Visual Studio solution on OneDrive

Question

Can I put my Visual Studio solution in OneDrive and work from there or can that end up in data loss somehow? I want to take my projects with me wherever I am and not worry about putting them on a flash drive every time.

Answer 1

OneDrive will not just synch (copy to the cloud) all your source files, but also all the binaries Visual Studio generates, which will use quite some space unnecessarily on your OneDrive and generates lots of synch traffic. I guess it is better to use VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) and Git to keep the sources synchronised on your various PCs and backed up in the cloud.

Remove the Visual Studio from your OneDrive path. In general, it is better not to let OneDrive synching everything stored in Documents.

How to do that: Make first a copy of Documents outside of OneDrive, for example C:. Then remove Documents in OneDrive Online (https://onedrive.live.com) from synching and delete Documents in OneDrive Online. On your PC, copy back from the folder with the Documents copy to Documents. Finally, add a new folder to the OneDrive folder (C:\Users\Xxx\OneDrive). Move all Folders you want OneDrive to synch from Documents to that new folder.

Maybe it is also possible just to ask OneDrive to stop synching Documents and delete everything from Documents in OneDrive. But I recommend to keep a copy of documents somewhere, in case anything goes wrong.

Answer 2

I wouldn't recommend it.

OneDrive and other cloud services tend to synchronize your files whenever they are created, modified or deleted. And Visual Studio does that a lot―to put it mildly.