Files On-Demand for macOS QA

Having used OneDrive for years, I do have to say I'm just sad and disappointed with the current state of things for OneDrive on the Mac after spending the past two weeks trying to figure out how to rework all my workflows that were heavily relying on OneDrive, as well as trying to explain to several less tech-savvy friends what was happening to OneDrive on their Macs, where their files are and what to do from now on.

Apple-mandated changes aside — as other cloud services will have to deal with them as well — this rollout was disastrously poorly communicated, and some changes which seem to be pure Microsoft decisions (like files on demand not being optional anymore) break so many workflows that it is simply incredible this was not properly and thoroughly tested before rollout. This feels like it has not been tested at all in real-life professional scenarios.

These decisions have led to a mess with a number of other bits of software, including e.g. Cryptomator (which needs encrypted files to reside locally), DEVONthink (which so far works fine with indexed files being on OneDrive, but leads to an inherently risky and potentially dangerous setup if one can not guarantee that they will always be available offline), and most of all any backup software (as one is no longer guaranteed local backups include all files as they may not have been available locally when backup ran — I fail to see how corporate customers will be happy with that state of things).

I don't feel like leaving OneDrive for Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud, but then again, the current setup is all but reassuring when it comes to file availability and file integrity. It's a mess, who knows what's online, offline, or somewhere in-between, and I've found several corrupted images on the local drive that were otherwise fine in the cloud, leading me to believe there is something seriously wrong with the way OneDrive is syncing files now and making them available to macOS.

I have two M365 subscriptions, a personal and a business one, mostly for the fact that OneDrive was so crucial to my workflows and was such a great deal as part of the 365 subscription.