Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

For a long time, I didn’t use OneDrive. I had a pretty big Dropbox, so I saw no value in it. So I somehow deactivated it — so that it didn’t even appear in my system tray. It was as though it had been uninstalled. How could I reinstall it?

However, when I had a recent technical difficulty with Dropbox, and saw how slow their support was, I realized I should have a backup cloud system in place.

But it appeared that OneDrive wasn’t working on my Windows 10 machine. I wanted to reinstall it, but it turns out you can’t. It’s part of Windows 10, so there’s no install / uninstall option.

And running OneDrive from the Search Bar on Windows didn’t help.

Finally, I solved it.

OneDrive came up and asked for my credentials and let me choose where to install the OneDrive folder.

Solved!

OK — you’ve gotta be backup-crazed to do what I am suggesting, but having lost too much data, starting with cassette tapes being eaten when I was using the Radio Shack Color*Computer, I am backup-crazy.

Dropbox is a great backup solution. (If you want an invite, which gives you and the inviter extra storage space, let me know at the email below.) And recently, Skydrive from Microsoft, has pretty much caught up with Dropbox. The down side of Skydrive is the old Microsoft ideology that they need to shut out competing technologies — it won’t work with XP, even. MS wants you to have Windows 7. Still, Skydrive has great value to me, in that being backup-crazy, I can backup my dropbox there.

Yeah — I am backing up my backup.

Initially, I was just copying my Dropbox contents to my Skydrive folder on my Windows 7 machine. Skydrive loaded it onto the cloud invisibly. That was great. But then when I wanted to do that again, Windows, naturally, wanted to merge the contents. That’s not what I want. If I delete a file  from my Dropbox folder, I don’t want it on my Skydrive. I want a mirrored backup.

My solution? Download and install my old friend FreeFileSync.

In the settings area…

I chose MIRROR.

Run freefilesync and mirror the Dropbox contents to the  Skyline folder. Then Skyline completes the backup to their cloud.

I know — I am backup-crazed.

EDIT: One note — you might want to EXCLUDE your Windows Skydrive from Windows 7 search index. Otherwise, you may accidentally edit a file in your skydrive and then preform the mirror of your dropbox to skydrive and overwrite the edits. You can learn how to exclude a folder from Windows search here.

Again, if you want an invite to dropbox, email me. Being invited gives you greater storage space than just signing up.

I love dropbox and have referred it to many people and businesses.

If you’d like a referral, let me know. By your asking and my referring, we both get bonus free space!

Recently, on one of my computers, Dropbox had been stuck “Downloading 7 files…”

This problem  persisted for several days.

At first, I tried uninstalling  dropbox and deleting the C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox folder and even deleting all the hidden dropbox files (.dropbox files) in my dropbox folders. But upon re-installation of dropbox, the problem persists.

In the end, I ran chkdsk /F /R.

Upon reboot, chkdsk found many errors and fixed them.

The dropbox problem went away.

How to prevent this in the future:

Usually a file error like this happens when your OS stops unexpectedly — as in a hard shutdown. So be sure to exit things nicely.