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If your account is school or work-related, you’ll have an automatic 93-day retention period. If it is, the oldest files will be deleted after three days to make room for the newer (deleted) files. With a personal account, your files are retained for 30 days – unless your Recycle Bin is full. Without the subscription, you can restore files from the web app through OneDrive’s version history or from your account’s Recycle Bin. This feature is especially helpful if your file has been deleted or corrupted. If you have a full Microsoft 365 subscription, you can use a feature called Files Restore to undo any actions that occurred within the last 30 days. Two Levels of Data Retention (For Paid Plans) You can restore files from the Recycle Bin within 30 days of deletion You’ll have to move any important files to these folders if you want them automatically backed up. Unfortunately, these are the only folder options for backups. There’s an “in-house” backup option that will automatically back up your Documents, Photos, and Desktop folders. Temporary files and those with invalid file names are automatically exempt from uploading, which means backing up your entire computer system isn’t possible.
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With a free plan, files over 250MB in size can’t be uploaded to OneDrive, but you can upgrade to a school or work account to remove this restriction. You can choose which folders you want synced to your device I like this feature because it means you can connect multiple computers to OneDrive and decide which folders each computer has access to. Once you’ve started your sync, you can use the desktop app to select which files will appear on the device.
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I was a bit disappointed to discover that you can’t schedule backups with OneDrive. That same data can be backed up, but only through the desktop app. You can sync documents, videos, audio, and photos using any of OneDrive’s available apps – mobile, desktop, and web. OneDrive is designed to function as both cloud storage and a cloud backup. Via web, desktop, and mobile apps, multi-device syncing Windows Server 2008 and later, Windows 7 and later, macOS X 10.12x and later, iOS and Android mobile appsĪES-256 encryption, TLS 1.2 encryption, optional private encryption key Limits on file size and type, fair use limits, bandwidth throttling Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, Ireland, France, India, Japan, Brazil, Switzerland, UK, and USĬontinuous/scheduled backup, backup status reports, offline restore option
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