OneDrive questions

There has been discussion on the 'Anniversary Update' thread about onedrive but it's getting buried a little. I've never been interested in it but seeing as I have 1 TB space via my Office 365 subscription I figured I might start using it a bit as an extra backup for documents, pics etc. However I have tried reading some stuff about it and am still not entirely clear.

As an example, at the moment I have thousands of pictures in the C: users/pictures folder. What is the best way to put them onto OneDrive? Should I be physically moving/dragging the files into OneDrive and out of that folder or should I be copying them to the OneDrive/Pictures folder so they also remain in their original location?

I do want the pics stored locally on PC aswell as in the cloud. But I don't want to see two instances of the same pic on my PC. So I am concerned that if I use the copy method and launch the native Photos app having done this I would see duplication of every single picture because said pics would reside in both C:users/pictures and also OneDrive/pictures. But on the flip side if I drag them out of their original home to the onedrive folder then they would now (after a long sync) only be in the cloud.

I guess it comes back around to my whether pictures should be moved or copied.

Thanks,
Wayne

Hi Wayne, you need not worry about duplicate files showing up in the photo app. The photo app has a setting which only shows duplicates as a single picture, perfect for doing what you want and having a backup in the OneDrive cloud. Therefore you can simply copy all your pictures rather than moving them.

Phil, thank you so much. Exactly what I was hoping!!!

philc43 said:

Hi Wayne, you need not worry about duplicate files showing up in the photo app. The photo app has a setting which only shows duplicates as a single picture, perfect for doing what you want and having a backup in the OneDrive cloud. Therefore you can simply copy all your pictures rather than moving them.

You could do that but then you would make duplicate files on your disk which unless your OneDrive is on a separate disk doesn't help for backups and you have the issue of trying to remember to manually copy things over to OneDrive and synchronizing the 2 directories on your disk.

An alternative solution is to move your C:\Users\<User>\pictures directory to C:\Users\<User>\OneDrive\Pictures.

Then you only have one copy on disk and you can look through file explorer either through pictures or OneDrive and see the exact same file. To do this right click on This Computer>Pictures and select Properties. Then choose the "Location" tab. Move the path to your OneDrive location (mine is on D drive - the default is C:\Users\<User>\OneDrive\Pictures )



You'll get these 2 dialogs - say Yes to both





Then you'll have one copy of you pictures and any that you put in Pictures will be automatically synched to OneDrive. You can do the same with Documents and other system folders if you wish.

Scottyboy99 said:

But on the flip side if I drag them out of their original home to the onedrive folder then they would now (after a long sync) only be in the cloud.

No, this is not the case. They will be on your disk and in the cloud (unless you deliberately decide not to synchronize a specific folder in which case it is deleted from your disk but remains in the cloud).

Note that if you delete files from disk this deletion will be synchronized to OneDrive so you still need to make a backup as normal.

That's great help. I will follow that as that suits needs perfectly. Cheers to you both