Why always keep on this device doesn't Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com with something that I think is a very common misconception or
at least misunderstanding. And it's of a nature that's actually causing people to lose data by accident.
Because always keep on this device doesn't do what you think it does
when it comes to one drive. So what I want to do is explain what the feature really is,
what it's supposed to do, what it doesn't do
and what you should do instead, depending on what kind of a problem
it is you're trying to solve. Let's have a quick look here at Windows Eleven and I'll
walk you through the feature. So I've got one drive running on this Windows Eleven machine. I'm
going to right click on it. Click on Settings and you'll see here that under the Settings tab is this
feature called Files on Demand. What that feature is is
a way to save disk space. Now the keep files on this device, which we'll show you in just a moment,
relates only to this feature. It has nothing to do with anything else. It is just this feature. So you can see I've got
the feature turned on. If you turn off the feature,
if you turn off save space and download files when you use them,
then all of the files in your OneDrive will be downloaded to your machine
and actually take up space. So if you've got 5GB of data stored in OneDrive online, then with this feature
turned off, you'll have 5GB of space taken up on your machine because all those files
will be copied down to your machine. With this feature turned on, all of those files will still be
accessible on your machine, but they won't take up any space, at least
not until you actually try and use them. So let's have a look at what that means. I'm going to go ahead and open
up my OneDrive folder and you can see that.
I've got some things here. The interesting thing to look
at is this status icon. This is telling you exactly where the data
for the files referenced here lives. This first one. The status is a little cloud icon. What this tells me is that the files that are in here and you can see the
individual file also has a cloud icon. The file is accessible on this machine. There's even enough data there
for it to generate a thumbnail. But the actual data for the file,
however big it is and I'm going to go ahead and switch over to a details view
so we can see just how big that file is. So it's five megabytes, but it's not
taking up five megabytes on my machine. That file exists. The data for that file exists only online. It exists only in my OneDrive account
online and not on this machine. It may exist on other machines, but for the purposes of this discussion,
we're just talking about this one machine and comparing it to what is stored
in my OneDrive.Com account online. So the file you can see it's
listed like a normal file. It's present. I could double click
on it and open the file. However, when I do that,
then there will be a delay. The delay is OneDrive saying,
oh, this file is online only. He wants to open it. I better go get the data. The data is not downloaded
to my PC until I actually need it. And the way it determines whether I need
it is if I try to do something with it. If I try to open it, if I try to edit it,
if I try to do something with the data in that file, then after
it's been downloaded. Yes, it's taking up its five megabytes or whatever on my machine,
but not until then. So it's a space saving feature. Now, if I right click on this file,
you can see then that in the pop up menu is this item that says
Always keep on this device. What that does. The only thing it does
is download the data for the file. The file is still listed
like it was before. The file is usable like it was before,
but the data is already on my PC. The data is actually on my PC. The best way to think of it is
that by saying Always keep on this device, you've turned off that space saving
feature for this file only or for any other files that you
may have done this too. So if I click on this,
always keep on this device. Now all of a sudden you'll see
that after a little bit of a refresh. Now this status icon has
changed to be a check Mark. That means the file is
actually on this machine. It's been downloaded,
and if I open it or change it or edit it or do anything, it'll happen more quickly
because it doesn't have to download it. It's already there,
that's all the feature does. And of course, if I want to change that, I can right click on it again
and I can Uncheck this. Always keep on this device and that will then change it so that it
will be optionally removed. The data will be optionally removed
from my machine to free up space. And you probably saw there was this other
item there that said free up space that will actually cause the data
to be removed from the PC. It won't take up space anymore. The file still present.
It's still listed. You did not delete the file. All you did was free up the disk space
so that it would be only in the cloud. It's only online once again. As soon as I double click on it
to open it, it'll get downloaded. Or if I once again go in here and say
Always keep on this device, then poof it gets downloaded again
and it's ready for us to use instantly. I want to be clear that this feature is only about space
saving within one drive, most particularly. And the reason that I'm spending time
on this is because if you say keep on this device, it does not prevent
the file from being deleted. What do I mean by that? Well, let's go ahead
and fire up OneDrive online OneDrive.com. And here are these files online. And if I go take a look at askleo examples, there is the file
that I've been talking about. This is the file that I currently have
marked as Keep on this device in Windows File Explorer, but it also,
of course, exists in OneDrive online. That's the point of OneDrive. I want to be really clear. I'm trying to be very clear about this. This file is marked as
always keep on this device. And yet if I go over
here to OneDrive online and I could open the file,
I could look at the file. If I hit delete, the file has been deleted and it's been
deleted from one drive, always keep on. This device has nothing to do with whether
or not the file can be deleted. If you delete the file in OneDrive,
it will be deleted from your machine. Those are two separate things. Now let's say I'm going to cheat here, use the recycle bin
and use the restore function to put it back,
which is another handy thing to know about OneDrive is that it has
its own recycled bin. So I've got the file here. What if I actually wanted
to remove it from OneDrive? But I wanted to keep the file. I actually want this file to persist,
just not in one drive. Well, if you'll notice it's
within a OneDrive folder, right. This is how OneDrive works. Everything within OneDrive
be it files folders. Whatever. This is all mirrored and copied
to your online OneDrive account. So move it outside of the OneDrive folder. In other words, let's go ahead and take
a look at the documents folder here. Right.
There's a documents folder. It's got this old thing.
Where are my files? I'm going to go ahead and delete
that because we just don't need it. I'm going to go back to my Askleo example. I'm going to right click
on this document this image. I'm going to copy it, which is one way of moving a file or
making a copy of a file somewhere else. I'm going to put it in documents
and I'm going to paste it here. What I've done is I've made a copy of the file in my local documents
folder that is not within OneDrive. So you'll see if I look at this
documents folder, the actual location. Is it's a little bit
obscured by Windows here. If I go to c:user\ my username documents,
that's where this file exists. Ask Leo documents. And you'll notice
that one drive is not part of this path. Onedrive is not involved in this path. If I take a look at the OneDrive documents, if I take a look at the example
here that I've started with, that's a different location that's
within the OneDrive folder. So I've copied it outside
of my OneDrive folder. Now, if I go online and I
delete the file here, the file disappears from my Examples
folder as it did before. But if I go to my Vispc Documents folder, it's still there because
we made a copy of it. We moved that file to a different location on my PC that is not managed by OneDrive,
and that's how you keep the file on your machine and still be able
to delete it for OneDrive. The magic here is that everything that exists within the OneDrive
folder is managed by OneDrive. Everything that exists outside
of your OneDrive folder is not. So when you make a change to OneDrive, if your files are outside of the one
Drive folder, they're not affected. But if they're within OneDrive,
then yes, they're going to be affected. If you delete a file online within OneDrive, it's going to get deleted
within OneDrive on your PC. Now I'm going to once again go back to my recycle bin and restore that file
because again, I want to reiterate the importance
of what we're talking about here. I go back to my examples. The file has been restored. It is in fact, cloud only. And if I delete it again,
it'll be deleted. The important thing to realize here is that this feature always keep on this
device had nothing to do with whether or not deleting the file
would delete the file. The only thing that feature does is save you disk space while keeping
the file within one drive. It still takes up space
on one drive online. It's only saving you space on your PC on this specific PC
for which this is not checked. I hope this helps. I hope this clarifies. If you've got questions, if it's not
clear to you, please do leave a comment. Visit the article it's askleo.Com/138874.
Four related links, for updates, for your comments and your
questions and more. I'm Leo Notenboomoom, this is askleo.com
