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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?