As I have said many times here on the site and on Twitter, I’m a big fan of OneDrive. It’s a solid, multi-platform cloud storage solution that works brilliantly well Windows Phone, iOS, Mac, Android and of course Windows PC. It’s also one of the best deals out there if you are an Office 365 user. For $9.99 per month you get office plus 1TB of storage. That’ll just about cover anyone I suspect.
One of the great things about OneDrive for Windows 8 is that you can have your PC save your files automatically to the cloud instead of to your local PC. This not only saves you hard disk space locally (although you can keep a copy local if you wish) but it also is an effective and easy backup to all your files. By default however this isn’t turned on so this How To will point you how to get there on your PC.
From the Start screen in Windows 8, go to the Charms menu and go to Settings. Next, click on Change PC Settings at the bottom of
Save to OneDrive Settings
the page to open up the PC Settings Page. On the right-hand menu you will see OneDrive. Click on it and you are brought to the OneDrive settings for you PC. The first option in the OneDrive for Windows settings is File Storage. At the top you will see the amount of storage you have with OneDrive and the next option down is “Safe Files to OneDrive by Default”. Slide this on and from this point forward all your files will be saved to OneDrive.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind when you set this up. First, it is not retroactive. What I mean is OneDrive will not go interrogate your hard disk and move files from there to OneDrive. If you want to move files from your hard disk to OneDrive you will need to do that manually.
Second, it is only going to safe files that are normally destined for the Documents folder. In other words, if you save a file to your desktop (like I normally do for screenshots like the one above) it will not save those to OneDrive. Those will stay local. It goes without saying but the idea here is to save your Office documents to OneDrive so you can access them from your other OneDrive enabled devices from anywhere.
If you haven’t given OneDrive a try, you can get a free 15GB account by clicking this link.
