Today, I will be sharing you about how to change OneDrive folder location in Windows 8.1. If you are one of the less geeky people like me and new to the term, then I must tell you that OneDrive is a cloud storage service mothered by Microsoft.

Although, it’s not a million dollar question, still, I would like to know if you are familiar with cloud storage and its basic applications. If yes, move on to the next paragraph but if your answer is negative then go on. Cloud storage is memory storage container alike your physical computer hard drives which is already uploaded to web and thankfully, without even a dime.

You can upload, store, search and share your important files to this container and access them from any device you use and stay synced with all of your files and thankfully, all the time, anywhere. You do not have to carry a portable drive everywhere and lose that again. Simply, upload your photos, music, docs, presentations and all of them which matter to you to a single protected place.

OneDrive, formerly known as SkyDrive has already became one of the most used cloud storage lately. In Windows 8 and in its later version(8.1), OneDrive comes as a integrated service. Normally, we use more than one cloud storage services now a days. All of them offer almost the same basic features but OneDrive is a bit special. It’s integrated within Windows. This was much-needed as cloud computing has really started to shaping up as one of the most essential services that we need today in a ceaseless way. Windows developer’s team have out-gunned the problem with this integration. If you want to dig deep, you can read our article on ‘How to transfer files between cloud storages’.

Now the most important question is why you need this tweaking. Simply, Windows 8 and its later version is not a computer only OS now. Windows Phones have already seen a many folds growth in its total number of users. It had to be in this way as Microsoft started developing Windows 8 for the touch happy smart device users. Appallingly, smart devices namely, phones, tablets and the rests do not have large memory storages. Your heavy OneDrive folder can really gobble up the entire memory space of those devices. This situation also holds true for those who can afford only a small amount of Solid State Drives on their devices. So, we need to change OneDrive folder location to a larger memory segment.

Let me walk you through the actual process for achieving this.

Firstly, locate your OneDrive folder on the File explorer window. By default it will be just above under This Computer have a right-click on the OneDrive folder on the quick navigation pane. Move to the bottom of the list and click on the ‘Properties’ option.

Choose the ‘Location’ tab on the Properties window to change the default location of the OneDrive folder. On the bottom of the location window you will find the address on which is it currently located. You can change pre-setted address to any location you want.

Now, as you can see on the above screenshot, you can change OneDrive folder location by moving the entire folder to a new segment of any storage partition you have. Even if you have plugged in any removable memory storage, that will help too. Moreover, If your device is a shared one or it’s connected to any network, you can move your OneDrive folder to any of the computers on that same network.

I have tried to move my OneDrive folder to one my hard drive partition which is the least filled among all my other hard drives in the screenshot below.

If your OneDrive folder is a bit heavy, then surely, it had occupied a sizeable amount of the memory on that partition of your hard drive where Windows 8.1 is installed. Now to be clear, only windows 8 and its later versions consumes a fair amount of your hard drive portion for installation. Added to this, if you have set the same drive as your default download location, then it’s going to explode soon with memory load. You can always use this work around.

Feel free to share your ideas on this article with us.