Hi Samuria, thanks for responding.
Not sure where you get 15GB from, but all the marketing I've seen suggests only 5GB is free (1TB for students), then you pay after that.
You get 1TB when you buy an Office 365 subscription regardless of whether you're a student or not - Buy Office 365 Home
Not that the amount of space is my concern. My issue is that I want to hold the "original" source copy of data on my own local 1TB hard drive and use OneDrive to back this up. (I say mine, but I'm talking about my parents!). You are suggesting, as I appear to have witnessed, that OneDrive becomes the "master" of the data and it is no longer stored on the local PC drive, which is what appeared to be happening to me when setting up my parents PC. I don't want that!
If you understood OneDrive you'd realize your "data" is stored on your local computer. OneDrive has to get that data that's backed up in the cloud from somewhere. The files you drop into the OneDrive folder are also backed up to OneDrive which are then shared with other devices connected to your account.
I have OneDrive setup on my own Windows 10 Professional desktop and it works EXACTLY as I want it to. I have multiple SSD drives and my data is stored on one of them, not on the OS drive, so the standard Windows libraries all point to the physical storage location on my own local drive. I then have OneDrive setup to "backup" various important folders. This works perfectly and I've not seen any attempts by OneDrive to take "ownership" of my libraries or files - it simply backs them up into the cloud and the files still exist on my own local drives. I've been running Windows 10 Professional like this for a number of years now, so suspect, the issue with my parents PC is that a) it is running Windows Home, or b) Microsoft have changed the way in which OneDrive interacts or is installed by default.
OneDrive only syncs folders you tell it to. It doesn't take over anything. If nothing is put into the OneDrive folder, or no other folders are attached to OneDrive, OneDrive has no say.
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Ah, I've just realised that on my own PC I'm actually using Google Drive, not OneDrive, which probably explains why I've never had the issues I'm seeing on my parents desktop.
I think the answer is for me to switch them to Google Drive, then I can configure the backup the way "I" want it to work, rather than the way "Microsoft" want's it to work for me!
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So, having just read an article comparing OneDrive and Google Drive I think I now understand why OneDrive is working the way it is. The point of OneDrive is to "share" data, so whichever PC you login to with your own Microsoft credentials, the data will be available.
This suggests that OneDrive data is therefore stored in the "Cloud" and not on my PC. I don't want this "sharing", I want data backup.
As I stated above your files are local to the machine they came from and sync'd to the cloud to be shared across devices connected to your OneDrive account.
Google Drive simply backs up specified folders into the cloud, so the PC continues to use the local data, but any changes are synced into the cloud. Exactly what I want.
Same as OneDrive. Period.
So, with OneDrive, if I don't have an internet connection, does that mean I can't access my data in the cloud, or does OneDrive automatically download all cloud data and store local copies of it (assuming it can get an internet connection to do this)?
See this Microsoft article on OneDrive - OneDrive on your PC