Skip to content
Get started
Back

How to Back It Up with Microsoft OneDrive

Nov 12 2019

Killian: All right everyone I know it’s Monday morning. We did have a crazy storm this weekend, definitely had a power outage. We’re going to get the server back up and running. The good news is, you all have been instructed on how to do backups and make sure that your stuff was in OneDrive. We’re going to get you guys going don’t worry about it okay.

Killian: Hey Frank you okay buddy?

Frank: Yeah, my weekend was, yeah it was good, how was, how was, how was yours?

Killian: Weekend was good, you alright?

Frank: Yeah, I’m fine it’s not like I’ve lost the last three months of work, I think.

Killian:  Frank?!

Frank: (sobbing) It’s gone, it’s all gone!

Killian: Hello there and welcome to Tech Riffs, my name is Killian and today’s tip for being that tech superhero in your organization, is all about backing it up. We cannot express enough how important backing up your work is. Even beyond work, things like pictures, projects, settings and honestly there are so many things that accumulate over time, we don’t even know how important they are until they’re gone.

So, we’re going to walk you through how to do a backup using Microsoft’s OneDrive. It’s quick, it’s easy and it may just save your bacon some time.

Here we are inside my computer and if we already have OneDrive installed, we may see this little gray cloud down here. This is our OneDrive cloud. Or you can tap on this arrow and it should show up in this tray here. What this means when it’s grey and there’s a little slash through it is that we’re not signed in to the account yet. We’re going to tap on that guy and it’s going to come up and this is we’re going to sign in with our office 365 credentials.

We have DUO enabled. MFA is very important, make sure you check out that Tech Riff if you have not yet. DUO is going to send a push. I have my Apple watch and the good news is because of my Apple watch I can do it right from here. So, I tap approve and it’s going to show us this next screen here, the OneDrive folder. We’re going to click next so it’s going to ask us where to put our OneDrive folder which is all the stuff that we’re saving up in OneDrive and able to back up in there. Now we’re signed in we see that the cloud and the bottom-right has turned blue. We’re going to kind of next our way through here. We’ve got some instructions. Then we’re going to hit open my OneDrive folder.

You are now syncing with OneDrive and what this will do is, as we’ve seen this opened our OneDrive folder it’s going to backup all of this different stuff. Including your desktop, your documents, your pictures and things that are saved on your computer. Now, something important to know, and we see that everything popped up here because it’s pulling down all the files that I had stored up in OneDrive. It’s important to note that this is what’s called a file level backup. What that means is; If the computer was completely fresh and we signed into OneDrive, your files are going to show up. It’s not going to show up for things like your applications, your desktop background pictures are not going to show up. It doesn’t restore the computer as a whole. What it specializes in, is it saves all of your files and it puts back in the same structure that they were in. That’s typically the most important stuff and that’s the stuff that we really, really care about.

There are some pretty interesting settings that you can explore within OneDrive. So we click on the blue cloud we see that it’s starting to sync with my computer, and there’s all sorts of stuff that it’s pulling down. If we click on the more here and then we go to settings, we can actually click on backup right here and we could hit manage backup and we can see here that it’s going to kind of load up here. It’s backing up my desktop, my documents and my pictures and sometimes, like if you’ve got tons of pictures or you have stuff that you don’t want to backup. You can manage all of that stuff in here. But this is also where you can go to make sure that these are the folders that are getting backed up. Very important to know. It also tells you how much space you have left.

Whether you have iOS or Android, iPhone iPad, whatever it is, you can download the OneDrive app and then all your files are right there with you. You can get to your OneDrive files anywhere you can get in a web browser. If you go to portal.office365.com you can sign in there. Another really great thing is if you open a Word file, we can turn autosave on and we can tell it that we want it to save to our OneDrive. So now that autosave is on what that means is that even though I’m working on Microsoft Word on my computer, as I’m working it’s going to automatically save all the updates and changes to OneDrive. So if I lose power or something crazy happens my stuff is still backed up and ready to go.

Ok that’s it for today’s tech riff. Make sure to check out the other videos on our Channel and see if maybe we’ve already answered a tech question you might have. If we haven’t then use that comment section to let us know what you would like us to riff on next. And until then make sure to back it up!

I’m Killian Smith, take it easy.

Have a question?

Our team are here to help whenever you need us. Drop us a line and we’ll be in touch ASAP. 

Get in touch
Worksighted Logo

Worksighted Team

We are a team of over-enthusiastic people, ready to help our clients utilize technology to spur growth! We love technology and come to work every day eager to solve problems and find ways to impact our clients.