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Upload folders/files without using browser, but also not placing them in the onedrive folder locally

Anonymous
2020-10-26T14:48:20+00:00

So I'm actually a fan of Onedrive and have been using it for a while.

Here is my question that I can't seem to figure out natively in Windows.  My problem is that I do video work, and video editing. You can end up with large video files that need to be shared with collaborators/Clients.  I upgraded to 1TB of Onedrive for just this purpose. 

What I can't figure out is how to upload a folder from an external drive directly to Onedrive without going through a browser.  I understand the Onedrive folder locally and that will sync up with Onedrive; but I don't want to have to copy the 35GB of video files to my internal hard drive (takes time regardless) then have that sync with OD.  Not only does that take extra time; but then I have 35GB of space gone on my internal drive.

I've battled this issue with OD over the years and there are sometimes some workarounds.  Ironically the best experience I had was with a third party file explorer on a mac that just treated OD as a network drive and I could just copy files to OD. 

Seems like this should be a simple thing for MS to do. Like a right click on a folder and upload to OD.  Or when I place files in the OD folder in File Explorer it copies them directly to OD and not to the local disk.

Am I missing something? Is there a function that I'm not enabling?  Any help would be appreciated!!

Video_John.

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Craig Long 17,825 Reputation points
    2020-10-26T23:41:42+00:00

    I work with video also.  My OneDrive folder is on my external drive.  I have all my project files in OneDrive.  So I can reopen the project at a later time and all files are always backed up.

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-location-of-your-onedrive-folder-f386fb81-1461-40a7-be2c-712676b2c4ae

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-10-26T17:34:22+00:00

    You also can't do this with a folder - only with individual files. So even if it didn't move it to your local onedrive folder first, it would still dump all the files in the root folder of Onedrive. Then you would have to go into Onedrive and move all those files again to folder to keep it somewhat organized.  It seems like an inelegant solution to say the least. 

    Strange - this would seem to be an easy thing to do considering how integrated they have made Onedrive.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-10-26T17:23:37+00:00

    OK - Just tried that, but if I'm understanding my symbols correctly, and if properties are to be believed, then that file was moved to my internal (local) Onedrive folder. This would then sync with the cloud, but I'm NOT trying to do is copy everything to my local Onedrive folder. Only upload to Onedrive from a local external drive.

    J

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-10-26T16:49:31+00:00

    File Explorer, select the external drive>select the doc>rt click>Move to OneDrive

    In OneDrive settings you can select other folders to sync

    PS You mention Clients, 365 Family is not licensed for Bus use. 365 Bus is fundamentally different to 365 Family, particularly OneDrive

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