The EASY Way to Sync Files To The Cloud - OneDrive Tips!

hey guys Matt here with another video today we're talking about intro to OneDrive syncing what does it mean to sync your documents from your Cloud down to your machine and your machine documents up to the cloud so I'm going to talk about what it means to do that why someone would go about doing that and show you exactly a couple demos of doing it for places like SharePoint and your OneDrive locations so let's dive in and figure out how all this stuff works before we talk about the benefits of OneDrive syncing we want to talk about what really happens when you sync your files using OneDrive most users keep documents either on their local device in their documents folder on their machine or they work from them up in the cloud so when you choose to sync your files using OneDrive it actually pulls those files down from the cloud or from your local machine and makes a connection between those two workspaces this means that you're going to get copies of your files in the cloud on your local machine and you can open them on your machine from there when they're synced the changes that you make to those documents between those two workspaces kind of sync up automatically when you have connection to Wi-Fi or another data connection so OneDrive sync isn't actually making copies of your files and making duplicates elsewhere it's just creating a portal or a window to your Cloud space on your local machine so that you can access your files there thank you so let's talk about why someone would want to use OneDrive to sync their files there's two big reasons that stand out to me why somebody would want to do this the first is that it connects your files from your Cloud to your machine so if you don't have a Wi-Fi connection on a plane or you're on a road trip or you're at a place that just doesn't have connection to the cloud space it gives you an opportunity to access your files on your local machine that doesn't mean the changes are happening instantaneously but eventually they'll sync back up to the cloud and your team will get your updates as soon as you get reconnected to This Cloud space that's a huge win for people who are on the road and working remotely all the time or just want to be able to work on their local machine so the second reason is people are really familiar with the file explorer or the local Drive the C drive of their machines so this is nice because when OneDrive syncs your files from the cloud down to your machine it puts them in your local machine files so people who are used to going into their documents folder or their videos folder to get that content have a familiar sense of working on their local machine but they're actually working on their cloud files in OneDrive not everybody is super used to working in OneDrive yet even though it's the base level of the Microsoft Suite so this is a great way to trick some of your old-fashioned users into using the cloud space while being familiarized with that classic file explorer style of accessing content [Music] so let's actually see this I'm going to do a demonstration and first there's actually two ways we can do this I'm going to show you the first one right now which is syncing with OneDrive so the OneDrive app is included on your PC machine if you have a Mac you can download it from the store and I'm just going to open that up here and type in OneDrive so after clicking next it says get to know your OneDrive add items drag or move them into the OneDrive folder it's just giving you some basic instructions keep clicking next it's just explaining to you what OneDrive sync actually does and it'll give you some hints about the the icons we'll go over those in a little bit and what those mean and there's a mobile app also so basically creates that space for you while you sign in and now you can open up your OneDrive folder it's going to take a while to sync all of the files especially if you have a lot of files already in your OneDrive Cloud space so you'll see that going on up in the top right corner you can actually watch the progress of some of your OneDrive files it's actually going crazy right now going through all my stuff that's up in the cloud so it's kind of fun to watch some of those and keep an eye out for anything that's not syncing or any errors that might occur so this one's all done because I didn't have it too much up in the cloud now you can kind of play around and navigate in your OneDrive space and see where it actually is I added mine to the shortcuts on the file explorer side so I can jump to them really quickly drafts or blogs and documents that I all have up in the OneDrive Cloud I can find here now the First Column I want to call out is the status that's like a nice white cloud that's just saying they're coming from the cloud and there's a couple of varieties of icons that you'll see on the status column depending on if you've downloaded the file to your OneDrive again they're synced to the cloud but they might they might not be actually stored on your machine space so when you click them that's when they get downloaded and you can open them up and work on them so you might set a lot of these files to be always available on my machine which means they'll take up space on your machine but generally you're just opening them from the cloud space and working on them and then the changes get pushed up so let's open one of these files I'm going to actually open it on my OneDrive sync space from my machine here's a little blog that I could be working on let's put in a title for this and make a change for it intro to OneDrive syncing I'm gonna watch the status up here it's saving the file so once this is saved you can see that I've got that check mark on the status column so that got downloaded and now it's actually syncing so it's done saving that change and it's syncing back to the cloud which means those changes are going up to the cloud so here I am in the cloud space from a browser and my blog template was updated a few seconds ago by me so this is already up in the cloud it's on my local machine changed I can see the change there because that's where I made it but I can go to the cloud and whoever else I've shared this document with now in my cloud space has those changes up to date if I was on a plane or on the road or something maybe this doesn't get synced immediately but as soon as I get connection back this change is going to be pushed up to the cloud if you ever notice something not saving or not syncing correctly it's a good idea to double check that that saving status at the top of your file or your app is actually fully finished and that whatever changes you made to the document are saved to either your machine or the cloud space before you close out of it otherwise stuff can go a little Haywire foreign to mention that this isn't just an All or Nothing thing you can actually go into the OneDrive app and pick and choose which folders both on your local machine and up in the OneDrive Cloud are synced and under your account if you're syncing multiple accounts you can go into each of those accounts and choose what folders from your OneDrive space or your local machine that you want to actually be syncing all the time so you can turn certain folders off or certain areas depending on if you just need your documents folder and you don't want to upload all of your video files because those might be crazy and take a long time thank you foreign so when you go into the app I highly encourage you to explore the settings of it skimming through the settings for your OneDrive syncing app gives you a sense of what's really going on and how you can make those adjustments to how you really want your sync to work on your local machine so do you want to start right when you turn your computer on do you want to pause syncing for certain files maybe large areas of documents so it takes some time to look into those and there's a good dashboard for your accounts if you are managing Office 365 accounts across multiple tenants or once you start syncing to multiple areas in SharePoint you can manage all of those in the account section of those settings these are really good Insider tips most of you might just decide to sync your OneDrive and maybe a couple areas and use all the default settings but for the power users this is a really good area to get into to to really see and understand what's going on thank you so once you get your OneDrive file synced and set up in the app you're going to open up file explorer and see a column called status and there's going to be a status icon for each of the files that you're syncing so I want to run through a couple of these here there's a lot of them um you're only going to see a couple of them if everything works well and if you ever run into common issues OneDrive syncing isn't totally perfect so depending on login issues or firewalls at your company it may stall or pause the syncing and as you make edits to these files you're going to see those statuses change and get updated and even when you download files from the cloud you might see some of those icons change around so they're important to pay attention to when you have an issue but generally they just are automated so one of the most common ones that people run into when they have issues with OneDrive syncing is the red circle with the cross that just means that a folder or a file can't be synced there might be a rule about syncing at your organization or some other issue arrives but when you see that cross and that red color generally something's up and you're not getting the latest and greatest content from your Cloud space or your local machine so if you're one of those types that like to always work on files directly on your device even though they're stored up in the cloud and synced up there the icon for solid green circle with a white check mark is something that'll appear when you choose to always keep files available on a specific device you can go into the OneDrive app and select those files that will always have virtual copies directly on your machine regardless of your connection to the internet a couple of these gray cloud situations are pretty common too one with a slash through it means that the app wasn't synced up or set up correctly or that it hasn't completed all the syncing if you see a pause icon you might have actually paused the syncing or for one reason syncing has been paused on your OneDrive account so you can go into the settings and adjust and resume syncing for that I want to point out here too that if you're on a work or a school account you're going to see a blue cloud for most of these file icons and if you're on a personal account you're going to see a gray or whitish Cloud so if you're sinking a bunch of content that's going to take a long time for your machine to process all of those things and pull everything down from the cloud and make that connection so you'll probably see that across most of the files until they update to a white or blue cloud when everything's good [Music] so now that we've talked about syncing in OneDrive let's talk about syncing to another shared space in the cloud which is SharePoint you can actually sync whole areas in SharePoint in this case I'm going to go to a SharePoint document Library here and you'll find the sync button right in the toolbar at the top of the library so as soon as I click that it's going to ask me if I want to sync this folder so now it's just syncing my files automatically I can go back to the OneDrive Sync here and see if things are syncing and I can even go and find that synced folder now in my files and now if I go navigate into my OneDrive I can even open up the OneDrive app and actually watch that sync happen so it's moving in all those files about 15 seconds ago and I can pretty much click any of the destinations for those files open up my file explorer and go right to them it's going to go into my user profile within file explorer and tuck it kind of next to where my OneDrive was synced classically so it'll give you the domain of whatever your SharePoint site is in and then create a shortcut or a portal to those spaces to get those documents it operates the same exact way as your OneDrive sync documents so same great benefits that you get from syncing a SharePoint site to your local machine and it's even better because generally those places are shared connections where teams are collaborating on documents together so you can make those changes and improvements to your documents and then push those changes up immediately as you continue to work together so is a good collaboration piece so hopefully this was really informative for you guys to start syncing your OneDrive documents hopefully it's not as tedious or scary as a process as it sounds and I was able to explain some of it away and you guys are more likely to already start using the cloud but use the benefits of syncing your files so that you can pretty much do the work you need to do at the times that work for you guys and then just have those connections do all the work for you to update the documents to where they need to go so when you collaborate on documents or you need to publish things out everything is where it needs to be so thanks again for tuning in add any comments below don't forget to like And subscribe the video for more content that comes out on this channel thanks guys

Channel: Bulb Digital

Views: 11,850

Keywords: onedrive, windows 10, how to use onedrive, cloud files storage, cloud files, onedrive tutorial, onedrive for business, onedrive sync issues, onedrive icons, onedrive icons explained, microsoft onedrive tutorial, cloud management, file syncing, onedrive benefits, sharepoint sync, microsoft suite, cloud space, local machine, file explorer, remote work, document sync, cloud access, onedrive setup, syncing files, working remotely, syncing demo, file organization

Id: 5rfk5POfnCs

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023