Re-Installing Windows / One Drive

With Dropbox, when I reinstall Windows / Dropbox, I simply guide it to the folder where my Dropbox is and within a few minutes, it syncs everything knowing that the files haven't changed and if a file did change, it would simply put a copy of the older one.

Now with OneDrive, if I had to reinstall Windows, even after pointing the location of OneDrive to my previous OneDrive folder, rather than simply checking for changes and quickly finishing, it ignores all the current files available and starts downloading everything from scratch as if my OneDrive folder stored locally on my computer was empty! now currently I have 30 GB of files on my OneDrive folder with a limit of 1TB so you can imagine that would take days to finish when the space fills up.

Is there a better way of doing this to quickly only scan for changes and if a file already exists locally to skip it? or is this just bad implementation of how Micro$h4ft made OneDrive?

 

I've personally never run into that problem. I've reinstalled OneDrive on Windows 7 a couple of times and pointing it to the right folder didn't trigger a full redownload of everything IIRC.

 

Why not just disable OneDrive and use local storage? I have had numerous sync issues with Cloud storage and don't find any real advantage to using is versus local storage. It's too limited and too slow, and less secure. OneDrive and Google Drive have both corrupted local folders and locked them down so that I could never move or delete them without moving everything else temporarily and formatting the disk. This has happened to me about 4 times on three systems in past 2 years.

 

Mr Fox, I agree with you but some of us have to backup our data off site in case of a fire or other disaster destroying our data.

 

Well can you tell me what am I doing wrong then please?

I install Windows 8.1 PRO, then use my email to sign in (why? because even if I choose not to use my email sign in and sign in with a local account, as soon as I install Office 2013 and try to launch OneDrive it will tell me that I need to connect to a Microsoft account before I can use it so I am forced to sign in with an MS account), as soon as I see the Windows desktop, I go to C:\Users\MY USERNAME\OneDrive, then I right click on it, go to the location tab, and select my E: Drive which is the mSATA SSD.

Instead of it quickly looking for changes and syncing, I see it downloading 0% out of 29GB......and then I had to wait for 7 hours for it to complete so I just went to bed......

How else would you do this man?

 

I have some things backed up to the cloud (Google Drive and OneDrive) but do it manually so I don't have to deal with those weird issues. It's easy enough to drag and drop from my HDD to a browser Window. I suppose if you have tons of stuff that has to be moved every day that might be inconvenient.

 

because with my Office 365 subscription which allows me to install Office 2013 on 5 computers and 5 tablets/phones (total of 10) it comes with 1 TB free storage for each user so I thought why not make use of it to have my stuff backed up since I stopped using Dropbox because their prices are high and because they control what you share with others now by checking SHA hashes

 

indeed, like how would I keep track of what changed? suppose I edit a document, or add a file, I won't remember and then it would be more of a hassle. Unless I wanna reupload everything every month or so, I actually might consider that option you know, come to think of it, that's better than dealing with OneDrive's horrible sync issues although I would like to get it fixed.

I tried connecting with Micro$h4ft's online support but it never connects to an agent