Updates to Files On-Demand on macOS

Ken_Tryon  To be honest, I could have configured my new Mac with a larger internal drive, but given the price delta and the availability of fast, much larger capacity external SSD drives (2 vs 1 TB) at comparable prices, I decided to save my money and spring for external SSD should it prove necessary. I simply had no idea that there would be insurmountable problems with using external storage. It isn't just that caching on an external drive is wonky - given that, I would have been perfectly happy to put the cache on the internal drive as long as my user account could live on the nice, expansive external one. I'm not terribly bothered by not always having a local copy of my OneDrive files, in fact it is actually NICE to know that I can free up space and have no trace of those files locally by unlinking the machine. In case of an internet outage I'm pretty much crippled anyway, for other reasons. No, the real problem for me is that putting my user account on the external drive BREAKS OneDrive - *regardless* of where the cache is (supposedly) located. As I think I've posted, in that configuration files on OneDrive are *invisible* to the filesystem - if downloaded they take up space on the disk but they (apparently) have no associated inodes (or else the inodes are corrupted) and can't be accessed in any way by the user. I have no idea whether that's due to a quirk of Apple's APFS or their File Provider extension, or whether it's a bug in Microsoft's code, but IMO it's absolutely broken behavior. Microsoft should have been aware of this problem as I gather it isn't uncommon for users to put their accounts on external storage - and if they were, it was criminal for them not to warn the community in their announcement, and to list it as an outstanding bug to be fixed in the future if the problem is in their code. (And If the problem is on Apple's end, they should be working with Apple to resolve it not engaging in a "pissing match".)

BobD68  I have OneDrive through an Office365 license from my employer (a university), not the free version. I wouldn't be bothering with it except that I cannot work from home without it.