Home Office 365 Mastering common challenges in Office 365 – Part 2: OneDrive (en)

Mastering common challenges in Office 365 – Part 2: OneDrive (en)

February 8, 2018

472

In this article of the series “Mastering common challenges in Office 365” it is all about OneDrive. Again as in the last article about PowerShell, here an overview of this article. You can directly click on the link to jump to the specific part or you just scroll through everything. There are also a lot of other articles in the series.

Check them out at Mastering common challenges in Office 365 series.

Getting ready
Files On-Demand
Sync status indicator overview
OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Groove etc.
OneDrive File Restore
Summary

Getting ready

To get ready to use OneDrive the first time after you open the application you get promoted with the “Set up OneDrive” window where you enter your credentials to use the application.

After successfully entering your credentials and a few straight forward decisions, you are already almost done. If you open your sync client and you don’t see the status indicator column / missing Files On-Demand you might wonder why… You might wonder, you wonder… #BeatlesReference 🙂

Files On-Demand

It is quite easy to active the Files On-Demand feature. Just open the settings of the sync client, navigate to the settings ribbon tab and active it. This settings is most likely disabled if you sign in with an account which is connected to OneDrive for Business. Important here is that OneDrive Files On-Demand requires Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (version 16299.15 or later) and OneDrive build 17.3.7064.1005 or later.

After setting this feature to active, the sync client will shorty reconnect and after a few seconds you should see the status column in your OneDrive.

Sync status indicator overview

With the different sync status indicators it could get a little confusing. Therefore here an overview what those are.

OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Groove etc.

You might also wonder what all those different names are you saw floating around in “that internet” 😉 . OneDrive, OneDrive Personal, OneDrive for Business (O4B), SkyDrive, Next Generation Sync Client (NGSC), Groove.exe etc.

To give a short answer which is not totally enough to understand everything is:

OneDrive for Business is most likely used in your company
OneDrive (Personal) is used at your home computer
Next Generation Sync Client is OneDrive for Business and OneDrive (Personal)
Everything else is almost outdated

There are several articles out there where you find more detailed information. One website I want to give a “shout-out” is hansbrender.com – His articles are very detailed, he has great insights in the development process at Microsoft and is a really good source when it comes to OneDrive. #ThanksHansBrender

OneDrive File Restore

If you have checked a little bit what was on the roadmap at Microsoft you probably saw the File Restore feature. In my tenant it is active since the 6th of February. So check out your tenant for that.

In general it is an easy way for the user to “go back in time” in your OneDrive and restore files from a specific date and time. Currently it is possible to go back up to 30 days. In my opinion 90 days would be perfect, but well… let’s see what Microsoft thinks about that 😉

To access the file restore feature just open your OneDrive in the web and click on the gear icon in the top right. In the sidebar you should find the menu to go there.

When you are at the restore site you should see in the drop-down the options “One week ago”, “Three weeks ago” and “Custom date and time”. If you select option one or two you get directly “set back” to that time. The last option gives you the option to choose the point of time.

The “Custom date and time” selection does now work. Directly after it was available in my tenants it just showed the following picture:

Microsoft announced this feature a while back and also has resources you can check out here. In there, you find also a picture what the file restore from a certain point in time looks like.

In my tenant it is now also shown, similar to the picture above.

Summary

With these view tips you have should have at least an brief overview of OneDrive. There are many things we still need, but the road-map shows that they are working on them super hard.

If you want to have more details about OneDrive let me know and get in touch with my via mail, Twitter or Facebook. Also stay tuned on my articles. There is already Part 1 about PowerShell, Part 3 about SharePoint, Part 4 about Teams, Part 5 about SharePoint HubSites and Part 6 – Teams reloaded available and an article about digital transformation with Microsoft Flow and Microsoft Teams is coming in the future.