If you have a Microsoft Office 365 online account there is a very high chance that you also have a free OneDrive account with a whopping 1,000GB of storage available to you. In this multi-part article, we explore what it is and the best way to get the most from OneDrive.
OneDrive (aka OneDrive for Business) is simply a secure storage space on Microsoft’s cloud available for you to keep your personal files. Think of OneDrive as a place for one’s own files.
For the past few years we have been installing OneDrive by default for all our customers with a suitable Microsoft Office 365 account.
OneDrive is not a company-wide shared storage area.
It’s true, you can share individual files with people or groups but SharePoint is a much better (and correct) place to store company or team-wide Shared files. We’ll cover SharePoint files in a future article.
If you have it installed you should see the OneDrive app as a little blue cloud near the clock in the bottom right-hand side of your screen. You may need to click on the tiny up arrow to reveal more icons if it has been hidden automatically.
This icon can show you some important things:
You are not signed in. Click the icon to sign in with your password.
All is working well and everything is in sync. Leave it alone.
A file or folder has a problem. Click this icon and follow the guide.
Files are being copied to/from the cloud. Leave it alone.
Files you create are stored on your computer as normal and simultaneously backed up to the cloud. Every time you make a change to a file the changes are sent to the cloud as well.
When using your computer you will find your OneDrive files by opening Windows Explorer (yellow folder icon at the bottom of your screen) and clicking here:
Or, if you are in an app such as Word or Excel, you can click File -> Open and then choose OneDrive as the location:
If you aren’t familiar with OneDrive already go ahead and give this all a try. Making sure your OneDrive is working properly might really save your bacon one day, as I’ll explain in my next article.
If you want to be a pro, learn about the more advanced icons here.
I know tech can be boring so I try to keep these articles brief and to the point. This time we covered the basics of what OneDrive is and how you can check yours is working correctly.
Look out for part 2 in which I will show you some really cool features of OneDrive.
Don’t forget, if you have any questions about this article please post a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer it or give our tech team a call on 03333 055 055 option 1. Guardian customers; don’t forget to use our VIP phone number to get fast, direct, access to our tech team.
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