Updated 20th March, 2016 – Skydrive is now known as OneDrive, but the references below to SkyDrive syntax still work (for me anyway).
Skydrive, owned by Microsoft, is a cloud storage service which is handy to store or backup files offsite (or in other words, in a different physical place to where your files are now).
7gig of storage is provided free, and if that isn’t enough there are pricing options available for more. You can use your existing live or hotmail email address to sign up, or use any other email address.
Skydrive works very similar to other cloud storage service out there, including Dropbox. My personal preference is Skydrive, but I do also use Dropbox.
One thing I wanted to do with Skydrive is rather than drag files folders over to my Skydrive location in Windows Explorer, I wanted to simply sync some selected folders and let Skydrive do the rest. Easy? Not that I could find. Anyway, googleing around I found exactly what I wanted.
Note: The below was performed on a Windows 7 64bit machine. Results *may* vary with other OS’s
Open up a command prompt with administrator privileges
Use the following command (explanation of the syntax below)
mklink /d "C:\Users\indi\SkyDrive\camera pics" "E:\personal stuff\camera pics"
The first path is the Skydrive path on your local PC. Replace ‘indi’ with your username/account name on your PC. replace ‘camera pics’ with whatever the folder name in Skydrive will be called.
In my example, the E drive reference is the actual path of the folder I want to sync.
Note: take note of formatting characters and spaces – they must be entered exactly as they are in the example.
Please leave a comment with any feedback or experiences you have had with Skydrive.