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I have loads of pictures I no longer want to store on my computer. I've backed them up to an external hard drive and now I want to back them up to the cloud.

If I put them in the "SkyDrive Folder" they sync to the cloud but they will also be removed from the cloud when I delete them from my computer.

How do I set up SkyDrive to just store my files rather than sync them? Any ideas?

amiregelz
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Kevin Brydon
  • 697

4 Answers4

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You can manually upload data via the SkyDrive website. SD will consider the "Orginal" location of those files to be in the cloud, thus preserving them from deletion.

However, you will also need to go into the SkyDrive plugin on your computer and disable syncing back down again. If you do not do this, SkyDrive will re-download all the files into your Skydrive folder once they are uploaded.

to do this:

  1. Right click on the SkyDrive app in the taskbar.
  2. Click settings
  3. Click the "Choose Folders" tab.
  4. Click "Choose Folders"
  5. Click "Choose folders to Sync"
  6. Uncheck any folders on your Skydrive you do not want to be automatically downloaded.

once this is done, you will have a set of data on the Skydrive that will ONLY be there, not locally, and not set to re download automatically.

ALTERNATE METHOD

Use the answer to this question to mount your skydrive as a network drive, then simply copy/paste. You will still need to disable the sync of these folders if you do not want them to automatically re-download.

Community
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Jared Tritsch
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This is possible with a little simple workaround...

here's an example:

  • Create a Folder (i.e. Folder3 in the example below) on your Skydrive (Cloud account not on your hardrive) in the lowest level of a folder directory.

    SkyDriveRoot/Folder1/Folder2/Folder3

  • Then sync only that folder (Folder3) using the "Choose folders to Sync"

  • After you sync Folder3, all the folders (Folder1 and Folder2) will be created in the SkyDrive folder on your hard drive but the content of Folder1 and Folder 2 will not be downloaded from Skydrive. But if you add something to ie Folder1 of the SkyDrive folder on your hard drive it will upload to Skydrive.

The only problem with this is that if you already have a file in a folder with the same name you will get an error, so it won't copy and replace basically.

slm
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John Paul Moore
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I want to do exactly the same with my photos and personal videos too, although i use crash plan aswell but i became paranoid after loosing some photos accidentally, so more straightforward way to do this in OneDrive is-[I use a mac]

Put the photos you want to back up on OneDrive in the pictures folder as usual(all setting being default) and wait for the photos to be uploaded.

After upload is complete, open OneDrive in your browser then create a new folder there- doing this will make that folder appear on your computer as well, Now go to 'oneDrive'---> 'Preference'-->'Choose folders' and uncheck this newly created folder(just this folder so you can use onedrive as usual), Now go back to browser and transfer your uploaded photos to this folder...

double check them that they are all there and delete them from the HDD of your computer...

from now on all you have to do each time you want to save new photos on OneDrive( onlineOnly) is- put them in the photos folder(or in any other folder except the new folder you disabled sync for) open one drive and move them to the unsynced folder and delete them from your hdd..

This is a more of a work around of course..

rohit
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Try Cubby.com it has way more control over what you sync, even across multiple devices and you can sync between folders on multiple machines without using up your cloud storage allocation.

user475492
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