How do you get OneDrive files?

[DalekSnare]

I don't want to sync any folder in particular, but I would like to get certain files on demand. I don't even know where to browse for them now. The store app that would allow that seems to not exist anymore.

 

[xandros9]

I believe the placeholder/online-only feature has been removed in the 10 Tech Preview. It may come back in some form, but not in the near future is my understanding. I can't be of much help, not being too up-to-date with 10 myself since I'm not in the trenches at this time, sorry.

 

[anon(5335899)]

Removing the OneDrive placeholder mechanism ia a big booboo IMO. he reasoning is that MSFT received 'feedback' that people found the system confusing but frankly, I do not buy it. This all smells like another 'We think this is better' and the backlash is then damage controlled by a bogus excuse. Never heard any one complain until they changed this.

 

[Derausgewanderte]

Removing the OneDrive placeholder mechanism ia a big booboo IMO. he reasoning is that MSFT received 'feedback' that people found the system confusing but frankly, I do not buy it. This all smells like another 'We think this is better' and the backlash is then damage controlled by a bogus excuse. Never heard any one complain until they changed this.

let's bombard their accounts, forums with this complaint. I agree that they borked it for now and need to find some middle ground. It was so easy and transparent to pull files from onedrive from windows explorer, tsts.
​

 

[peestandingup]

Can you map a new drive & point it to your OneDrive? How to map OneDrive as a network drive letter - Club Myce

That may be a workaround.

 

[kevynpm]

Can you map a new drive & point it to your OneDrive? How to map OneDrive as a network drive letter - Club Myce

That may be a workaround.

​This worked for me. Note: I have 2-factor authentication on my Microsoft account so I had to create a new app password on the Microsoft account - Security web page and use that password to connect to the mapped drive. My normal password would not work. But now I see all my OneDrive files on-demand in File Explorer.

 

[peestandingup]

​This worked for me. Note: I have 2-factor authentication on my Microsoft account so I had to create a new app password on the Microsoft account - Security web page and use that password to connect to the mapped drive. My normal password would not work. But now I see all my OneDrive files on-demand in File Explorer.

Great, glad I could help. Yeah, mapping OneDrive is an old trick that people forgot about since Windows 8 started integrating OD into the file structure. Looks like its useful once again!

 

[rhapdog]

I for one don't think removing the placeholders was a big mistake. On the contrary, I actually welcome it.

I'm not always online. My only source of Internet is when I tether the data from my phone to my laptop, unless I happen to be travelling somewhere that I will have access to WiFi, when is generally only every couple of months.

For me, when I was offline, I would get quite aggravated when I would try to open a file on OneDrive, and didn't know that it wasn't saved locally for offline use. Some files were, some weren't, and I didn't understand why the heck that was, because I wanted them all that way all the time.

Well, later I realized, after I figured out how to make it sync them all, that I didn't really want that after all, because now my data use went up quite high, and I needed to avoid that at all costs. What to do? I wanted a solution where I could sync what I wanted to sync, and just independently view the rest as needed. The solution for me? What Microsoft came up with works great. Did it take some getting used to? Yep. Long enough for me to figure out how to properly set it up, because it was not a very friendly way to do setup. It was confusing.

Microsoft needs to, in the final product, have a "setup tutorial" to assist people in getting to know it and getting it set up properly.

<Begin Rant>
Now, some of you know a little about me. I started programming computers in the 1970s, was a network engineer and moved up to a corporate CIO in the 1990s. But I've been retired for nearly 6 years, and I just simply don't keep up with technology as much as I'd like, mostly because I'm too busy with my new family and raising 2 small children now. I have multiple degrees in multiple disciplines, including computers, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, music, and pastoral care. I love to learn, and I'm rather good at it. If it is possible for someone like me to get confused while a 2 year old is crying in my lap over something new in Windows, then the average consumer in the market might get confused under the best of circumstances. If it didn't confuse you, then you aren't the average, congratulate yourself. However, average is rather slow on the uptake by some of your standards, as is evidenced by the sheer amount of complaining about "why won't it open 'calculator' when I want it to!" and some of you are like, "Did you tap the calculator tile?" "Um, no." Aha!

Understand what Microsoft has to deal with, and applaud them for trying so hard to make something for so many. It's not an easy task, I assure you.<End Rant>

 

[peestandingup]

This isn't a change thats likely to stick around since OneDrive is so tightly integrated with the OS now & an update to fix this is almost certainly incoming. You really can't expect people with tons of OneDrive storage (sometimes 100GB or more) to sync all those files for offline use. Are you forgetting about the tablet users out there with smaller hard drives?? This would basically completely cripple those users.

I agree though that it could be implemented better. Maybe a way to quickly see which files are offline or online-only. And their terminology is kinda vague IMO.

 

[rhapdog]

I imagine the way it will end up working will be very similar to the way it is working now, except that it is rather "incomplete."

Microsoft will probably still let you configure which files will be "synced" and which ones will not. What they still need to add is a functionality that will show "online only" files placeholders of some sort, but will probably be highlighted with a different color in order to make them distinctive, so that there will be no confusion on the matter.

It's not that they've gone in such a bad direction, and it isn't that they need to scrap the work done so far. It's just not complete yet. Hence, "Tech Preview" and not "Consumer Preview" or "Release Candidate".

 

[peestandingup]

Great idea. I was thinking of something similar. Like a faint outline around thumbnails or a small overlay inside of them to indicate if its online or off. Right now its basically a guessing game, so I end up just keeping everything in the cloud since my tablet & phone are almost always connected to the internet. But I can see how this would be troublesome for those who travel a lot.

Someone should send that in to their feedback.

 

[DaveSC]

I need placeholders, I have over 300gb on onedrive and I use most of it regularly. This poses an issue for my tablets as they dont have that much storage. Placeholders also allow me easy access to files on VM's where I dont want to replicate any data at all.

 

[rhapdog]

I need placeholders, I have over 300gb on onedrive and I use most of it regularly. This poses an issue for my tablets as they dont have that much storage. Placeholders also allow me easy access to files on VM's where I dont want to replicate any data at all.

In the meantime, I've mapped a drive to my OneDrive (Drive letter O so that I can always see what's there and access it at will. Not to mention, desktop apps that aren't made with OneDrive in mind can now access my files on OneDrive directly as if they were on a local drive. Gotta love that option.