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
- Sorry, I haven't edited a plist file before. I looked around online about how to do it, and found some stuff about it. Would "defaults write com.microsoft.OneDrive FilesOnDemandEnabled false" be what I need to put into Terminal, or am I doing it wrong? I find the lack of an option to turn this off in the client extremely annoying.
Ryland301 - what do we know, we are only the user/customer. I have mow synchronised every folder I'm my OneDrive and selected 'always keep on this device' but have found if I add a new file to a folder, it does not work and have to synchronise it manually. I do think this is a bug rather than the way Microsoft/Apple want this to work otherwise why would the 'always keep on this device' be an option?
I ended up moving to iCloud yesterday. I couldn't find any other solution online. I want my files on my computer and to back them up with my time machine. So far iCloud works fine for me. It took some work to make the move. I started it in the evening, so it was running when I was not active anyway.
I ran into the same issue, but seem to have corrected it by right clicking the highest folder and choosing "always keep on this device". The result was having both icons (the check mark and the cloud). I then left clicked on the cloud for each file or folder and the information downloaded. When it downloaded, the cloud disappeared and I was left with only the check mark as before and it looks like it is synching as before as well. Hopefully this will help someone.
- Mike_Thomas2030, thank you for this. I wasn't getting anywhere other than frustrated with MS support on this issue.
Larger directories seemed to require clicking on the 'cloud' multiple times to get it to disappear. Just be patient and you should have things back to normal. I was a little worried at first because I was seeing drive usage climb during the sync process (my drive space usage didn't drop after the OneDrive/Monterey change), but usage didn't increase significantly and it bounced back after several hours.
For those backing up their OneDrive locally, below is the new path you'll need to point to.
/Users/[username]/Library/CloudStorage - I was about to write the same exact "resolution" here. You beat me to it.
However!! It is necessary to click each cloud RECURSIVELY. And THAT is the most painful part.
I was able to spend a few long minutes to do so. But I'm sure many people have many many subfolders and it would take an insane amount of time to go through each folder and sub-folder...If you right click the top folder that has all the subfolders enclosed, they will all be downloaded without having to go into every subfolder.
- This was my experience as well. Annoying but not fatal.
Further discussion of the API changes can be found here, as this is due to an upcoming deprecation of the kexts used in MacOS by Dropbox and OneDrive Previously. Comments have further info:
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1828969
PeterRisingThanks for this. I tried adding
<key>FilesOnDemandEnabled</key>
<false/>to the plist file and restarted the Mac but didn't seem to make a difference. OneDrive happily tells me "You're all set. All files are in sync" but I am still seeing the following in Finder
Philip
- Same here
Same issue here.
Two icons are shown next to the file nameTootip for icon on the left states: "Shared and Always Available on this device"
Tooltip for icon on the right states: "Not Downloaded"
Likewise, "Files on demand" cannot be turned off.
It seems like a quirk rather than a bug, as if files on demand were turned on automatically.
As a result, spotlight indexing doesn't always work with such files.
Utterly annoying.
Have you managed to resolve this issue? I am running into the same problem with the same symptoms.
Clicking on each "Not Downloaded" icon forces the file system to recognize that the files are local. It does not appear to actually download anything. However, this regularly resets to showing both icons.
In addition to spotlight indexing not working for files that are local but flagged as "Not Downloaded" other programs that require the files to be local error when the files show as "Not Downloaded"
- Hmm, interesting. Sounds like a bug. I'd be tempted to open a support ticket with Microsoft to see if they can help you troubleshoot further.
