Live the Thin Client Dream with OneDrive (Premium)

Thanks to Apple’s move from Intel to its own ARM-based chipsets, the relative failure of Windows 10 on ARM, and continued delays in getting Windows 10X to market, we’ve been consumed by a debate about the future of the PC and whether Windows will be swept away at some point by a coming wave of thin clients. Thinking about this rationally, I believe that the future of personal computing is heterogenous, and that users will interact with web services and their data using device types of all kinds.

But we’ve already experienced steps towards this future. Today, most people use smartphones for communications, social networking, and games, and for music, audiobooks, podcasts, videos, and other content. This frees up the PC to return to its roots, so to speak, as a productivity device, where content creation using Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and other similar products is more prevalent.

One side-effect of that change corresponded with the move from traditional hard drives (HDDs) to solid-state storage (SSDs) for PC storage. SSDs are smaller, faster, quieter, and more power-efficient than HDDs, but in the beginning of this shift, especially, they also provided smaller storage allotments. So there was a period of time in which you might have gone from a laptop with a 1 TB HDD to a 64 or 128 GB SSD.

That sounds like it might be problematic, but that shift in usage means that most people don’t need to store as much data on their PCs. I used to sync podcasts, a music collection, some selection of videos, and some archive of work-related data to my PC each time I traveled, for example. But since I access content on my smartphones (or, in the case of video when traveling, my iPad), I just don’t need as much storage space on my PC as I used to.

But how low can you go?

I use OneDrive for my work-related data and I’ve accumulated a 25+ year archive of all of the content I’ve written dating back to the early 1990s. (I also use OneDrive to store my personal photo collection, though I consider Google Photos to be the primary source for that data; I also have small apps and digital music collections in OneDrive.) What’s changed over the years is the way I organize this data, and much of that change has been driven by changes in the way that OneDrive works.

And the Files on Demand feature—available on the Windows PCs I use, but also on the Mac—has triggered the biggest change. This feature has evolved since it was finally (re)introduced in Windows 10 back in 2017, but I really like the way it works now: If you sign-in to Windows 10 with a Microsoft account, or if you manually sign-in to the OneDrive app, you can by default access your entire OneDrive storage structure, including all the files it contains, from File Explorer (or from any app that can access the file system) without even needing to sync those files to the PC.

Naturally, this system requires your PC to be online. And if you do open a file “on demand,” so to speak, it will take a second (or, if a larger file, a some number of seconds) to download so that it can be used normally. When you open a file this way, it remains available for offline use; that is, you’ve downloaded it, so a synced version of that file will stay on your PC going forward (unless you manually mark it to not always be available on that PC).

That’s nice. But anyone who moves around with a portable PC will likely also want to specifically configure some collection of files and folders (which are full of folders and other files) to always be available offline. That way, they will open immediately because they’re synced locally whether you’re connected to the Internet or not.

What I’ve done is organize my documents such that I can sync a minimal collection of folders to every PC that I use, whether they’re desktops (like the Intel NUC I use in my home office) or portable PCs. The system I use may or may not be exactly what you’re looking for—we all have specific needs and our own workflows—but I’m hoping that by describing this I can in some cases inspire you to at least consider a similar system.

My top-level OneDrive folder structure has four folders—Documents, Music, Pictures, and Apps—plus Personal Vault. I assume the way I use Music, Pictures, and Apps is semi-obvious, but each is rarely if ever used directly, and that Apps folder only has a few items that would be hard to find otherwise (including a great registry script for disabling the CAPS LOCK key).

Here, I’ll focus on the Documents folder. This folder contains my work archive plus the things I’m currently working on.

Here, there are several folders:

__old. My archives, which amount to almost 250 GB of data.

Book. This is the Windows 10 Field Guide, which takes up less than 2 GB.

Home swap. These are the documents and images for a home swap blog that my wife and I worked on and will eventually publish in some fashion. (The pandemic hasn’t helped.) It takes up 1 GB.

Notebooks. These are my OneDrive notebooks for each year’s home swaps, my meeting notes (dating back to 2012), my personal notebook (I use this at the gym among other things), and Windows Weekly (dating back to 2011). It takes up 2.65 GB.

Work. This folder contains recent folders/files, a subset of which I sync to each PC. The contents of this folder vary over time, but right now there is a To-do folder (with current articles not just published) and folders for each of the months in the current half-year or so (2020-04, 2020-05, and so on), plus a few others (that are superfluous now and will likely be moved soon).

Work archive. This is an archive of my older folders/files related to day-to-day work. So when folders from the Work folder become out-of-date, they get moved here. This contains folders for individual years (2012, 2013, 2014, and so on), plus an _old folder for years older than those.

This structure was designed to make syncing the files/folders I do regularly need as easy as possible. So what does that look like?

Let’s say a review laptop arrives. After signing-in with my Microsoft account, installing a few applications, and getting it configured the way I like, I turn to OneDrive inside of File Explorer. When I do so, I see that same top-level view, with the Documents, Music, Pictures, and Apps folders, plus Personal Vault. I sync a few installer files from this folder—just 150 MB—first. Then I turn to Documents, where I sync a Windows 10 Field Guide folder inside the Book folder (1.5 GB). Then I navigate into Work and sync To-do and the current month folder (currently 2020-07); those today are about 1.75 GB.

Add that all up, and you’re looking at about 3.25 GB of data. That’s nothing, even if the laptop only has a 128 GB SSD, which frankly is kind of rare these days: Most PCs I review ship with 256 GB or bigger SSDs. As important, the initial sync is pretty quick.

On each PC I use, I also configure File Explorer very specifically. In Folder Options, I configure the default view to be This PC and not Quick access. I also disable the two options—Show recently used files in Quick access and Show frequently used folders in Quick access—under Privacy.

Then, I configure the Quick access section in the File Explorer navigation pane to only display the folders I regularly use: Desktop and Downloads, and then the Book, To-do, and current month (2020-07) folders.

When the month switches over, as it will to August on Saturday, I mark that month’s folder (2020-08) to be available offline and then drag it into Quick access. Then, I delete the shortcut to the previous month’s folder (2020-07). I don’t always do this right away, but I will also mark folders for previous months to be not available offline over time since their contents are just taking up space.

Here’s how I work.

I use the desktop as a scratch space, and so I configure Microsoft Word to save to the desktop by default. That’s because most of the documents that I create are for news stories or other one-off articles and don’t need to be filed away in some special folder. So I write the article, create/edit whatever graphic it needs, and then copy/paste what I’ve written in Word into the website content management system and post it to the web. Once that’s published, I move the folder and whatever graphic(s) into the current month’s folder (2020-07 currently) where it will be archived forever.

For longer-term articles like laptop reviews, articles series (like Programming Windows), and the like, I save those documents either directly in To-do or under a sub-folder.

This folder is, by definition, transitory and looking at it now there are a few things I’ll like move/delete soon, like that Hackintosh folder (which thanks to Apple Silicon, is no longer relevant). But whatever. It is what it is. When I do finish writing a review or other document that’s in To-do, it too gets dragged (moved) into the current month’s folder to be archived. If it’s an article series (like Programming Windows), I archive those in the appropriate month in the Work archive folder structure. I try to keep my current working set lean and mean.

What this system lets me do is always access the documents I need no matter which device I’m using. And while it requires a bit of self-inflicted organizational structure, I find that it really works for my needs.