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I'm trying to take advantage of the fact that OneDrive now offers unlimited space, and allows these files to not take up space locally. I already have a backup system in place, but I would like to add this as an additional offsite backup option.

My photo folder is 200GB+, and I want it to stay on my data drive, and be available offline. I imagine this is a common scenario.

Goals:

  • Keep my OneDrive on my SSD
  • Keep an offline copy of my files on my data drive
  • Keep an "online-only" copy of my photos in my OneDrive

My first instinct was junction points, but it sounds like they're not supported. Next, I tried Robocopy, but it doesn't like overwriting online-only files.

Is there a way to compare offline files and online-only OneDrive files, and overwrite those files if the source is newer?

Excellll
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Jason Young
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3 Answers3

3

I actually figured out how to do this without buying a 3rd party tool.

Basically, I just mount my OneDrive using WebDAV, and then I can use Robocopy to mirror the files.

I created detailed instructions here.

Jackdaw
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Jason Young
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0

In your OneDrive settings, you can decide which folders you do not want to sync (aka select sync - dropbox).

  • Go to the web interface of OneDrive.
  • Create a folder called archive
  • Go inside the archive folder
  • In your desktop client, go to Settings > Choose folders
  • Uncheck the archive folder
  • Back to the web interface, upload files you want into the archive folder
  • After content is uploaded to OneDrive, you can erase the local copy

No need to pay for a third party tool.

Sun
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0

There is a open-source backup software that supports OneDrive as target: Duplicati (version 2.0 which is a preview currently only).

It stores block-level de-duplicated backups, so you cannot browse the files directly. The advantage is, that for incremental backups it only stores the changed blocks and they don't take much space!

I have a daily backup of all emails on my linux mailserver, dating back 11 months now and could restore the files how they where on every single day since that.

If anyone uses that, make sure to regularly try to restore a backup on a new user account/PC where duplicati doesn't have its database. A backup is only worth anything if you can restore it.

I use that solution for almost one year now, backing up files from one Linux server and three Windows PCs and had no problems so far!

If you need browsable, directly viewable copies of your files, this is probably not what you want. If you want a backup with incremental versions of your files that you can restore if anything happens to them, this is the way to go!

Don't forget to exclude the backup folder from syncing.

Josef
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