OneDrive for Business customer momentum. Office 365 continues strong growth with over 85 million commercial monthly active users. Many of these customers are moving to OneDrive for Business from on-premises file shares and other cloud-based solutions to empower their employees to intelligently discover, share and collaborate on files.
You can sync your OneDrive to your iPad or Mac. In computer terminology, syncing (the term comes from synchronizing) means to see to it that the data in two different places is the same. For example, you would sync data on a cellphone and a computer to make sure that the same telephone numbers are stored on both devices.
Syncing is important for working on files on OneDrive because, unless your OneDrive files and the files on your iPad or Mac are in sync, you can end up with many different versions of the same file and not be sure which version is up‐to‐date.
You will be glad to know that Office files on the iPad and Office files kept at OneDrive are synced automatically. In case you lose your Internet connection when you’re working on a file stored on OneDrive, the iPad keeps a local copy of Office files you’re working on. If you lose your Internet connection, you work on the local copy. This local copy is uploaded automatically to OneDrive when the Internet connection is restored.
You can tell when you’re working on a local copy of a file from OneDrive by opening the File menu. If you see the words “Upload pending” under AutoSave, it means the edits you made to your file haven’t been saved to OneDrive yet. The edits will be saved to OneDrive when the Internet connection is restored.
To sync files between Office 2011 for Mac and OneDrive, you need an app called OneDrive. This app is available for free at the App Store.
After you download and install the OneDrive app to your Mac, you can tell the app which folders on OneDrive you want to sync on your Mac. The OneDrive app makes copies of folders on OneDrive and places these copies on your machine. Then, working in the background, the OneDrive app copies files back and forth between your Mac and OneDrive as necessary to make sure that the latest versions of all files are in both places and in sync with one another.
Open the Launchpad and click OneDrive to open the OneDrive app. After it opens, the OneDrive icon appears on the Mac toolbar. Clicking the OneDrive icon opens a drop‐down menu with information about how much storage space you have on OneDrive and when files were synchronized. As far as syncing goes, these are the options worth knowing about on the menu:
Open OneDrive folder: Opens the OneDrive folder so that you can see which folders are synced. You can open Office files from this folder. Click a folder to open it and then click the name of a file you want to open.
Preferences: Opens the Preferences dialog box so that you can tell the OneDrive app how you want it to work:
General: Place the OneDrive icon on the Dock and open the app at startup.
Choose Folders: Tell the app which OneDrive folders you want to replicate and sync with on your machine.
About: Unsync folders on your machine from OneDrive.
How to Sync Mac Desktop, Document with OneDrive OR OneDrive Business.
Like most of you reading this article, you are probably using OneDrive as your cloud document storage but can’t force the desktop, document or other folders on your MAC to sync with it. This short tutorial will show you how to do that. Before going any further I would like to credit Chris Hoffman @ How to Geek for his article on how to use Symbolic Links. After reading his article we use the same method to force Mac personal folders to sync with OneDrive or OneDrive Business. Please read his article to better understand Symbolic Links.
Prerequisite:
Open Terminal application:
Press Command + Space, type “Terminal”, and then press “Enter” to open Terminal from Spotlight search.
Or
From the top right search icon type “Terminal” and then press “Enter” to open Terminal
Or
In Finder go to “Applications / Utilities / Terminal to launch it
Type the following commend in the Terminal:
ln -s /Users/username/Desktop /Users/username/”OneDrive – Company”/MBP
Whereas “username” is your account name. Note there is a space between the first (source) and second (Destination) patch name. Notice also the bracket in “OneDrive – Company”, this is because OneDrive for Business may have your company name with spaces. Download bonjour for mac os x. If you type the path without the brackets, it won’t find it. So, add brackets if you have spaces in your path name.
Another example with picture below.
Once your Symbolic link is created, OneDrive will see the files/folders and start uploading the content. You simply have to continue working on your desktop, documents or any other folder and Onedrive will pick the files/folders and sync them