How to disable Files On-Demand in OneDrive MacOS? It's enforced since the last update ...

For the time being, I have also moved my files out of OneDrive, and into Google Drive as I have already used it before.

With the current Google Drive client that was released last year you need to be aware that it only does file streaming (= files on demand) OR mirroring (fully downloading all files). There is no selective sync i.e. you cannot select just a few folders to sync. (Old Google Drive app had the selective sync option similar to OneDrive's.)

There's a thread on Google Cloud Community regarding Spotlight and not fully synced files (= when using file streaming). I'm mirroring all the files, so all are available locally, and Spotlight is indexing them just fine, including all the contents.

It mounts itself as more or less network storage which works fine (files go into the local bin when deleted, Quick View works, Spotlight works, etc.) but there's no word from Google yet on whether that system will also be impacted by macOS 12.3 changes. I guess it technically shouldn't be but I don't know.

The client is an M1 native app and though some posts also refer to it using large amounts of memory or CPU, I've not had any issues with it in the past two weeks. It seems to be less processor-intensive than OneDrive.

Truthfully I don't know yet, I took another backup on disk over to a friend's house and left it there! I haven't really had the time to figure out yet. I'm also waiting to see what happens because I actually only took out the subscription rather than buying it outright purely because of OneDrive.

After reading through the responses and the blog post https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/inside-the-new-files-on-demand-experience-on-macos/ba-p/3058922/page/2, I decided to try the following, and it worked to put over 100 GB files back without much network activity, since my files were already in the cache.

Run the following from a terminal (Launch the Terminal app and paste it there). It will show an error for each folder, which is useful to know which folders it has visited. Basically, it opens each file and reads the first byte, causing the file to be transferred from the cache to the actual location so that it can be read. The command took many hours on my Mac. The command can be restarted without harm, and quickly gets back to where it left off.

find ~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal -exec head -c 1 {} >/dev/null ;

Please put the setting back to turn off files on demand.

This is OUTRAGEOUS. Why? I don't even need to elaborate on how severely OneDrive is crippled by the inability to DISABLE FILES-ON-DEMAND. I will wait a few weeks before cancelling the Microsoft365 subscriptions for dozens of my colleagues.