Following Microsoft’s release of a new “Files On-Demand Experience” for Macs running macOS 12.1 and later last month, changes to the way OneDrive syncs files and folders on Mac have sparked outrage among OneDrive customers.
The Files On-Demand function of OneDrive, which introduced in 2018, is intended to allow users to access files in the cloud without having to download them and consume storage space on their Mac. Also Apple Targeting Indie Director Over ‘Apple-Man’ Film Title Trademark
However, with macOS 12.3, which is still in development, Apple is deprecating the kernel extensions that were previously utilised by OneDrive’s syncing functionality, thus the Mac client now uses Apple’s File Provider extensions instead.
According to Microsoft, the updated technological stack should make the functionality “far more integrated with the operating system than the earlier iteration.” However, based on user feedback, this has not been the case for many users. To make matters worse, Microsoft has made Files On-Demand the default behaviour of its OneDrive client and removed the user ability to stop it, further infuriating consumers.
In reality, this has meant that any local versions of files synchronised to OneDrive on macOS 12.1 or later have been unceremoniously destroyed off their Mac without notification. One user complained about the modification on Microsoft’s community responses forum:
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 can I turn off Files On-Demand? Will you please quit thinking you know what’s best for your customers? We aren’t children. Thanks!
If Files On-Demand is made mandatory by policy, I will no longer use your cloud service.
Responding to the question, another user wrote:
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 option 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 only with a high degree of syncing fails. Another user adds:
The proposed solution of doing this on the root doesn’t work. If I select this option for more than a couple of folders, I am greeted with a Finder error citing “cannot communicate with the helper.” I’ve been working on this for hours and it appears I have several hours to go. Already provided feedback via the option on OneDrive. Bad form, Microsoft.
In addition to these failures, some users are having issues with files refusing to download or open properly in their default programme. One Reddit user writes:
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.
Hundreds of similar complaints about the forced modifications and accompanying issues can be found on Microsoft’s OneDrive site, the MacRumors Forums, and Reddit, with many customers threatening to switch to a competing cloud storage syncing provider until the ability to deactivate Files On-Demand is restored. We’ve reached out to Microsoft for further information, and we’ll update this piece if we hear back.