Synchronize Your Cloud Files
Clouds are a great storage option to protect your files. Even if your computer dies the files still live on in the cloud.
Issues With Clouds – Synchronize Your Cloud Files
The problem is that Synchronizing Your Cloud Files may slow your computer down to a crawl if you are synchronizing too many files. We certainly don’t want that.
Another problem with Synchronize Your Cloud Files is that it’s somewhat limited unless you purchase a premium plan.
Limited Space in the Cloud
When we use clouds with limited space we have to ensure we don’t try to back up unnecessary files.
The best Synchronize Your Cloud Files solution is to back up files that are the most important taking precautions with sensitive materials by encrypting.
Scroll down or click for help with Synchronizing Select Cloud Files
We can also spread out files among various cloud plans by maybe putting family photos on one and business documents on another.
If you have Office 365 you get 1 TB to backup your files so space should not be a major concern.
Slow Computer
The more files you have to synchronize the longer it takes the cloud software to index your files and upload.
Even if you only change one file the software has to evaluate them all. This can make your computer unusable when the cloud software is indexing.
Synchronizing websites can be particularly bad since they may have lots of little files.
If there are repository file like Git then the situation is even worse.
If Windows Search all by itself can slow down your computer. Add that to cloud synchronization and you may think your computer is broken or infected.
Synchronize Your Cloud Files – Too Many Files
One Solution that addresses speed and space is to limit the files you synchronize.
If you have plenty of space but don’t want to drag your computer down every time it indexes your changes you can select which folders you need synchronized.
In our case, we have lots of websites and customer backups that don’t need to be constantly synchronized.
First we backup these sorts of files to an external drive or internal section of our drive that’s not associated with the cloud.
Test Case
We download a lot of stock photos from GraphicStock.com that we may want to use someday and we have 1 TB of cloud storage available on OneDrive thanks to our Office 365 subscription.
Initially we download the stock photos to our external RAID (12 TB) into a folder that shows it has not been synchronized to the cloud.
Then we copy this folder to an appropriate place on our local OneDrive folder which gets synchronized to the cloud.
Once the synchronization is complete we remove the folder from synchronization by opening OneDrive Settings.
- Start OneDrive if it’s not running
- Right click OneDrive icon in tray
- Navigate to Account Tab
- Choose folders
- Only Choose folders that are likely to change
OneDrive Settings – Account
- Only Choose folders that are likely to change
What This Does
Removing the folder from synchronization removes the files from the local PC which is why we have it backed up outside the OneDrive folder. We don’t need these files in 2 places on our computer.
More importantly OneDrive doesn’t have to scan through all these files to see if they have changed. Since they are stock photos we won’t be changing them.
We might however create new versions from the stock photos but we will be sure to back these up.
It does not remove the files from the cloud so the files are still available on OneDrive.com
Windows Search
Windows Search is also known for slowing down your computer so this added to a cloud backup can really bring your computer to a crawl.
This is especially true if you try to open Windows Explorer. Just clicking on a drive may take a long time to open. Think minutes instead of seconds.
Disabling Windows Search
Microsoft constantly recommends Windows Search for Outlook and Windows Explorer. They suggest that searches may take a long time unless we turn it on.
Search performance will be impacted because Windows Search service is turned off.
In our experience, Windows Search slows down any drive with a lot of files. You probably want to turn it off even if you are not synchronizing Cloud files.
Perhaps Windows Search is useful if you are looking for text within files but it’s a significant drag on our resources.
Disabling Windows Search is easy enough. Crank up the Services and disable Windows Search.
You can find Services by typing in the search bar. Double click Windows Search service and set it to disabled or manual.
Conclusion
It’s possible to synchronize your files to the clouds without impacting your computer performance by selecting specific files and folders to keep synchronized.
Turning off Windows Search will help even if you are not synchronizing files to the cloud.