Selecting drives to sync with OneDrive

I had a try of One Drive 2-3 years ago but wasn't too impressed, mainly because I lost a few files due to my learning mistakes. Should not have been possible if there had been adequate warning. Decided to have another go and found one difficulty which would make me not use it again!
I have my PC setup with a system drive (C) and separate data drives (D & E and their backups F & G).
Going via One Drive settings my options re Manage backup appear to be Documents, Pictures, etc. These folders are all on C drive and I don't use them for data.
What I want to do is select certain folders on D, not Documents which only seems t backup documents on C.
How do I select certain D:/folders

@Sigurd, there’s possibly an easier way that someone more experienced than me would know but I would personally use something like FreeFileSync to sync whatever folders you want from D: to the windows preferred Documents folder C: via a mirror image backup one way from D: —> C:

I’ll be looking to do the same soon, my main/important files & docs are also pointed to a separate drive (docs/images etc) and I want to use onedrive for certain folders because I can’t seem to get my external to work properly on my router and I’m sick of transporting files via usb to another computer.

It’s very easy to setup, free open source and video tutorials that are short and easy for beginners/anyone to follow.

If you did it this way (one way mirror sync from D:—> C:) you stay in control, Onedrive never gets to touch your D: drive and C: will only hold what you sync with it.

I may be misunderstanding you but your replies imply that it is not possible to synch D: with One Drive. I need to synch the D:/folders I want on One Drive with C:/Documents and then set OneDrive settings to synch with the default C:/Documents.

Sigurd said:

I may be misunderstanding you but your replies imply that it is not possible to synch D: with One Drive. I need to synch the D:/folders I want on One Drive with C:/Documents and then set OneDrive settings to synch with the default C:/Documents.

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That’s correct. I only offer this suggestion to you because it is how I will be doing it. Considering you have had a bad experience with lost files, this would be one way to ensure Onedrive doesn’t have access to the base files.

There very may well be a way to point onedrive to D: and as I mentioned, there are smarter people here than I am who may know how, @Sigurd , but no way I am going to let Onedrive have access to my important folders as I don’t want to experience what you did (and others I have read here as well) so that would be my suggestion.

Thanks @antspants. Interesting to see that others have lost files. In my case it wasn't too drastic as I keep 3 copies of anything vital - original and backups on two separate disks.

Sigurd said:

I keep 3 copies of anything vital - original and backups on two separate disks.

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Smart move @Sigurd

Edit; The loss of files isn’t everywhere but I only need to read the experiences of one or two other people to say no way. My personal experience with backups is losing 20 years of work, which I’ve mentioned here before. So I am extra cautious now. Not trying to alarm you or anything. Cheers, @Sigurd

Why Onedrive doesn't offer selective folder syncing like Google Drive does has never made sense to me, but there is a workaround.

antspants said:

Smart move @Sigurd

Edit; The loss of files isn’t everywhere but I only need to read the experiences of one or two other people to say no way. My personal experience with backups is losing 20 years of work, which I’ve mentioned here before. So I am extra cautious now. Not trying to alarm you or anything. Cheers, @Sigurd

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My background is medical so I am ultra careful.

OneDrive doesn't work by allowing you to select various folders in multiple locations and sent them to OneDrive. Your only intended option is to create the OneDrive folder on whichever drive you like, say D:\OneDrive. (as others mentioned just above, you can hack in some junction points and get it to work as expected....but I don't recommend doing that for some of the concerns I share below to how restores work). Then, the things you want to be included in your OneDrive cloud account should be moved into this folder. For example, I have My Documents, My Pictures and my Desktop included in my D:\OneDrive folder, but not things like My Downloads as those can easily be redownloaded again in the event of a disaster.

I also recommended having a dedicated drive for OneDrive if at all possible.....if you regularly take image based backups and restore your system.

Here is a sceario that you can easily run into. Say you have OneDrive at C:\OneDrive\, and on Monday you take a systems image. On Tuesday you create C:\OneDrive\file1.txt and C:\OneDrive\file2.txt, these files will obviously be on your local drive and also synced up to the cloud. So, no problems here, yet. Let's say on Thursday you find a problem on your machine and you restore your image from Monday. You may expect to be just fine as your machine is now back to Monday, but file1.txt and file2.txt are in the cloud and are newer and should just sync back down. But they DO NOT. As far as OneDrive is concerned, you used to have C:\OneDrive\file1.txt and C:\OneDrive\file2.txt, but all of a sudden you don't have them anymore. So, OneDrive naturally assumes you deleted the files from C:\OneDrive, and thus it will sync the deletion to the cloud. The GOOD NEWS is that there is a recycle bin in the OneDrive cloud account, and file1.txt and file2.txt are still safely sitting in there. As long as you get them pulled out before the cloud based Recycle Bin is emptied, you would be good.

So, I like to have a decided drive in my system, say D:\ or E:\ that contains just my OneDrive folder and maybe other things that i do NOT want to include in a systems image. This way I never restore them back to a previous point in time. I could include them in a system image "if I wanted a backup", I would just be very careful to not restore that image without understanding the caveat above.

Thanks for that clear explanation. It was probably something similar that led to the "loss" of a few files before!
I have experienced the opposite of this recently. For irrelevant reasons, I recently decided it was time for a rebuild of my system drive - clean reinstall of Windows from a download, not an image. That completed and everything back as before with nothing lost, I decided to try One Drive again. Found a couple of dozen files in OneDrive/Documents from 3 years ago! Not a major problem as most if not all are on my data disks, and if I want to tidy up, I can use my duplicate cleaner app.
I think the risk for newbys such as me to OneDrive, is to consider OneDrive as just another drive and folders in the sky, which you can access and and edit files the way you do on the drives on your computer. The answer to the question "can I do that" seems to be "Depends"!

Sigurd said:

I had a try of One Drive 2-3 years ago but wasn't too impressed, mainly because I lost a few files due to my learning mistakes. Should not have been possible if there had been adequate warning. Decided to have another go and found one difficulty which would make me not use it again!
I have my PC setup with a system drive (C) and separate data drives (D & E and their backups F & G).
Going via One Drive settings my options re Manage backup appear to be Documents, Pictures, etc. These folders are all on C drive and I don't use them for data.
What I want to do is select certain folders on D, not Documents which only seems t backup documents on C.
How do I select certain D:/folders

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Dead easy.

You can synch any folder with onedrive using juction links

glasskuter said:

Why Onedrive doesn't offer selective folder syncing like Google Drive does has never made sense to me, but there is a workaround.

Sync Any Folder to OneDrive in Windows 11 and Windows 10 Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to sync any folder to OneDrive for your account in Windows 10 and Windows 11. You can use OneDrive to sync files and folders between your computer and the cloud, so you can get to your files from anywhere - your computer, your mobile device, and even through the...

www.elevenforum.com

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The tutorial linked by glasskuter is more applicable for Windows 11. Either way that should help the OP per their query.

THanks Cereberus - another option to consider. I'll need to think which suits my needs best. Will try a couple out using some unimportant files.