When you do, the applications you use will automatically look for relevant content in those locations, and will automatically save new content to those locations. This capability is automatic, but you can make your workflow a bit more efficient by mapping the Documents, Music, Pictures and/or Videos libraries on your PC to the corresponding folders in OneDrive. So you might create and edit a Word document on your PC, and then you can read or edit that document on your phone or tablet while commuting to work, on the web from your work PC, or in any other situation you might imagine. What this means is that you can use OneDrive as your centralized storage solution for all forms of data, and then access that content seamlessly from your PC, even when you’re offline. In short, Microsoft lets you sync all or parts of your OneDrive storage with your PC, and you can choose at a folder level (or in Windows 8.1 only, at a file level), exactly which content syncs. On Windows-which is my primary concern-the capabilities are particularly sophisticated, though they’re also changing a bit as we move to Windows 10 later this year. (See OneDrive Tip: Get Extra Storage for details.) What’s wonderful about this storage is that it’s ubiquitous: you can access anything you store in OneDrive from any modern mobile device (Android, FireOS, iOS, Windows 8+, Windows Phone) or in even more sophisticated ways on a PC or Mac. But you can also purchase additional storage-100 GB is just $2 per month, for example-or get additional OneDrive storage in other ways. Today, Microsoft provides 15 GB of free OneDrive storage to anyone with a Microsoft account (free). But in doing so, you will want to configure Windows to use your OneDrive-based storage by default, and not disconnected local folders, for this data.

Given the liberal storage allotments and deep OS integration with OneDrive, Windows users should consider using this cloud service for all of their documents, photos, music and videos.

Documents and settings windows 10