There once was a time when I payed attention to cloud drive solution face-offs on the Internet. DropBox vs. Google Drive, OneDrive vs iCloud, Copy (R.I.P) vs Box, you name it. It was always interesting to see the pros and cons of each solution and then make a decision on who the winner was. OneDrive never came victorious with its competitors, and this was a shame as it is one of the solutions that had the most storage available for the best price. Fortunately OneDrive has evolved into a stable and trustworthy solution, so all these terabytes are really coming handy for cloud syncing.  In this post I will show you a simple way in which you can use all that extra storage to archive things in OneDrive.

Motivation

Even though storage is cheap these days we really do not want to hoard files in our computers that are never accessed and simply take space. We could have a external drives and place all these files there but then we are faced with the daunting task of remembering which drive was what file. And not only that, we need to make sure those archives are backed up somewhere. Too complicated.

I have signed up my family with Office365 and each member gets 1 TB of storage. That is a huge amount of online storage. The catch is that when you use it with OneDrive, only the things that you keep inside OneDrive on your machine will sync actually sync. So how do you get things to archive to OneDrive without having to manually upload files through the web interface?

The Archiving Solution

The method I have implemented is nothing groundbreaking, but it works for me. I thought others might benefit so here is the guide.

The Setup

To implement this archiving solution you will first need to create two folders inside your OneDrive folder:

1. _incoming: This folder will be used to send your archive files to the cloud.
2. _archives: This folder will hold all of the files that you want archived (the ones that you do not want to be in your computer)

Once you have created them, let OneDrive sync so those folders are created in the cloud.

You then want to access OneDrive’s settings and specify which folders to sync:

Mac on Left, Windows on Right

You then want to specify that you want to ‘Choose folders to sync’ and uncheck the _archives folder:

Uncheck the _archives folder

The Archiving Process

The _archives folder will now disappear from your computer but will exist in the OneDrive Cloud.

Now, when you have something to archive, put it into your _incoming folder and wait for it to finish the sync. When that finishes, access OneDrive’s web interface and from there move any files from the _incoming folder to the _archives folder. The files will disappear from your computer but will exist in OneDrive until you manually delete them:

Moving files from the _incoming folder to the _archives folder.

That’s all there really is there to it, now try and fill that 1TB of storage – I’ve been trying for 1 year and have merely gotten to 300 GB!

Only 330 GB used!