Skip to content

Skydrive/OneDrive software

Sync your OneDrive folders automatically

The free Skydrive/OneDrive program is available for Windows and Mac.

Windows 8.1 users don’t need OneDrive software because it’s ‘baked into’ the operating system itself.

It will synchronize your cloud storage with local folders, saving you the hassle of manually uploading/downloading each file. All the file transfers happen in the background.

Install the OneDrive software, login using your Microsoft account and it’ll start synchronization. The OneDrive folders will appear in Windows Explorer / Mac Finder.

Note that the software works on any Internet connection. If you’re using a data limited connection (which has limits on the amount of data used) then Dropbox could eat up your MB or GB limit quickly. Windows 8 has a ‘metered connection’ option to limit OneDrive on selected network links.

There are also OneDrive apps for many mobile devices – Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone however these apps have synchronization and other limitations. The Windows Phone and iOS apps have the very handy Camera Roll feature.

Update:  around 20 Feb 2014, a new version of OneDrive for Android was released with Camera Roll support.  Go to Settings in the app to enable with the option of using Wifi only.  In our tests you could enable both OneDrive Camera Roll and Dropbox Camera Upload features on the same device.  Any photos are them uploaded to both cloud services.

About this author