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 found this:
It is from January 12, 2022 but references plans back to June. It appears this is all intentional by MS. It says:
macOS 12.2 will be the last version that supports the classic Files On-Demand experience. For future macOS versions, this means:
- Files On-Demand will default to on for all users and cannot be disabled.
- Devices will migrate automatically to the new Files On-Demand as soon as they receive a macOS update. You cannot delay this update without also delaying an update to macOS.
- Both our Standalone and App Store versions of OneDrive will have the same behavior.
- Users running a developer or beta version of macOS will have the same experience as a release version of macOS.
It is not a quirk or programming oversight. It is the way they want it. But, is it MS being difficult or Apple not allowing freer access for companies to create apps for Macs?
The MS tech helper I am working with told me to use SharePoint. However, I learned that SharePoint's access to files is via OneDrive. Therefore, the files still are not on your computer.
I conclude the only answer is to fine a new cloud storage program. Or buy a PC?
Today morning after many attempts, I have updated the macOS to Monterey 12.2 and re-installed the One Drive 22.0002.0103.0004 version. After these changes, I selected the "Always keep on this device" option for the root folder and also for critical folders I clicked the download cloud icon and OD started to download the files up until now and still downloading... It took more than 10 hours and it could not finish 84 GB of files. I will keep the MacBook open till morning, I hope at least some critical folders will be downloaded and I can work properly tomorrow.
- You need mighty bandwidth for that. We have 1 Gb/s here so my hundreds of GB were downloaded rather quickly compared to you. I know the feeling though. I did as you say and it worked rather well for one or two days. Today was a total nightmare. I started having duplicates and couldn't delete them. Then I moved files and had errors and eventually I lost an entire portion of my client archive. I managed to retrieve it from my time capsule. I will back up everything on an external HD tomorrow or Saturday. I cannot but encourage you to do the same, we're talking data loss now. Will anyone at Microsoft pay attention to this? I think I'll tweet something to them or post something dire on LinkedIn.
Yann Gourvennec, I don't think the files get deleted. They seem to get moved to '~/Library/Group Containers/U<Random Non-sense>OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex'.
Why they are moved here I don't know? Maybe to act as a cache or something?
And then like JoaoGomes said, your OneDrive directory gets linked to a directory in '~/Library/Cloud Storage'.
As you can see on my computer.
➜ ~ ls -la OneDrive lrwxr-xr-x 1 jason staff 51 Jan 27 14:48 OneDrive -> /Users/jason/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal
- I'm glad to hear its working better on your M1, as I am hoping to upgrade this year from my 2016. Since going and clicking every folder and file that showed both the cloud icon and the present locally icon, the files appear to be fairly stable in remaining local. That being said, Onedrive will regularly pin all 4 cores to 100% as it chews through some sort of sync or file updating scan.
If recent changes to MacOS have meant that Onedrive and other cloud storage services are using a built in MacOS API, rather than rolling their own, I would not be surprised to find its working better on M1 devices rather than the older Intel CPUS. Onedrive has always been a resource hog on my Intel MBP.
