Readers speak: How-tos, tips, and troubles with OneDrive

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LANGALIST By Fred Langa An outpouring of reader mail turned what was planned as a one-off item into a multi-issue conversation! In today’s column, rea
[See the full post at: Readers speak: How-tos, tips, and troubles with OneDrive]

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Cleotus Bartholomew, ajay

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Great articles on OneDrive – inspired me to start using it for myself and friends. Got everything working but one big question. If you use mklink with the /D switch to add a folder to OneDrive then you don’t get the cloud/update status column in file explorer for that folder. If you use the /J switch you do get a status column but it always shows pending updates in the status column, even after the files are available online.

Is there any way to show the update/cloud status for a folder if you use mklink.

Thanks very much

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Another great article from Fred. I use OneDrive as my primary cloud storage service. This current article is really useful as it contains hyperlinks to his previous OneDrive articles. I’ve read most of them and find I am getting more out of the service.

One technique I use that I haven’t seen written about elsewhere: I keep my Dropbox inside of my OneDrive folder. My Dropbox is the free version that sits at about 22 GB (increased the storage through various methods over the years)

Is there a potential problem with this? I keep most of my really important records in it so I thought why not the belt and suspenders approach?

Also, I decided to keep a separate physical hard drive for my OneDrive files on my desktop PC. I use an 6TB drive for my 5TB OneDrive service. I use the “Always keep on this device” trick I learned from Fred and it is the only device that has physical copies of all of my OneDrive files. So far it works well.

Thanks again Fred!

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Hi Fred:

Wondering if you know what’s up with mklink? Today I tried to make a symbolic link to add a directory on my D Drive to OneDrive for backup purposes. When I tried the command below:

mklink /j %userprofile%\OneDrive\DDrivePictures D:\Pictures

I get the following error:

mklink : The term ‘mklink’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.

I’m on Windows 10 21H1. Have they decommissioned the mklink command?

Thanks,
Patrick Long

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Sounds like you were in Windows PowerShell, not Command Prompt.

mklink works fine at a Command Prompt in recent versions.

Enter “cmd” in PowerShell to reach Command Prompt.

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.1485 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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Ah – got it. My bad…

 

Thanks!

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