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With OneDrive, you can backup your important folders automatically. Important folders may include documents, desktops, and pictures. This is known as OneDrive Known Folder Move (backup).
This means that you can continue to work in the ‘traditional’ manner. In fact, you can save documents in your documents folder on your PC. These documents are safely backed up with OneDrive known folder move so you have access to them from any other device. No need to copy documents to a flash drive and you can work on them when you go home from work.
The known folder move is probably set up by default. But to check, select ‘help and settings’ by clicking on the OneDrive cloud symbol on the taskbar. In settings, you will see a ‘backup’ tab. On that tab, you can control whether or not you want your local folders to be backed up to OneDrive.
Restore OneDrive
If something goes wrong, you can restore your OneDrive to any time over the previous 30 days.
View OneDrive online and click the settings cog in the top right.
Select ‘restore your OneDrive’ and then select a time period to see a histogram that shows file activity so that you can see where you should restore back to.
We have other helpful topics about OneDrive for Business.
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You have a lot of options when you share a document that can make sure that the document is only made available to those who it is intended for. You can specify who to share to, set an expiry on the share, share with password, allow editing, or only allow read access.
When you right click on a document the share option appears in the displayed menu. Select share and you will see a window like the one above.
If the document has been already shared you can check who has access by clicking the three dots at the top right of the window (not shown in this picture). Here you can immediately block access.
Moving down the window you can select who can access the document. Anyone with a link, anyone in the same organisation or only specific people.
You can untick ‘allow editing’ so that the receiver can only view the document.
You can set an expiration date after which time the document is no longer shared., and you can set the share to only be accessible with a password.
If you have unticked ‘allow editing’ you can also block downloading of the file.
There are controls in Microsoft 365 that allow the ability to not only stop downloading of a document but prevent the printing or forwarding of a document.
This can be valuable, for instance, to a business that does not want printing or forwarding of quotations that they send to prospective customers.
OneDrive for Business gives you 1TB (one terabyte) of storage. If you pay for the personal edition of OneDrive you get 1TB storage as well. That’s a lot of storage, plenty for most people.
A benefit of this is ‘files on demand’. Documents and other files that you have stored on OneDrive are synchronized to your local computer, but only if you are using them or have used them recently. If you have files that haven’t been accessed for some time, there will not be a local copy on your computer.
Here’s where that can be really handy. Say if you have a solid-state drive and it’s maybe 240GB or 500GB in size (That’s a typical size at time of writing). Maybe you have 700GB of data, more than your hard drive will hold. You can store all of that data on OneDrive and have it almost instantly available to you as you work. Want to free up space on your computer? Right click on the file and select ‘free up space’. The local copy will be removed.
If you have a document shared to others, you can each work on it simultaneously, seeing where the other is typing and not creating multiple versions of the one document which happens when a document is emailed around.
OneDrive is online file storage that you can get to from anywhere.
If you use Office 365 you already have OneDrive for Business and knowing how to use it is a major benefit. It has a lot of really good features.
With OneDrive you are not restricted to your computer but can work on your documents anywhere on any device: mobile phone, tablet, Apple computer as well as PC.
Using OneDrive, you can more easily and securely share files or folders. You can restrict sharing to only certain people or set an expiry on the share. Sending a link to a file rather than a copy of the document itself solves the problem of people generating multiple copies of one document as they edit it.
OneDrive For Business works to protect your data with automatic backups. The technology keeps local hard drive space freed up so you can have immediate access to more data than your computer could store locally and that’s handy if you have a smaller capacity solid state drive.
Want to know more about taking advantage of OneDrive?
Know more about OneDrive for Business and how this online file storage can help your business.
Check out our next blog posts about using OneDrive: