Connect to a remote computer using Fetch

- [Instructor] Have you ever been working on a document whilst at home and forgot to save it to the cloud or perhaps you were making some sketches for a room makeover on your surface tablet and then saved the drawing to the desktop, you arrive at work or the store and need the file. Well, there's a feature in OneDrive called Fetch where you can connect to your remote computer and retrieve that file. It has nothing to do with throwing a ball to a dog, but rather it allows remote file access. Let's take a look. There are a few requirements but it works really nice.

With Fetch, you can access files remotely on your computer even if they're not saved in the cloud. You get access to the local drives and also network locations that are included in your PC libraries or mapped as drives. The key requirement is that the remote PC needs to be switched on, connected to the internet, and OneDrive needs to be running with the Fetch feature enabled. Just before I demo Fetch, there are a few gotchas. You can use a PC running Windows 8.1 to fetch files that are on another PC, but you can't fetch files that are running on a PC running Windows 8.1.

And if you're a Mac user, you're out of luck since you can't fetch files that are on a Mac. At the moment, Fetch is not implemented in the mobile OneDrive apps or within OneDrive for Business. So really, you need to be using Windows 10 to be sure that Fetch will be available. For an added layer of security when you're using Fetch, you may be required to use a security code in order to access your PC and your files. This two-form factor authentication process may require that you access the email address or cellphone associated with your Microsoft account.

In addition to everything being encrypted when stored in OneDrive and access virus secure browser session, only the files that you select are transferred to the local computer. Let's drop down onto our demo PC and take a look at how to connect to a remote PC using Fetch. First, we need to open a browser and head to OneDrive.live.com. I'll log on to OneDrive with a Microsoft account. I've now logged on to my OneDrive Personal account and I can see a new item on the left-hand side called PCs.

Let's select the item. We can see that there's two PCs listed, a Win10_PC and Win10Laptop. The files I'm looking for are on the Win10_PC. Let's select the Win10_PC. As mentioned before, if this is the first time you've used this browser to connect to your remote PC, there'll be security check required. Let's click the sign in with a security code and then decide how we want our identity verified. I'll choose the email option and then check my email account for the security code.

I'll enter the security code received in the email and notice I could choose to make this PC trusted. I'll click Verify. Once authenticated, in the central pane, the directories and files on the remote PC are shown. I want to select the camera roll and select a vacation photograph of my boy. I can optionally download this file to my local PC by selecting the download option and save the file or I can use the upload to OneDrive option and take the file from my remote PC and upload it to OneDrive.

I'll do this and select the vacation pictures and upload the file. Let's now take a look at the settings under the hood. If I wanted to allow Fetch on a PC, I would first need to know what the PC is called. This can be found within Settings, System, and About. We can see the PC name is Win10_PC. I could optionally rename this PC to another name. Note if you do this, you need to reboot the PC.

Remember, Fetch is only available on the Personal OneDrive so I need to give my PC names that make sense to me such as laptop, desktop, media center, or in this case Win10_PC. Now on the notification area in the bottom right-hand corner, I'm going to right click the OneDrive icon. If you don't have the OneDrive icon present, you may need to download the OneDrive app for your PC. The link is on screen. I need to click the settings option and then click the settings tab.

Here in the general area, we can see that OneDrive automatically starts when I sign in to Windows and below there is the option to turn on or disable Fetch.