Before we begin, I will say that I love OneDrive.
Towards the end of last year I was getting a little tired of Google Drive (Which is now called something else… Baby, I just dont’t care), so decided to give OneDrive another go. A long time ago OneDrive was pure shite, wouldn’t even trust it with a backup of a single meme – WoW – how wrong was I – I tried it again and it was the unicorn of the file storage solution I’d been looking for.
To make OneDrive useful, like all useful things in life involves payment – it’s a small payment, and you get the full, industry standard power of Microsoft Office with it (Or is it the other way around, you tell me 😉 ) – either way £6 per month won’t break the bank in most cases, and for 1 TB of online storage, it’s great.
One drive has the best features:
- Great Interface
- Fire and forget installation in most cases
- Granular file and folder selection
- Works well with MS Office
- Business and Personal versions
- Online sharing, expiring links and password included
- Click on the icon and it tells you what it’s doing
- Brilliant online views, especially for your images
- Ransomware protection
- 30 Day File-Restore (Like previous versions)
Anyhow, the above said, Microsoft have been doing some fuckery with OneDrive recently, and I feel a public duty to undo it! One of the best features of OneDrive was the ‘fire and forget’ install, but Microsoft had to fiddle with it!
Until recently, I was happily using OneDrive to download and sync my files across multiple devices, then all of a sudden it stopped, and every time I tried to access one of the newer files, I was faced with a ‘xxxx program is downloading this file in OneDrive’… ‘fucking odd’ I think! But then… then the worst happens, you grab your device and run, knowing that your files have all been downloaded in the background, and you’ll have them offline.
W R O N G.
In one of the latest Windows updates, a ‘feature’ has been made live, in full on stealth mode I might add. The ‘feature’ is ‘Save space and download files as you use them’, which means that none of the newer files will be background synchronised between devices, and when said devices are later offline, you’ll be screwed. BAD Microsoft! There is however an easy way to disable this ‘feature’ and restore the full glory to OneDrive.
- Click on your OneDrive icon (Note it tells you what’s it’s doing / done!)
- Select Settings
- Go to the Settings Tab
- UNTICK FILES ON DEMAND
- Don’t forget to click on OK.
Once the above is done, you’ll find that OneDrive goes off and catches up, downloading all the stuff you probably thought it had done already.
… And they all lived happily ever after…