How to sync files to Onedrive

Contents

What is OneDrive sync

OneDrive is a program that stores your files in the cloud as a backup in the event that something should happen to your local files. OneDrive sync is a feature where OneDrive will backup your important files for you in the background and can easily be access from another computer also linked to your one drive account

Who has Onedrive?

One Drive is provided to any employee with an Office 365 suite license (Email, Teams, etc)

Where to find OneDrive

OneDrive should be installed on every XGS computer and can be found in your taskbar icons in the bottom right of Windows. You may need to click on the up arrow in order to see it. Depending on your user configuration in Windows.

This is the one drive symbol. It may be located here or will require clicking the up arrow symbol just to the left of it.

How to enable OneDrive sync

Once you have located the OneDrive symbol, the steps to enabling syncing is very simple.

Click on the OneDrive symbol (The blue cloud)
Click on the Help & Settings button
Click on Settings within the context menu that appears
Click on the category at the top that says Backup and then click on Manage Backup
Make sure that all backup locations given are selected with a blue checkmark and click Start Backup
Verify that the blue checkmarks do appear above each folder backup.

Once you’ve clicked Start backup, you’re all done!

Flickering desktop icons?

You may notice that some of your desktop icons will disappear and then re-appear soon after. This is normal and everything will return to normal as soon as Onedrive is finished with it’s initial backup of your desktop icons.

Useful tips

OneDrive icon changes

OneDrive changes icons to have either a cloud, checkmark, or X symbol beside them. Here is a brief description of what these mean.

Cloud Symbol – The file is not on the computer. But is accessible remotely from the cloud by clicking the icon as usual. Which will then make the file download to your computer for viewing and editing.
Checkmark – The file is on the computer and stored remotely as well.
X symbol – The file is on the computer but can not be stored remotely. This is normally because the file is already open by another program.

There are some cases where you may want to free up space or you wish to pre-download certain files before you go off-line and can not access OneDrive. You can resolve this by right clicking any file and clicking on Free up space or Always keep on device

These options will appear with right clicking once OneDrive sync is enabled.

Files shared via Teams that come from OneDrive will stay up to date. Even if you make changes locally later!

Updated on August 5, 2021

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