Getting started with Onlinedrive: your first hour

Most people open a new cloud storage account, drag a few files in, and then forget about it for a month. That is fine as a start, but an hour of deliberate setup at the beginning saves a lot of mess later. This guide walks through that hour, in roughly the order that makes sense.

You do not need to pay anything to follow along. The free plan gives you 1 GB with no card, which is plenty for a trial run.

Minute 0 to 10: choose a region before you do anything else

The first decision you make at sign-up is which region your drive lives in. Onlinedrive offers six: US West (Los Angeles), US East (Virginia), Canada (Montreal), United Kingdom (London), Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Singapore). Your files are stored in the region you pick and stay there.

This is not a setting you tweak later, so take a moment:

• If you are an individual, pick the region closest to where you actually use your files. Uploads and previews will feel quicker.
• If you handle other people’s information for work, pick the region where those people are. A UK accountant with UK clients should be in London. A Toronto photographer should be in Montreal.
• If you genuinely need files in two places, you can hold more than one drive account, one per region. Most people do not need this on day one.

We wrote more about this decision in Why the region your files live in matters. For now, choose and move on. Head to /register, pick your region, confirm your email, and you are in.

Minute 10 to 20: learn the file manager

The web file manager is the whole product. It works in any modern browser on a desktop, tablet or phone, and there is nothing to install.

Spend a few minutes clicking around before you upload anything serious:

• List and grid views. The toggle is at the top of the file area. Grid is nicer for photos and video thumbnails; list is better for documents where you want to see dates and sizes.
• Search. Type a partial file name. It searches your whole drive, not just the folder you are in.
• Starred and Recent. Starred is for the handful of files you open constantly. Recent is what it sounds like, and it is often the quickest way back to the thing you were just working on.
• Trash. Deleted files go here first and can be restored. Nothing is gone until you permanently delete it from Trash.

None of this is complicated, but knowing it exists changes how you use the account. People who never discover Starred end up building a “Current stuff” folder that slowly fills with everything.

Minute 20 to 35: upload a first batch

Start with something real but not enormous: a project folder, a batch of photos, the tax documents you keep meaning to back up.

Two ways to get files in:

1. Drag a folder from your desktop straight into the browser window. Folder structure is preserved.
2. Use the upload button and pick files from the file dialog.

Uploads are resumable. Large files are sent in parts, and if your connection drops halfway through a 3 GB video, the upload picks up where it stopped rather than starting over. The single-file limit is 5 GB. If you have a lot of large video to move, there is a separate guide on uploading large video files.

While the upload runs, click a finished file to preview it. Images, PDFs, Office documents, MP4 and MOV video, MP3 and WAV audio and over 100 other types open directly in the browser. You rarely need to download anything just to check what it is.

Minute 35 to 45: set up a folder structure you will not regret

The temptation is to recreate whatever chaos is on your laptop. Resist it. A few rules that hold up well:

• Keep the top level short: five to eight folders at most.
• Name folders by what they are for, not when you made them. “Clients”, “Personal admin”, “Photos”, “Archive” beats “Stuff 2026”.
• Put dates in file names, not folder names, using year-month-day so they sort properly: 2026-08-07 Invoice 0412.pdf.
• Have one “Archive” folder and actually move finished things into it.

There is a full article on this at Folder structures that still make sense a year from now. For your first hour, just create the top-level folders and drop your first batch into the right one.

Minute 45 to 55: share something

Sharing is where cloud storage earns its keep. Try both methods once so you know how they feel.

A public link. Right-click a file or folder and choose Share. Create a link. Anyone with the link can open it. Before you copy it, look at the options: you can set a password, set an expiry date, and switch downloading on or off. For anything remotely sensitive, set an expiry date at minimum. More on that in Password-protected and expiring links.

Sharing with a specific person. In the same Share dialog, enter someone’s email address and choose whether they can view or edit. They sign in to see it, and you can remove their access later. This is the better choice for anything ongoing, such as a folder a colleague will keep adding to.

If you are not sure which to use, the short version is: a link for one-off handoffs to people outside your circle, a named share for people you work with. Share links vs sharing with a person goes into the trade-offs.

Minute 55 to 60: lock the account down

Finish by turning on two-factor authentication in your account settings. It takes about two minutes with any authenticator app, and it means a leaked or guessed password alone is not enough to get into your files. Save the recovery codes somewhere that is not inside the account you are protecting.

While you are in settings, check that your account email is one you will still have access to in five years. Lifetime plans in particular tend to outlive email addresses.

What to do next

Use the account for a week on the free plan before deciding anything. If you find you want more than 1 GB, the pricing page lists annual and lifetime options, starting with 250 GB on Lite. If you arrived with a redemption code from a deal site, apply it in your account settings and the plan is attached to the drive you have just set up.

The one habit worth building from day one: whenever you finish something on your computer, drop a copy into the drive. Everything else in this guide is optional. That habit is the point.