How Do I Download All OneDrive Files to My PC?

➕ Downloading all your OneDrive files isn't particularly difficult; it's just not particularly obvious. I'll show you two ways to do it.

➕ Downloading all OneDrive files

✅ Watch next ▶ How Do I Backup OneDrive Files?

Chapters
0:00 Download All OneDrive Files
1:00 You need to have enough disk space
2:00 Download using the OneDrive app
2:20 Choose folders
3:30 Files on demand
5:30 Use OneDrive online
10:00 From any Pc to any drive

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[hmsilverman]

Excellent video. Well done. Thanks Leo

[raptr]

Thank you Leo for making sense of this OneDrive nonsense. 😉

[dachitownman]

at first i was mad at you for making such a long video; but very good info; got what i needed and saved disk space on my new pc so awesome!!

[Golf]

Great video and One Drive info that make sense 👍

[ChJc]

Thanks Leo! Great Video. I'm curious how you download to an external drive. It seems like the "right click-download" option just defaults to your native Downloads folder, which is on your C Drive. Do you have to manually move them from the Downloads folder to the external drive or do you change a setting to have downloads go to your external drive directly?

[kathleenwilkins]

Thanks, I wish you could do this for me, I am so afraid of losing my files in the process. I have tried not use onedrive, but then it looks like most of my files have ended up in it. Also after I download the files do I have to internet connection to see them, or are they really on my PC?

[saintanian]

I have a question to Ask Leo. I got a new laptop and just loaded on onedrive. All my old laptop files are showing under the onedrive folder in file explorer. How can I get it back on the desktop like before and make sure it works and sync the same as many files was shared files and I dont want people to loose acces and I also want the folders thatbwas on my desktop before back on there syncing with one drive. I am scared if i download it won't work or sunc the same as before or will loose shared access

[johnburgess]

At 7:35, you click the top icon, everything is selected, and "download" is not an option. Since "Personal Vault" is also selected, the choices you get are probably the most limited subset of commands available, also probably limited by what you can do with "Personal Vault", which does NOT include "Download". I suspect, if you click the top icon to select everything, and then UNSELECT "Personal Vault", that the 3-dot menu might then include the "Download" option.

[ShahradKh]

Super Helpful, very clear, thank you so very much

[dorianhunt]

Will this restore all my stuff to it’s proper location??? Please I need help I can find none of my beats or plugins in so sad and hurt

[Purge_One]

Thanks man.... much appreciated, was using it over a year I had 160gb in the cloud then realized my new PC has 2tbs only took me 3 months to realize & remember. Hahahahaha thanks again man.

[drescherjm]

1:02 Oh my! I laughed when I saw this title because I have a 25 TB OneDrive account at work (imaging research). I currently have no single desktop PC or workstation where I could download all the data but thankfully I rarely need to download more than a few hundred GBs. I have part of the folder tree set in explorer to not synchronize on my most used PCs and I have disabled indexing on the archive to avoid some of the performance problems.

[NoEggu]

Our host did an amazing job, walking us through the myriad of steps and options. Narrating, along with time synced screen captures, is a complicated and time consuming process that our host makes look easy. But even with his guidance, it made my brain hurt.

It seems that Microsoft made their cloud storage service intentionally complicated, to dissuade people from grabbing a copy of all of their files.

-- Microsoft could have included a "Download Everything" button. But they did not.
-- Microsoft could have allowed you to open an Explorer window on their cloud server, you select all files / folders, and copy / paste (or drag) everything to your local PC's storage device. But they did not.
-- When you choose their "Download" option, you get zip files. Now you have to deal with that.
zip files are fine, as an option. But that you cannot (even as an option) download everything in the folder tree that OneDrive shows you, and have that same tree duplicated locally, is intentional by Microsoft.

And if you have X terabytes of OneDrive files, then after you download it all as a zip file (assuming the zip format supports such a size), you then have to unzip your X terabyte zip file to recreate the folder structure on your PC. So you would need double the space, and double the time, to finally have all of your files, in their native tree structure, on your local PC.

Microsoft has the brightest software engineers on the planet on their payroll. So the above is all 100% by design. Nothing is an oversight.
Microsoft wants your files, and they do not want it to be easy for you to retrieve all of your files (as that indicates that you might leave their service).

Microsoft makes it simple to hand them copies of your files, and complicated to get them "all" back. Individual files are easy to grab. But not so when you want to grab everything.
Like so many other subscription services, the companies make it simple to join, and yet you need a support team to navigate parting ways.

I copy important files on to two external drives. One I keep local, and the other I keep elsewhere (protects me in case of a fire or burglary).
The files on my external drives are in a VeraCrypt folder, making them useless to anyone other than me.

It is simple, safe, and I am neither at the mercy of Microsoft having down time, nor my ISP possibly having down time. And there are no monthly cloud storage fees for using my own external drives.

Unless you have a good reason for uploading your files to compete strangers (i.e. Microsoft's OneDrive cloud servers, controlled by anonymous people), then why do so?

This video is very helpful for two reasons:
1) There is no doubt that countless people are using OneDrive, where our host's step-by-step guide will be of great value.
2) For people on the fence about using OneDrive, hopefully they will not.

[Older_not_wiser]

First class explanation. Very clear, and best explanation after viewing and reading a lot of alternatives. Kudos.

[havagolan]

Thank you!! Can you use the copy paste option??? to select several folders without zipping them?? anyone know?

[asdlkj]

Tried this and the download file has a 100GB file size limit (Desktop is showing 246GB size).

[ibrahimlawan]

Hi Leo,
Does this means after clicking "Download all files" all the files will remain on the PC even after deleting them from the OneDrive itself?.

[terrikoyle]

I did the download that went into Zip drive, but then had problems opening the Zip drive to get to my files. How to I get my files out of the Zip drive?

[pammerryweather]

Have you something similar for Win10? Last night, my Win10 decided to throw everything into OneDrive and I want it back...

[ClintonSnow]

Hi Mr. Leo, I would like to ask you an important question that Microsoft can't answer me. When I turn on my OneDrive shows me that it is syncing, but when I'm away from my computer after 25 minutes, my computer goes to sleep and the most important question is: when the computer is sleeping, does OneDrive still upload my files to the cloud or not?