OneDrive Tip: Upload Files with Your Web Browser

While many people will use the OneDrive sync client to push PC-based files into the cloud storage service, it’s not always practical to move all of your files into the OneDrive folder on your C: drive. One alternate approach is as simple as it sounds: You can use your web browser to copy files into OneDrive.

The rationale here is simple enough. Yes, you could copy or move files into the OneDrive folder on your PC. This would sync them up to the cloud, and you could then stop syncing them to the PC, which would keep the “master” version of these files in OneDrive only. But doing so can cause a lot of manual oversight, especially if you’re trying to move big files.

I’ve been experimenting with various ways to get files into OneDrive, and while this isn’t necessarily optimal, copying files through a web browser does work well in some cases. For example, I keep a lot of video files on a home server in the basement and I’ve been slowly copying them up to OneDrive in batches and then deleting them from the server in anticipation of moving to a smaller system (perhaps a NAS) in the future.

In my case, I navigate to the file share from File Explorer on my PC, open a web browser window and navigate to the target directory in OneDrive on the web, and then just drag and drop the files from File Explorer right into the web browser.

OneDrive will upload three files at a time and queue the others. When that progress drop-down disappears, the upload is done.

And here’s a tip: While you can drag-and-drop files into any web browser to upload them to OneDrive, if you want to copy entire folders, you need to use Google Chrome.