Updates to Files On-Demand on macOS

Liz_Atems_elisatems I had thought that when you moved your home folder to another disk, that did work for you? Am I remembering incorrectly?

Grimrian As I understand it and observed, sort of, when you specify another drive for the OneDrive cache, that is actually where the cache files are stored. I was able to go there in the Finder and open files directly, or at least copy them. The original shadow folder in ~/Library is still there to keep AFP happy, but it just redirects OneDrive to the user specified cache.

When I tried relocating the cache to one of my external drives, it worked, sort of. I found, and other users have reported, that some cached files were stored in ~/Library rather than the external cache folder, and there wasn't any clear reason why. I didn't look closely enough to see if they were eventually relocated to the external cache—I basically gave up and left the cache where Big Brother wanted it. That has been stable for the last several months, so I'm not messing with it.

The post that restarted this thread was about DropBox announcing that they too would be switching to AFP from their own file sync mechanism, which meant that the DropBox workaround was, unsurprisingly, going away. Big tech has decided they want us to store our files in the cloud, and they aren't taking "no" for an answer. I can store my files locally and back them up to the cloud with Carbonite, but shared access appears to be out. I don't worry about that so much at work, where I don't own the information, but for home use it's a pain.

FWIW, I discovered today that Box on Windows (at work) breaks local searches—I can only search in the current folder (no subfolders), and the Search Tools tab doesn't even appear. OneDrive doesn't have this issue, which isn't surprising, given that it's Microsoft's own solution. I haven't played enough with iCloud Drive on my Mac to see whether features like backup, QuickLook, and Spotlight continue to work. I'm pretty sure QuickLook works but is delayed by the file download. Spotlight may work, as it would be possible to store the index file(s) locally. I use Box heavily at work, because it is an enterprise solution for us. We recently completed moving all 30,000 of our users to M365 from our on-premises servers (about double that if you include University users as well as the medical center where I work), and we may slowly migrate away from Box to OneDrive. It certainly would save the University a lot of money not to pay for two cloud storage solutions, but it will take a huge effort and upend a lot of established workflows.