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

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-01-31T10:17:14+00:00

    This might be the most stupid thing MS ever did, to me at least. The person behind this decision should get fired, deleting My Files from MY DISC without permission??!

    Give me My choice back to choose where my personal files are to be stored, asap!!

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-01-31T12:02:51+00:00

    Guys, I have been rather too frustrated for not being able to use Spotlight search on Onedrive. Plus not having enough privacy to own my own data. Those who are still blocked by this problem and on the same boat, I fortunately found a solution. Here are the steps that I followed. Disclaimer is that I might have done too much. Maybe only subset of the following steps might also work.

    1. Unlink your account from Help and Settings > Preferences > Account > Unlink this Mac. Make sure that Onedrive On-demand folder is deleted.
    2. Quit the Onedrive app from System tray and delete the updated OneDrive app from Applications folder.
    3. Remove all preferences and background folders that OneDrive creates https://nektony.com/how-to/uninstall-onedrive-on-mac . In addition to these, I also deleted Onedrive related Keychain entries from Keychain. Search for Onedrive and delete everything.
    4. Make ~/Library/CloudStorage read-only. Note that some of the sudo commands might have side-effects if you are using Dropbox/Google Drive in on-demand mode (I am using neither). Modify the commands accordingly. 
    
cd ~/Library

cd CloudStorage

sudo rm -rf ./\*

cd ~/Library

sudo chown root CloudStorage

sudo chmod -R 000 CloudStorage

    Basically onedrive creates On-demand folder in ~/Library/CloudStorage. This will make sure that the app won't be allowed to do so.

    1. Use time machine and restore ~one month old OneDrive client. Now log in and voila! On-demand by default gets disabled and the OD settings start to show up in the preferences.

    Under the hood, Most likely OneDrive MacOS client team is doing an evil experiment and they have disabled regular file sync from the UI. Fortunately their backend still supports regular sync. There is a possibility that Microsoft can disable regular sync completely in the future. So make sure to make a local backup of OneDrive files. If they do so, I have prepared myself to stop using OneDrive and switch the cloud provider. I encourage others to do so as well.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-01-31T12:54:56+00:00

    Me and my company will move away from OneDrive if this problem is not solved shortly, not that I think MS care..

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-01-31T13:11:11+00:00

    I had thought I would stay with OneDrive and see if things get settled, but last night I ran a test with an old Word file. I opened if from the finder, made a minor change, and turned on auto save. Word just hung there with the “Saving…” message up (it was a very short file). After about 10 minutes, I had to close the file since it was obvious this was not going to resolve itself. Went back to Finder, and the file had vanished!

    I can’t have this kind of uncertainty in my work flow, and I sure don’t want to lose any current work.

    I have moved everything to iCloud Drive.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-01-31T13:14:12+00:00

    Hmm, I had a similar issue with a couple of large PSD files (400+mb) but I figured it was because I first tried to enable that "Keep files locally" and I had both icons for those folders (cloud icon + local icon) . I figured that somehow corrupted the files. Did you try to first set the files as local and after that move them out of the hidden folder?

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