Playing with OneDrive

October 1, 2015

I decided to play around with OneDrive, the Microsoft cloud space you get on Windows 10. I wanted to see exactly how this works. I figured, it's just a server somewhere out there...literally that's what it is. In any case, here's what I started with. Just a very simple copy of the music folder with one file in it, I then copied a second file and wanted to see when it would sync to the OneDrive.

Here you can see the music folder with my two files. This also brings me to my next topic. why does the music folder not look like an actual folder? When I put the second file here, it basically made a second folder that looked like the first right under the left side there. I have no idea why, but that was just very weird.

You can't see it here, but the music folder I manually created under the OneDrive icon was also the music note. The normal folder came up after I logged out and back into the computer. I did this because I was looking for a way to manually force the sync, but there's nothing I could find to do this. It's supposed to sync each time you log in, well that's how I got mine setup since I'm just testing it. Either way the second file did not sync as you can see even after I logged out and back in. There are some predetermined folders that you can sync, I unchecked them and just manually copied the music folder to test this.

There's this other thing that when I drag music folder to the cloud area where the file is, it creates a shortcut link instead of copying the folder. As you can see I'm just trying to make a simple copy of the music folder in this case and have it sync with the folder in the OneDrive. Although the tasks are pretty much like anything else of just dragging and dropping, the way it does things is a bit confusing.  So to keep this simple, just right click on the folder you want, copy and paste it to the cloud. Then just let it sync that way. It looks like this sync's okay, but not the folder I created and then copied files to.

Okay, for testing purposes I added a third file in the original music folder so now there should be 3 files. I also logged out as I didn't see any change, but there's still no update or sync. So I'm not sure if this only works with the predetermined folders that you get. It shouldn't but that's what this looks. I haven't even bother to check that since this should be no different. Well, there you go, you can use this just as extra space out there on the web. I'll keep an eye out and see if that even changes, but so far, it's not.

Update:
I left the third file in the original music folder overnight to see if the cloud folder would get sync/updated, but it hasn't. I haven't tried any of the default folder because I don't want any files there since I'm just testing. This is why I used the music folder instead and because I don't have much in there anyway. For now I'll just treat it as plain remote storage, but nothing that can sync to folders I want.

The best example of how a cloud service should work is the previous Firefox post I made. All you need is your account one any computer and it syncs your bookmarks without any fuss or other input from you.

I'm thought I play with this a bit more and even going into the OneDrive settings doesn't show me the music folder to choose it. So I can't even see many of the folders either. So this doesn't help.

It would be nice to just right click on any folder or file and have the option to just sync it and be done.

Apparently there are quite a few issues with OneDrive that others have ran into, so you an check out their forums here.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us 

Here's another interesting screenshot. The folders show no files, but you can clearly see that there are documents in the documents folder of the computer.