If you’re like most people, you probably have a few external folders on your computer that you access frequently. For example, you might have a folder for your photos, a folder for your music, and a folder for your videos. If you sync these folders with SkyDrive, you can keep all of your files in one place and easily access them from any device. Here’s how to sync external folders with SkyDrive:

  1. Open SkyDrive and sign in to your account.
  2. Click the three lines in the top left corner of the screen and select “New Folder.”
  3. Type “photos” into the text field and click OK.
  4. Type “music” into the text field and click OK.
  5. Type “videos” into the text field and click OK.
  6. Click the blue arrow next to “photos” to add it as an external folder on SkyDrive.
  7. Click the blue arrow next to “music” to add it as an external folder on Sky Drive.
  8. Click the blue arrow next to “videos” to add it as an externalfolder on SkyDrive if it isn’t already there!

Microsoft launched its new SkyDrive desktop app which is set to compete head-to-head with Dropbox and Google Drive. Here’s how to sync folders that are outside of your SkyDrive folder.

Using a Reparse Point

Known as the Soft Link to some, a Symbolic Link is the most common form of reparse point. Luckily for us Windows Vista and later include a command line utility, called mklink, which can be used to manage symbolic links. In order to create a symbolic link we first need to find your SkyDrive folder which, buy default, is located at:

This is also known as the %userprofile% environment variable, which makes it extra easy to create a symbolic link. So go ahead and fire up a administrative command prompt.

Now we need to use mklink to create a symbolic link, the syntax to link to a folder is:

For files we don’t need the “/d” switch so we can just use:

But as an added bonus we can use our environment variable, so we can do something like this:

Above I created a symbolic link that points to the Music folder on the root of my “C” drive. This means that any files I put into that folder will be automatically uploaded to my SkyDrive, you can check this by looking at your SkyDrive.

As you can see my symlink is there and functioning just as we expected. That’s all there is to it, happy symlinking