I just got my Office 365 account with 1TB of free space on OneDrive. I was desperate to find a way to get my files into the cloud for offsite storage. Why not use OneDrive…
The way OneDrive works is similar to products like Dropbox where you have a folder on your machine that continuously syncs with the remote storage solution. The thing I didn’t like about that was I had to move my folders into this sync folder for the service to work. That would require changing my folder structure which I wasn’t too keen on.
I found a solution – Symbolic Links. These are links or shortcuts that basically mirror the folder or file it points too. In my case I wanted to sync my entire Documents folder to OneDrive. What I found from the link below was to create a Junction symbolic link in the sync folder that would make the sync folder think it was the actual Documents folder and start syncing.
So in the command prompt with admin rights I issued the following command from the OneDrive folder
mklink /J C:\Users\Keith\Documents
Naturally your path will be different…
Just like that OneDrive started syncing my Documents folder. Brilliant
Of Note: This is a syncing function. If you delete something in your Documents folder it will be deleted on OneDrive as well. So I caution you to not look at this as a complete backup solution. If your machine crashes the files are still on OneDrive but if you delete the file on your machine it’s as good as gone from OneDrive.