless you changed the folder structure somehow when copying them).

Would that be a terrible thing if it happened? I probably wouldn't even notice.. unless you have a metered internet connection.

I'm now in the same position of doing just this after buying a new computer. So, for me I have copied over 92GB of files from the OneDrive folder on my old PC to the new one before launching OneDrive on the new one. So, what has it done?....

Mostly it has been fine, for some reason it has decided to re-upload 5.6GB of the 92GB of files. I don't know what is different about that particular 5.6GB of files to the rest of them though?!?!? One thing I have noticed that you should be aware of though is that I have a few encrypted files (ZIP files with passwords) that OneDrive has checked and tried to "merge" and failed because it can't open the files. When this happens, it does create two files - the one on the machine gets renamed with the machine name appended to the end of the filename and then it downloads the copy on OneDrive in the place of the original filename. (The same as when it detects a file conflict with files that have been updated in two different machines)