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
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-PersonalYep, you could call it a cache of sorts. It seems to be a replica of the entire file structure, except it's made up of links which either fetch files from the server, or from elsewhere in one of your internal or externally connected storage volumes – i.e. still your designated OneDrive folder location, now replaced with a combination of a hidden folder and an alias, which looks… really amateurish, unpolished and hacky compared to what we had before.
I honestly wouldn't mind the whole shuffling around of files, as long as it was just cosmetic. Google Drive also changed to this stupid model of sticking some shortcuts I REALLY don't want on my sidebar whenever it loads, because it treats its folders as virtual mounted drives/server shares. But since I keep my Macs either on or asleep most of the time, I just drag those out every time I reboot them. Boom, problem solved!
But the moment I realised OneDrive broke QuickLook – an essential functionality of Mac OS X / OS X / macOS which was introduced with 10.5 “Leopard” and, as such and after FIFTEEN STRAIGHT YEARS of daily use, is now fully baked into my muscle memory –, even for always offline available files, that was the moment I called it quits.
I'm not standing idly by while I wait for either Microsoft, Apple or both to fix such an egregious regression. If this CloudStorage feature wasn't fully baked, whether at the OS level or at the third-party level (and here's why I suspect it's actually the former, without really exempting Microsoft from the consequences of jumping in the bandwagon way too soon instead of showing Apple the finger and ask them to further polish it: it reeks of something hastily ported over to the Finder from the iPadOS/iOS/Files.ipa codebase, where QuickLook isn't really a thing, by young engineers who don't give a d***), it shouldn't have even gotten past the drawing board, let alone the beta or the live stage. Do you guys even test your products?
