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
    2022-02-17T22:39:30+00:00

    FWIW, I'm done with OneDrive because of this. I've migrated all my data to iCloud, and am happy with that. In truth, the only reason I was using OneDrive at all was that M$ gives us 1TB of 'free' storage with our M$365 accounts. It always drove me crazy that (even on a Mac), they still have their antiquated filename restrictions, so I certainly won't miss that!

    Good riddance, M$! I hope you learn a lesson from this debacle!

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-02-21T19:27:09+00:00

    What is the best way to register protest to this?

    I am in the process of migrating to paid iCloud for my private files, but MS won't even know...

    Stuck with OneDrive for work files as everything tied to SharePoint - but I have invested 20 years into creating some of the material stored and if my company ceases trading I would lose everything.

    So going to be downloading c. 1Tb each month to re-archive (too difficult to work out which files have changed) needlessly hogging bandwidth. Again, MS won't know about this.

    Need some of the files live too when away from internet connection - so having to sort out a separate file structure for on the go.

    It's probably too late to go back to MS for personal. Even if they rectify now, this is the direction of travel - cloud only because they don't use files like people in the real world.

    But it would be good for them to know they are losing business and I'm eating bandwidth needlessly.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-02-21T21:50:07+00:00

    You can save a lot of effort by picking up an Insync licence. You can download all files locally from OneDrive and then upload to other services as you see fit. You can get it for macOS and Linux. See insynchq.com

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-02-23T11:03:03+00:00

    Are you MS going to pay for the time I spent searching for a solution and for finally downloading all the files you have deleted from my device in the first place? At least the Insync license should be on MS.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-02-23T12:01:35+00:00

    Thanks for the info about pCloud JanTerjeAugestad ... having paid for a monthly subscription to Google Drive and uploaded all my files, I found that it was using a huge amount of hard drive space for cache files (noticed in my system data under 'About this Mac/Storage'). I stupidly tried deleting the cache files to free up the hard drive space they were taking up, but they then had to resync, meaning that they were all redownloaded to my hard drive! So I thought I'd check out pCloud. I moved all my files from GD to pCloud and once I'd uninstalled GD and deleted all files from GD, my system data went down from >400 GB to currently 55 GB. Obviously pCloud handles cache files in a very different way to GD!

    Once my files were uploaded (took a weekend to upload all 400 GB), pCloud has since been working smoothly and I've had no hassles at all with syncing. My files are safely stored on my hard drive and backed up to pCloud - exactly how OneDrive used to work before MS broke it.

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