Is My MS Stuff Being Backed Up?

Tech Support
1

I have two specialized, massive projects requiring extensive MS Office use.

One of those projects is preparing extensive documentation, strategic plans, project tasks with accountabilities and timelines (including Gantt charts), and communications for simultaneous accreditation with three national and international accrediting agencies. Anyone who has gone through institutional accreditation will understand what is involved. With three national and international organizations accrediting us, the work and documentation is nearly triple what is required for one. It is, to put it mildly, extensive!

Our accreditation work will require reports and documentation using MS Office files.

Nearly all of my other work is done with documents stored in iCloud. Those documents are also downloaded on my Mac and backed up with Backblaze each week to two external drives.

However, as far as I can tell, all of my MS Office files are in OneDrive on MS servers. I don’t believe any of my MS Office files are saved on my Mac. I have most of the MS Office apps installed but not OneDrive.

I hope this is not a dumb question, but here goes. :slightly_smiling_face:

Are the MS Office files residing “online” on MS servers being backed up by Backblaze? If not, do I need to install OneDrive on my Mac to ensure I have backups of these files on Backblaze and my external hard drives?

2

They won’t be being backed up by backblaze.
You’ll need to install OneDrive and then open settings > account > select choose folders.
This will bring up a list of all the folders in OneDrive and you can choose all or just the ones to store locally on your mac.
They’ll be under ~/library/cloudservices/ondrive.

Works for me :slight_smile:

(You can also back your local documents / desktop folders to OneDrive if you want another backup of those too)

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3

If you don’t have Onedrive installed, then they won’t be on computer and therefore won’t be being backed up.

You’ll need to download them using Onedrive (or other software, such as Insync) to have them backed up to Backblaze.

Be aware, the default settings of Onedrive is not to downloaded everything.

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4

Right click on your OneDrive folder in Finder. Is there an “always keep on this device” choice in the resulting context menu? Select that if it’s there, then all of your OneDrive data will download and will subsequently be backed up by BackBlaze and/or TimeMachine.

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See Cloud Backup vs. Sync | Different Services, Different Uses for definitive info on how Backblaze handles OneDrive.

6

Thank you for the helpful responses, much appreciated!