Re-Installing Windows / One Drive

[Berryracer]

With Dropbox, when I reinstall Windows / Dropbox, I simply guide it to the folder where my Dropbox is and within a few minutes, it syncs everything knowing that the files haven't changed and if a file did change, it would simply put a copy of the older one.

Now with OneDrive, if I had to reinstall Windows, even after pointing the location of OneDrive to my previous OneDrive folder, rather than simply checking for changes and quickly finishing, it ignores all the current files available and starts downloading everything from scratch as if my OneDrive folder stored locally on my computer was empty! now currently I have 30 GB of files on my OneDrive folder with a limit of 1TB so you can imagine that would take days to finish when the space fills up.

Is there a better way of doing this to quickly only scan for changes and if a file already exists locally to skip it? or is this just bad implementation of how Micro$h4ft made OneDrive?

 

[ringtail]

Well it is suggested that there's a better way to do what you want that doesn't use files from the cloud, whether in dropbox or onedrive.

Windows has a built-in feature that does what you seem to desire.

You run it like this in Windows 7 (I don't know for Windows 8):

Start / All Programs / Accessories then right click on Command Prompt and select Run As Administrator.

Then in the Command Prompt window enter this command:

sfc /SCANNOW

(system file checker) It takes a look at your Windows files, and if it discovers any have been overwritten, then it retrieves the correct version of the file from the %systemroot%\system32\dllcache folder, and replaces the incorrect file with a fresh copy of the good Windows file.

Remember that you have to run it as Administrator, and that it takes awhile, say maybe 15 - 30 minutes depending on your computer. Notice one blank space after sfc and before the "/"

more about this