OneDrive deployment and migration — Known Folder Move, sensible sync scoping and Files On-Demand, so local files are protected without filling every laptop.
The files nobody protects
Ask a business where its data lives and you will hear about the file server and Microsoft 365. Then look at people’s laptops.
The proposal someone is working on is on the desktop. The spreadsheet the whole quarter depends on is in a folder called stuff in Documents. Photos from a site inspection are in Pictures. None of it is on the file server, none of it is backed up, and if that laptop is stolen or its disk fails, it is gone.
This is consistently the most common way small businesses permanently lose work, and it has nothing to do with ransomware.
Known Folder Move solves it without asking anyone
Every previous attempt at this problem depended on changing behaviour — telling people to save to the network drive. It never worked, because saving to the desktop is faster and nobody is thinking about backup at the moment they hit save.
Known Folder Move redirects Desktop, Documents and Pictures into OneDrive at the operating system level. People carry on saving exactly where they always did, and the files sync. No behaviour change is required, which is why it works.
Deployed by policy across the fleet rather than asked of individuals, staged so the initial upload does not saturate your connection.
What needs deciding
Which libraries sync. Everything syncing to every laptop is how you get full disks and conflicts. Most SharePoint libraries should stay online-only, accessed through the browser or Teams.
Files On-Demand. On, so content appears in Explorer without consuming disk until opened. The main thing to watch is someone marking a large library as always available offline.
What must never sync. Database files, some accounting data files, and anything an application holds open continuously. Sync and file locking interact badly, and the result is conflict copies and occasionally corruption. Identifying these during the audit is important.
What should be in SharePoint instead. OneDrive is individual storage. If losing access when that person leaves would be a problem, the content belongs in SharePoint. Business-critical documents living in one person’s OneDrive is a genuinely common and entirely avoidable failure.
This is not a backup
Worth being explicit, because it is widely misunderstood. OneDrive sync protects against device loss and hardware failure, and version history recovers an overwritten document.
It does not protect against ransomware encrypting files that then sync in their encrypted state, or against a deletion propagating everywhere. Version history and the recycle bin help within limited windows, and they are not a substitute for proper backup of Microsoft 365 with its own retention.