Forum Discussion
MacOS Monterey - Disable Files on Demand
- That sounds strange. I would expect it to be one or the other as you say. On my own Mac running Monterey I cannot duplicate your issue. As you say, you can't disable FOD from the OneDrive client settings but you should be able to do this with a PList as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/deploy-and-configure-on-macos#filesondemandenabled
I have a 2020 mac mini that I recently updated OneDrive on and also ran in to this issue. I use CloudBerry to back up my OneDrive folder so it's very useful to be able to disable files on demand.
I did find the option to right click on the top level folder and select always keep on this device, but that didn't seem to work as expected.
My silly solution is to first set the top level folder to always keep on this device and to then run a recursive md5 check sum on every file in the OneDrive folder.
find . -type f -exec md5 '{}' \;After the md5 check sum finished each file no longer showed the cloud icon and only showed the always available on this device icon. I was also then able to successfully run a backup of the folder.
This isn't my favorite solution, but it seems to be working. I though others mind find this useful.
BTW my 2015 mac book pro hasn't gotten the most recent update to OneDrive that changed the behavior of disabling files on demand.
I did some more testing and found that files that are created on another system will show up as "Always Available on This Device" but won't be downloaded and will cause my backup to stall. To remediate this I created a small BASH script that finds any file modified since yesterday and runs the MD5 checksum on it. I then have my backup plan configured to run the script before running the backup. Hopefully this will cause any new files to be downloaded / actually available on this device.
#!/bin/bash find /Users/MYUSERNAME/OneDrive/ -type f -newermt $(date -v -1d +'%Y-%m-%d') -exec md5 '{}' \; > /Users/MYUSERNAME/pre-backup.logHopefully this will work for other backup solutions as well.
I got a Syntax error from your script, would you please be so kind as to send it as a .scpt file?
- Sorry, but I am not familiar with the scpt format. I run my script as a BASH script in iTerm2.
- Sounds cool TAIngalls, I'll give it a go. I ran into the problem again this afternoon, but only for a particular folder. Hold on tight! I created a file on my hard drive, opened it with Word, saved it on my HD and ... it was uploaded alright on onedrive but didn't show on the HD. This bug is driving me potty. I'll give your script a go and keep you posted. Thank you kindly 🙂