Never lose your important files and documents again by creating an automatic backup.
We can never say it enough: when you are working on an important document, it is essential to multiply the backups. Yet too many people are still unaware of this and insist on saving their file only on the computer they are working on.
Calls for help from people who lost their computers with jobs that took years of work have almost become a daily occurrence. A few days ago, again, in Lot-et-Garonne, a doctoral student lost in a Bordeaux-Nîmes train, her computer in which was stored the only backup of her thesis.
However, setting up an automatic backup system for your files only takes a few seconds. If you have a Microsoft account, you can automatically sync your work to OneDrive, Microsoft’s online storage service.
This allows you to keep a local version of your work while storing a copy in the cloud. In its basic free version, OneDrive offers 5 GB of storage space. More than enough to store the few megabytes that a Word document weighs!
1. Download OneDrive
If the program is not already installed on your machine, download and install OneDrive. Connect your Microsoft account to it and confirm the connection.
OneDrive should generate a local folder on your computer where you can store files that will then automatically sync online.
Download OneDrive for Windows (Free)
2. Move your directory to OneDrive
By default, OneDrive synchronizes all the files and documents found in the appropriate directory.
To ensure that the directory containing your work is backed up, you will need to move it to the OneDrive folder connected to your machine.
Open a file explorer window, and drag and drop from your folder directly into OneDrive.
From now on, you will no longer work in the folder originally created on your PC (stored in My Documents for example), but directly from the version stored on OneDrive. You can therefore delete the first directory
3. Keep the directory locally on your machine
Now that you’ve moved your directory to OneDrive, you’ll need to make sure it’s also present locally on your machine to be able to access it offline.
To do this, click the OneDrive icon in the taskbar to deploy the OneDrive pane. Then click on More, then on Settings.
In the window that appears, go to the Account tab, and click Choose Folders.
In the window that appears, make sure that the directory where your important documents are located is selected
