Updates to Files On-Demand on macOS

BobD68 I have a personal M365 license for home use, and I work in a MS-first IT shop, where we have enterprise licenses for nearly everything MS makes. So far as I can tell, the functionality is the same. This isn't an issue on Windows computers, because it uses MS's own sync framework. It's only a problem on Apple computers where the file provides have used the Apple File Provider framework to build their sync. I like the idea of an OS-level sync framework that anyone can use, but Apple has placed restrictions on it that I can only see as marketing driven. AFP works great for the average user, and MS has built a solid OneDrive implementation on top of it for people like you. Those of us with more demanding needs or less common use cases are incredibly frustrated because a product that used to work for us no longer does.

If you look back at the early messages in this thread, you'll see that longtime OneDrive users were blindsided when they updated to an Apple OS and/or OneDrive version that supported AFP, and suddenly hundreds of gigabytes of data had been wiped off their local drives with no notice, much less a warning. This had real-world business impacts as working professionals, particularly photographers and videographers, lost access to huge numbers of files. They could get to them, eventually, but it takes a while to download 500GB of data, and often files were corrupted. This was especially true if they were stored on external drives, which is usually the case when you need a multi-terabyte drive to hold your library. I currently have three 1TB drives, 2TB and 4TB drives for storage, and an 8TB drive for local backup. It was a painstaking process for me to download my critical OneDrive files to local storage again—I kept nearly all my documents and photos there for easy remote access, and they were suddenly gone, and I had to download them again on my crappy Spectrum Internet connection. It was a little easier once I upgraded to a faster tier, but even then, I wasn't sure when they were really stored locally, because the file status icons were often incorrect, and the local cached versions weren't stored where they appeared to be. Instead, they were either in a folder buried in the Library folder in my Home folder, or they were in an entirely hidden folder on my external drive. Neither of these worked with my backup software, and many programs still choke if you try to open a file from their own file picker instead of double clicking the file in the Finder.

The basic problem seems to me to be that Apple forced not ready for prime time software driven by marketing decisions on its users, and Microsoft implemented it without warning their users that their files would disappear from local storage. That kind of change is unforgivable in the IT world--never, ever mess with a user's data, especially without warning them repeatedly. Add to that, botched implementations by MS and mealy mouthed claims of user convenience from their tech support mouthpieces. It's a fubar, they know it, and nearly a year later they still haven't acknowledged that.