How does OneDrive work again?

I never seriously used Microsoft’s OneDrive before and now I actually need to use it. I have many files I want to share on my laptop for later and instead of connecting my laptop to my desktop and doing it that way I can just move the files to OneDrive.

So I open up File Explorer and dump the files into the OneDrive directory. Then I open my laptop but see that nothing was added to the OneDrive directory. Basically, nothing seems to be syncing and it’s really confusing me.

I looked up some help online which didn’t really. . .help. But one suggestion really confused me. It said that your computer should have at least the same amount of space as your OneDrive. Huh? I thought OneDrive was independent of your computer. Isn’t it a cloud drive?

Is this not how OneDrive works? I thought you could share files within other Windows computers through OneDrive if you login with the same username. Isn’t that why it’s called “ONE DRIVE”?