How one drive works. The Very Basics. Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. We
talk a lot about OneDrive, its various features, its quirks,
its pros, and its cons. But it's important,
important to understand, I think at a very fundamental level,
just what the heck it does. What is OneDrive? How does it work? It's reflected kind of in the question
that I got the other day. "I want to understand the ramifications of copying files to OneDrive
versus moving files to OneDrive." And that's a great case where we can examine just what it means
to use and not use OneDrive. So let's flip over to Windows 11 here. I'm using Windows 11
as my example machine. You'll see that it has
a Windows 11 style File Explorer. That's fine.
Everything that I'm talking about applies equally to Windows 11, Windows 10,
Windows 8, Windows 7, Whatever version of Windows you're running
that happens to have OneDrive installed. I'm also assuming that you have OneDrive
running and you're signed into your OneDrive account, so that OneDrive is in
fact set up and working on your machine. So what we have to do first, I think, is talk about what it means
to be a file on a machine. If you take a look
at Windows File Explorer as I have it open right now, I have it set
to a very specific folder. This is my Documents folder. In fact, the Documents folder here on the left
actually ends up going to the same place, even though it says This PC, Documents,
that is a folder on your machine and that folder is in your users
folder, your login ID folder. And then in there is the actual
true Documents folder. If we were to take a look at that in full
path notation, because of course Windows Explorer tries
to make it look a little bit pretty here. But in reality, what we're looking at is c:\users\askle\documents, and that's the location of the folder on this hard drive. Now, I've got nothing in it right now, so what I'm going to do is go
ahead and create a text document. Example.txt So there's nothing in it. It's an empty file, and that's fine. It could have a bunch of data
that doesn't really matter. The point here now is
that we have a folder Askle\Documents, and that folder
has a file example text. That file exists only on my machine. It's in one place and one place only unless I do something like back it up
or make a copy of it somewhere else. This is the one and only copy of the file. Now let's take a look at OneDrive. Onedrive also starts
with a folder on your machine. If I click on OneDrive Personal here, you can see it gives you this OneDrive
Personal, along with some kind of information about maybe what
is or isn't in the folder. But the bottom line is it doesn't tell
you where on the disk the folder is. We happen to know that. If we go to again C: Users Login ID,
there's a OneDrive folder here. So if I double click on that, this is the true location of the
OneDrive folder on this machine. As you can see, I've actually
got a few things in here. I'm going to get rid of them
because I don't need them. So once again, we have
a folder on our machine. It is C:users\askle\onedrive and I'm going to put a file here.
Once again. I'm going to put a new text document
and I'll call this secondexample.txt. Now we have a file on my machine
in the OneDrive folder. Again, the full path to that would be
c:user\askle\onedrive\secondexample.txt. and indeed, if we go over to the OneDrive folder here on the left,
we'll get to it directly. It's basically a shortcut to avoid having to go through that folder
structure every time. I personally find this much more explicit and much easier to understand exactly
where things are stored on your machine. So far, so good. It looks very much like the file we created in our Documents folder,
except it's not. What I'm going to do is I'm going to move
this window off to the side. I'll see if I can do that... So it's taking up half the screen
and I'm going to fire up Edge if it'd be the other half of the screen
and go to OneDrive.com. Now this is where the first and perhaps most important part
of OneDrive's magic comes from. The mere act of creating that file
in the OneDrive folder on my PC caused that file to then be automatically
uploaded to OneDrive.com. My Cloud Storage. That cloud storage is of course
available to you anywhere. As long as you can log into your
OneDrive account online. You can access all of the files that are stored in your OneDrive from any
computer, even mobile devices. So there is one of the big differences. The original Example file, which sits only in My Documents folder,
is only in my Documents folder. There's just one copy. The second Example file that exists in my OneDrive folder has been
automatically uploaded to the OneDrive Cloud Storage
without my having to do a thing. You saw that I did exactly the same thing. All I did was create it. What mattered was where. And the fact that it exists in the OneDrive folder
within the OneDrive folder, then that is what caused OneDrive
to notice and upload the file. So it's important to understand then that
only files within the OneDrive folder, Again, this is the folder C:users. in my case, askle that's my login ID OneDrive. Only the files within
this folder are managed by OneDrive. You can have subfolders,
those subfolders can have files. Those subfolders can have subfolders. It's all managed by OneDrive, which means that it will all be
automatically uploaded when you make a change when you add a file
or when you delete a file. So now we can actually get to the question,
what's the difference between copying a file to OneDrive
and moving it to OneDrive? If I now go to my regular Documents folder where I've got the original example text,
if I now right click Copy, go back to OneDrive and paste. In other words, I've copied that file to the OneDrive folder,
a couple of things have happened. One is there are now two
copies of that file on my PC. One in the Documents folder where it started,
an additional copy, an independent copy in the OneDrive folder
where I copied it to. And since OneDrive noticed that a new file
had appeared within the OneDrive folder, it automatically uploaded that file
to OneDrive online. And you can see in the left hand side here
that it magically appeared a few seconds after I copied and pasted that file
into the OneDrive folder on my PC. Now let's delete that file real quick. Click on Example.txt
and just hit the delete key. You can see it disappeared from my machine and it's about to disappear from OneDrive
online on the left hand side. But it did not disappear from My Documents
because that was an independent copy. Remember, I had two copies on my machine,
one in OneDrive and one in Documents. I only deleted the one in Documents. Now what if we move the file? There's a bunch of different
ways to move things. I will in this case,
right click on it and hit Cut. Now I'll go back to the OneDrive folder. I'll hit Paste. Now the file is back here in the OneDrive folder and a few seconds later
it shows up online as well. There it is. However, this time because I moved it,
it's no longer in my Documents folder. So there is now only one copy
of that file on my machine. It lives in only the OneDrive folder on my machine,
and because it's in the OneDrive folder, it has been uploaded to OneDrive.com
and is available in my cloud storage. Finally, if I now go back to OneDrive, you'll notice it's not
in Documents anymore. If I go back to OneDrive
and this time I delete it, it gets deleted from the folder
and it gets deleted from the cloud. Now the file doesn't exist at all. I moved it out of Documents so
that there was only one copy in OneDrive, and I then deleted
that copy from OneDrive. That is perhaps the most important concept
to understand is that whatever you put in OneDrive is
automatically copied to the cloud. If you move a file there,
then the file in OneDrive on your machine is the only copy of that
file on your machine. It gets replicated to the cloud, but it's the only copy
of that file on your machine. If you copy a file from a different folder that's not in One drive,
and put it into one drive. You now have two. That's the nature of copy. You're making a duplicate
copy of the file. One of them will be in whatever
folder you started with. Documents was our example and the second one will be in OneDrive
because that's where you copied it to. But every change, every delete,
everything that shows up all within that OneDrive folder,
anywhere within that OneDrive folder is automatically reflected
in OneDrive in the cloud. And that is an incredibly,
incredibly powerful and fundamental concept to understanding how a service
like OneDrive can work for you. I hope that was helpful. I hope that gets some
of the basics across. There's a lot more to OneDrive,
there's so much more to OneDrive. But if you recognize or understand only this, you'll have understand
the most important thing of all. For Updates For related Links For comments
and mores, visit askleo.com/142445 I'm Leo Notenboom. This is
askleo.Com thanks for watching.
