This could qualify as something of a mess.
Following up on a series of changes as to how OneDrive syncs files and folders to the Mac, a number of users have reported errors about the cloud storage service, following Microsoft’s rollout last month of a new “Files On-Demand Experience” for Macs running macOS 12.1 and later.
In a change coming with macOS 12.3, currently still in beta, Apple is deprecating the kernel extensions originally used by OneDrive’s syncing features, so the Mac client is now using Apple’s File Provider extensions instead. Microsoft says this new technology stack should make the feature “much better integrated with the operating system compared to the first version.”
This doesn’t seem to be the case among users, who’ve reported a variety of bugs and slowdowns.
To make things worse, Microsoft has also made the new Files On-Demand feature the default behavior of its OneDrive client. The Files On-Demand feature is designed to allow users to access files in the cloud without having to download them and use storage space on their Mac. This had previously been an optional feature that users could disable. Instead, the latest update has controversially removed the original user setting to disable it, further angering customers who now have no way of keeping local copies of their synced files.
In short, the practice has removed local copies of files synced to OneDrive from their Mac since the update was released.
Responding to the change, one customer offered the following:
“What is going on? Why would you enforce Files On-Demand on your customers, isn’t it enough to enable it by default? My 70GB of cloud data is not local anymore, sometimes I have no internet, you are locking me away from my files. Also making it impossible for me to do full text searches. Files On-Demand is also too slow, waiting a second to display folder contents is too much when you organize things in deep folder structures.
How I can disable Files On-Demand? Will you please stop knowing the best for your customers? We aren’t toddlers. Thanks!
If Files On-Demand is enforced by policy, I will leave your cloud service once and for all.”
Another user offered the following:
“You could have asked instead of just deleting everything so I have to download all of my files again. So angry at Microsoft over this. Returning my files to local has been a gigantic pain in the rear end. I have far better things to do than to painstakingly select each folder and choose ‘always keep on this device.'”
Microsoft includes an ability in OneDrive’s Finder integration to mark synced files as “Always Keep on This Device” (internally referred to as “pinning”), and some users have resorted to exhaustively re-downloading all their files and folders using this option, but not without a high degree of syncing fails.
Other users have reported experiencing issues with files refusing to download or open correctly in their default applications, as noted by one Redditor:
“Prior to today, when I double clicked a Word document, PPT, etc. in the Finder that resided in my OneDrive folder, the Office app would open the OneDrive version and autosave my changes. Today, when I do that, it just treats it as a local file and won’t sync it with OneDrive. I still have the setting ‘Use Office applications to sync Office files that I open’ enabled, but the new version seems to have broken that.”
If you’ve seen this issue on your end, please let us know about your experience and what you did to resolve it in the comments.
Via MacRumors, Reddit, and answers.microsoft.com