Forum Discussion
Files On-Demand for macOS QA
Hello there!
2.24.22 UPDATE: We've been listening to your feedback, and we've made some design changes. We're releasing a new version that addresses the most common themes and makes it easier to achieve the previous experience. Please read the latest blog post for more details.
Two weeks ago, we posted an update about Files On-Demand for macOS and have received overwhelming feedback from the community. We have spent a lot of time reading your comments and concerns to understand how we can improve your experience on macOS. To address some of the common issues and doubts we have updated the blog with a FAQ. If you still have more queries feel free to reach out to the team directly on this thread.
Thank you for your constant support and partnership!
Team OneDrive
152 Replies
Okay, so since we have to manually download everything in our bright new shiny non-automated world:
- If I tell onedrive to make a folder always available locally, does that also recurse through the contents of that folder and download 100% of the contents or do we have to do so individually for every single item in the onedrive folder?
- In my testing, the setpin option listed here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/files-on-demand-mac worked so badly as to be useless. Specifically
- the /setpin option can't be used while onedrive is running, which means to use /setpin, you have to quit OneDrive, then watch it restart and quit every time you use /setpin. This is a *very* bad implementation of a command line feature. Literally makes it effectively useless as a way to speed up pinning things locally faster than clickclickclickclick in the finder. - Will the FileOnDemand preferences key documented here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/deploy-and-configure-on-macos#filesondemandenabled be around for a while or is that going to get stealth deleted too?
The implementation of this decision is to put it mildly, awful. I can't think of a worse way to go about this, and for no real reason other than "The OneDrive Team is very enamored of FoD, so you will be too"
I'm very sure no one on the OneDrive team has to deal with this in a situation with heavily metered, slow, capped internet access, and that limitation in your design decisions shows.
- gacarini
Microsoft
Thanks for the feedback. Regarding #1, if you mark a folder as "always keep on this device," that will apply recursively to everything below that, including new files/folders that are added. In the FAQ, there's a video showing how to do this for the root of your OneDrive, which has a similar outcome of previously disabling Files On-Demand checkbox.- And when I upgrade my computer and reinstall OneDrive, will it respect that setting or do I get to do that all over again?
- Jack_NicholsHi johncwelch,
To answer your questions:
> If I tell onedrive to make a folder always available locally, does that also
> recurse through the contents of that folder and download 100% of the contents
> or do we have to do so individually for every single item in the onedrive folder?
The setting applies to the folder and all of its children. This is true on all of our platforms.
> the /setpin option can't be used while onedrive is running, which means to use
> /setpin, you have to quit OneDrive, then watch it restart and quit every time you
> use /setpin.
Interesting - this code hasn't changed in a while, other than a minor update to support this update, but we'll take a look.
> Will the FileOnDemand preferences key documented here:
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/deploy-and-configure-on-macos#filesondemandenabled
> be around for a while or is that going to get stealth deleted too?
This key is no longer supported. We'll update the documentation. cc gacarini
JackWhen trying to keep all files locally, only getting an error, unable to to load some helper program.
This has been such a terrible waste of our time.
- If I tell onedrive to make a folder always available locally, does that also recurse through the contents of that folder and download 100% of the contents or do we have to do so individually for every single item in the onedrive folder?
One issue I found is that when I open files from Finder, Auto Save doesn't works, and the Share button asks to upload the file to OneDrive. It opens like a file outside the OneDrive folder. But if I open the file from Word, Excel or PowerPoint, it opens with Auto Save and the Share button works as expected. Looking forward to an update fixing this issue.
Thanks,
DV- I had this as well. An update of Onedrive and/or the running the command "ls -alR ~/OneDrive" in terminal has solved that issue for me.
- gacarini
Thanks for sharing. We are aware of an issue that we are going to fix asap related to AutoSave if you have OneDrive installed from the App Store. Is that the case for you? Can you share by DM your OneDrive Device ID and date of when you tried to open from Finder so we can take a look at the logs to confirm if it's the same issue or a different one?
