This is your ransomware protection and a backup of sorts. OneDrive offers the option to restore a file, folder, or entire OneDrive to a previous version. Instead, you’ll choose view online to restore a file. The previous version you see here in the menu is an unrelated Windows feature so ignore that. You might need this if you’re going to configure a Flow to do a task for you or if you want to restore a previous version. View Online will take you to the web version. I think it’s one of the most useful right-click menus.įrom here you’ve got several OneDrive specific items. The right-click menu has a few gems in it that I have highlighted. For sharing, the person icon is your indication that the file or folder has been shared. In the figure above, I’ve included a legend to illustrate what each status item means. That column tells me whether each file and folder is saved locally or in the cloud only, what its sync status is, whether it has a problem, and if I’ve shared with someone. With OneDrive you control where your files reside (collectively known as Files on Demand) and the status column lets you see at a glance what’s going on with each file and folder. Let’s start with the feature you might already know about - the status column.

Let me point out a few of the features I find most useful that aren’t obvious to the casual user. The sync engine, while originally persnickety, is now rock solid. It also integrates into nearly everything while saving space on your computer.

That’s a shame because it’s got very good security including ransomware protections, monitoring, recovery, and backup solutions built in. Most people think of OneDrive as the place where they can store files and they don’t look much further into the full feature set. But as they’ve done before, Microsoft not only created the thing called OneDrive, but the comeback kid finally got it right. In typical Microsoft fashion, they saw a good idea - online file store, sync, and share - and then took a long time to get it right.

Onedrive view online