Life After Fetch (Premium)

Microsoft’s decision to kill OneDrive Fetch isn’t a cause for despair: You can achieve this functionality using another OneDrive feature.

Or, at least most of it.

Most are aware that they can use OneDrive on a Windows PC or Mac to access any files they store in Microsoft’s cloud storage service locally. This is true of files you explicitly sync to an individual device, of course, but it’s also true of so-called “On Demand” files that only sync when you attempt to open them. This is core to the OneDrive experience.

Fetch was a bit different because it allowed you to remotely (from the web interface) access the entire file system of any synced PC for which this feature was enabled. That is, you could browse to OneDrive.com > PCs, locate a specific PC, and then access any files on that PC, whether they were synced with OneDrive or not.

The usefulness of this feature is obvious, but so too is the rarity of its need. Those with important documents and other files shouldn’t be storing them only on a single PC to begin with, and ideally, they’d be synced with OneDrive, making them available from anywhere.

But Fetch had its uses. Many users, for example, temporarily store documents and other files on their Desktop, and this folder is not synced with OneDrive.

Fortunately, OneDrive can already handle the most frequent use cases for Fetch: It can be optionally configured to backup the files you store in your local Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders to OneDrive as well. This protects those files, as Microsoft notes, and it also makes them available to you from other devices. This was the promise of Fetch, right?

You’re prompted to enable this backup when you first configure OneDrive on any PC. But you can also manually enable this backup at any time: Right-click on the OneDrive icon in your taskbar’s tray notification area and choose Settings, then navigate to the Backup tab in the Microsoft OneDrive settings window that opens. Click the Manage Backup button to configure this backup. (You will need to do this on each PC you use if you want that content backed up.)

You can also enable the option “Automatically save photos and videos to OneDrive whenever I connect a camera, phone, or other device to my PC” for yet another layer of backup.

Folks, this isn’t rocket science. If files are important, you should sync them with OneDrive to make sure you can always access them. And you should never store important files outside of OneDrive on any PC unless you’re backing up the containing folder as well. It’s that simple.