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

Anonymous
2022-01-27T12:43:10+00:00

For OneDrive home and business, I cannot disable Files-On-Demand since the last update. This is crucial, I need full access to my files at all time.

What is going on? Why would you enforce Files On-Demand on your customers, isn't it enough to enable it by default? My 70GB of cloud data is not local anymore, sometimes I have no internet, you are locking me away from my files. Also making it impossible for me to do full text searches. Files On-Demand is also too slow, waiting a second to display folder contents is too much when you organize things in deep folder structures.

How I can disable Files On-Demand? Will you please stop knowing the best for your customers? We aren't toddlers. Thanks!

If Files On-Demand is enforced by policy, I will leave your cloud service once and for all.

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For business | MacOS

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

185 answers

Sort by: Newest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2022-01-29T21:00:17+00:00

    This sounds promising, but does it ONLY work if you had OneDrive on a partition or other hard drive? I had it on my Mac hard drive under my username. Where can I find the '.ODContainer-OneDrive' folder to retrieve my local files? Any idea?

    Was this answer helpful?

    2 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2022-01-29T19:35:19+00:00

    Hi there: if you had your OneDrive Folder in a different partition or another drive you can

    1. Press Command + Shift + . (period) to make the hidden files appear.
    2. You should see a hidden folder called ".ODContainer-OneDrive". This is where they moved all your local files
    3. Copy ALL the files out of that folder
    4. Use something else till this thing is fixed

    Personally, I've moved to Tresorit (https://tresorit.com/individuals) after this whole thing.

    Hope this helps.

    Thank you very much!

    Now can someone please tell me how files-on-demand saves space?

    Far as I can see we now have multiple copies of the files and hollow fake copies.

    This uses more space not less.

    Was this answer helpful?

    6 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2022-01-29T19:09:17+00:00

    Hi there: if you had your OneDrive Folder in a different partition or another drive you can

    1. Press Command + Shift + . (period) to make the hidden files appear.
    2. You should see a hidden folder called ".ODContainer-OneDrive". This is where they moved all your local files
    3. Copy ALL the files out of that folder
    4. Use something else till this thing is fixed

    Personally, I've moved to Tresorit (https://tresorit.com/individuals) after this whole thing.

    Hope this helps.

    Was this answer helpful?

    3 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2022-01-29T17:56:29+00:00

    A couple things: On my Mac, right clicking a folder and selecting "Always Keep on This Device" did not work, but when I clicked the little gray cloud icon to the right of each folder the "download" was almost instantaneous.

    It was so fast that I suspect my files were actually on my computer the whole time and "downloading" just updated the "pointers" to my files in the OneDrive folder while the actual files are in the "cache" folder.

    The "cache" folder is here: /Users/My_Name/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive

    To make things even stranger, there seems to be "clone" files in /Users/My_Name/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal This folder appears to be symlinked to the original OneDrive folder location.

    If I delete a file in the "cache" folder its "clone" is simultaneously deleted in OneDrive-Personal (and the symlinked OneDrive folder).

    The delete functionality is "normal' in the "cache" folder as deleted files will go to the Trash, but if a file is deleted in OneDrive-Personal, there's a warning that the item will be deleted immediately with no undo. The file can be restored from the OneDrive online Recycle Bin.

    Was this answer helpful?

    5 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2022-01-29T17:12:14+00:00

    Hi. I am very, very angry about this new intrusion into my privacy and into my ownership of my data. Effectively, you have unilaterally decided to delete all my most important files from my harddrive. It frankly feels like data theft in all respects.

    Besides the fact that you have deleted my files from my computer – I am quite worried about whether I will be able to get the data back. What I (obviously) want to do now is to download all my data, leave OneDrive because it is clearly extremely unreliable and unethical, and go to another cloud storage provider. But I am unable to move (i.e. download) the files out of the OneDrive network drive (it just stalls) and I am equally unable to go to the web portal and download my files. It just downloads a zip-file with a bunch of error messages in .txt-files ("The following files/folders have not been downloaded ...").

    Please give me a 100% certain solution to download all my data – which you have deleted without asking – immediately!

    Has anyone else found a working solution to download the data Microsoft deleted?

    Was this answer helpful?

    6 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments