What is OneDrive?

• oned is part of Microsoft365

  • formally office

  • a part of our subscription

• the old system

  • spinning NFS on campus

• advantages of oned and cloud services

• break

• features

  • no VPN

  • multiple editors

  • sharing files

  • files on-demand && local vs. online

  • external access

  • recycle bin

• syncing

  • how it mimics the familiar view of NFS

OneDrive is a part of Microsoft365 (formally Office365), just like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. OneDrive is included in the university’s subscription to Microsoft and every university member has 5TB of cloud storage available to them.

Faculty, staff, and students at UConn pre-2023 are likely familiar with the P Drive and the Q Drive. These drives are different than OneDrive because they existed on campus. In the UConn datacenters, there were specialized computers, full of hard drives, that acted as personal and shared storage. These specialized computers acted as network-file-shares, or “NFS”. Whenever a user signed into a university computer on campus, that computer would reach out and connect to your NFS so your files were always available to you. This allowed users to begin their work on one computer, and then continue their work on another.

However due to the nature of these computers and the ecosystem they lived in, they could not feasibly adapt to the changing workplace. These NFS were physically on campus, and you needed to be on campus to access them. Or, users could use a VPN (virtual private network) to have their computer behave as if it were on campus. In the case of the P Drive, users could not share files with each other, they could only transfer files or make copies of the file to send to one another. If you needed to share a document from your P Drive, you could have either sent it to your coworker and have them send it back when they were done, or you could have copied the file and sent the copy to them. However, this copy would be totally independent from the original file.

Advantages of OneDrive

In 2023, UConn expanded its use of Microsoft365 by incorporating OneDrive into daily use, replacing the legacy P Drive system. OneDrive is hosted on the cloud (internet based, not physically on UConn campus), this means a VPN is no longer needed to access your files. This also means that any computer connected to the internet can access the files, whether it is a university computer, a personal laptop, or even a smartphone/tablet.

OneDrive allows for multiple, simultaneous editors in Microsoft365 files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). Unlike the legacy P Drive system, OneDrive can recognize when multiple users have the same file open and will allow multiple users to edit the file at the same time. This means a user typing in a Word document will see their coworker typing along with them. This allows users to divide the work and collaborate in real time. If you have used Google Docs in the past, this is a familiar experience.

OneDrive is a part of our university Microsoft accounts, which means your user-presence is tightly integrated with your UConn account that you use every day. Sharing files with another university member is as easy as knowing their name. As explained in the help guides on this website, sharing is as simple as: right-click, type in your colleague’s name, and click then Share. If sharing with a university member, their name will appear in OneDrive share fields. However, if you’re sharing with someone outside of the university, you simply need to know their email address.

Is my data safe?

OneDrive offers an encrypted file storage solution. Your files are encrypted during travel (downloading / uploading) and while at rest (you’re not interacting with it). But what does it mean to be encrypted?
You can compare an encrypted file to a secret message you are sending to a friend. Beforehand, you both decided on a cypher that you will use to unscramble your secret messages. Now, you when you are finished writing your secret message to your friend, you scramble all the words using the cypher. Then you send the letter to your friend. When they receive the letter, they use that same cypher to decrypt the message. If anyone were to intercept the letter, they would have no idea what it says.

How do I access my data?

ITS recommends that you “sync” OneDrive with your computer. Doing so will allow your files to appear in File Explorer (Windows) and Finder (macOS) as if they were on your computer like any other, non-backed up file. Keep reading the next section to learn more! And remember, all of these terms and situations are fully explained in the help guides on this website. If you feel lost at any point while reading this guide, there’s a help guide that will get you back on course.

Where does my data actually reside?

In OneDrive, you will see the terms “local” and “online-only” very often. What do these terms mean?

• When a file is “local”, that means the file is physically on your computer. That file is on your storage drive (general term for “hard drive”, “hard disk” or “SSD”), taking up space. If you were to sail out into the middle of the ocean, you would be able to open and edit the file without issue.

• When a file is “online-only” (you can also consider it to be “remote”, to contrast the previous term), that means it is not on your computer, and you need internet access in order to open and edit the file.

OneDrive has a feature named Files On-Demand that automatically handles the transition of files from local to online-only, and vice versa. With On-Demand enabled, only the files that you are working on will consume space on your storage drive. This feature is enabled by default when you first install OneDrive.

A real-world scenario: I have tons and tons of files on OneDrive. I log into my laptop and open the OneDrive folder and. I see every folder that I own in front of me. I dig into a couple folders to find the Word document I want and double-click on it. The file automatically downloads and then opens in Word. This file is now local, it can be edited and then saved once more, and it is consuming space on my storage drive. When I click on Save, my changes are automatically sent to OneDrive. I then close Word. If I do not touch that document again within 30 days, it will remove itself from my computer and return to online-only. It is no longer consuming space on my storage drive. If I need to edit the file again, I double-click on it, and once again it downloads to my computer. If I edit the document again 10 days later, the 30-day timer resets.

This is how “Files On-Demand" works. The files appear as if they are on your computer until you double-click them. Once double-clicked, they download to your computer so you can edit them. Once the file goes 30 days without interaction, it silently removes itself from your computer and returns to an online-only state and frees up the space on your storage drive that it was using.

Guides referenced on this page

• OneDrive - help homepage: OneDrive

• Sharing files - homepage: Share Files/Folders in OneDrive

• https://uconn.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IKB/pages/26228721112/OneDrive+On-Demand