Online | OneDrive
IFTTT AND ONEDRIVE
$XWRPDWH \RXU FORXG EDFNXSV f This Then That (www.ifttt.com) is an extremely handy online service that can automate the interactions between other online services. This sounds like madness, but a simpler way of thinking about it is that, if you want, all the pictures you’re tagged in on Facebook can be saved directly to OneDrive. The service keeps running until you tell it to stop, so any pictures you’re tagged in future will be saved to OneDrive too, and from there appear on your hard drive. IFTTT uses ‘recipes’ to do its work, and at the time of writing there were 643 available that make use of OneDrive, from saving all your Instagram photos to OneDrive, to Gmail
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attachments (useful for immediately opening Office documents in Office Online), to Bing’s image of the day. You can even save tracks from Soundcloud direct to OneDrive, if they’re available for download. If you’re looking for a really secure off-site
backup plan, you could even use IFTTT to synchronise the contents of your OneDrive with another cloud storage system, such as Dropbox, mirroring your files between the two and knowing nothing will be lost.
GET MORE ONEDRIVE STORAGE Until the end of September 2014, any user who activated automatic picture uploading to OneDrive, would be rewarded with an extra 15GB of free space, for a total of 30GB. Sadly that’s now passed, but there are other ways you can boost its capacity. Referring your friends is the easiest, and is free. On www.onedrive.com, click the Get more storage link at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. You can earn a 500MB bounty for anyone who signs up for the service from one of your referral links – something that’s well worth having even though it might take a lot of friends to match the 15GB of free capacity. The alternative is to pay for it. Extra storage can be bought from the
OneDrive website, or through the OneDrive storage space app. Either way, the only way to access truly huge amounts of storage, enough to back up whole hard drives’ worth of data, is to pay for it, and this is likely to be the choice of the professional who can’t risk losing images, movies or audio data. A terabyte of space will set you back £7.99 a month. It’s not a huge amount of money, and this includes a subscription to Office 365 for five users – each of whom gets the full 1TB. There are cheaper options available. £1.99 or £3.99 a month gets you 100GB or 200GB of storage space respectively (in addition to your free 15GB), but without the Office subscription.
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TIPS AND TRICKS SELECTIVE SYNC Windows 10 drops the file placeholders seen in Windows 8, as many users found them confusing. Instead, there’s now a Dropbox-like selective sync system that lets you choose exactly what data ends up in the cloud. Right-click the OneDrive icon in the system tray and choose Settings, then click the Choose Folders button on the Choose Folders tab. Tick the folders you want to back up.
132 | Windows 10 Beyond the Manual
VERSIONING Shared documents are vulnerable to being overwritten, but OneDrive allows you to roll a file back to an earlier version, potentially saving hours of work. Head to www.onedrive.com and log in. Find the document in question, right-click it and select ‘Version history’. The document will open in a new browser tab, with a sidebar that lets you see earlier saved versions of the file.