The OneDrive Blog

Taking the Next Step in Sync for OneDrive

We want OneDrive to be the very best way for people to store and share files, photos, and documents across life and work. Over the past year we’ve seen a massive increase in OneDrive use for people who use Windows and Office both at home and work. We want to take this opportunity to share how we are thinking about delivering a great sync experience and some of the things that are coming in the next few months. We are focused on making OneDrive a great tool for you to store content, share it, and collaborate with your friends, family, and co-workers. A fundamental part of that is ensuring that OneDrive reliably and securely syncs files between the cloud and your devices. That’s why we’re building features like the ability to sync shared folders, and selective sync across all platforms.

Prior to Windows 8.1, we had two sync experiences. One used on Windows 7/8/Mac to connect to the consumer service, and a second sync engine to connect to the commercial service (OneDrive for Business). In Windows 8.1 we introduced a third sync engine that supported placeholder files, an innovative capability that lets you access all the files you have stored in OneDrive whilst only using a fraction of the local storage space. Customers who use OneDrive extensively on small devices found this feature extremely useful.

Customer feedback indicated that user actions against placeholders was an area that needed improvement in reliability. In Windows 8.1 certain apps would occasionally fail to open files that were placeholders because the app didn’t know how to issue commands to download the file, or the download would timeout due to bandwidth speed. We noticed that certain file operations (including copy, move, and delete) had a higher degree of failure when placeholders were utilized. In parallel, we learned that many customers found the feature was confusing, as it wasn’t necessarily clear which files were available online versus offline. These challenges are particularly acute for people who use both the consumer and commercial service as sync behaves differently. As a result, we knew we had to step back and rethink our approach and figure out a way to provide the features that customers liked about placeholders, without the impact on reliability, and deliver them in a comprehensible way.

It was clear that the right approach was to converge to a single sync engine and experience that would be able to provide all of the benefits of the consumer and business service to all customers faster. We decided to start with the consumer sync engine foundation from Windows 7 and Windows 8 and add the right capabilities from the other two engines. This way, we could add features once and have them benefit all customers, while also ensuring that we didn’t run into any more reliability challenges due to placeholders in Windows 8.1. We understand that having one sync engine provide a superset for all three will take time, but this is the best option to meet our core goals.

The good news is that the vast majority of our customers will only see the benefits of this approach. For those running Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, or Windows Phone – or if you use OneDrive on a Mac, Android, iPhone, or iPad – your experience continues to improve every day. We’ve released our unified OneDrive app for Windows Phone and Android and will follow up with iOS later this month. We’ve made dramatic improvements in sync reliability and performance for Windows 7, we’ll release a preview of the Mac client for OneDrive for Business later this month, and we are working to sync shared folders by the summer. For customers running Windows 8.1, we have already made changes to the way OneDrive works to automatically sync smaller OneDrive accounts.

We do recognize that some of our best customers are using the Windows 10 Technical Preview and this is where we’re actively doing the work to converge to one sync engine and as a result, no longer have the separate engine for placeholders. There are important capabilities that we need to bring to Windows 10  some will make it into the first release – including shared folders and support for the consumer and business service. However, others will come in updates that follow later in the calendar year – most notably the core capabilities of placeholders that are both reliable and comprehensible.

We know that when you decide to use OneDrive you are trusting us with your files, and we work every day to earn that trust. For those of you in the Windows Insider Program and running the Windows 10 Technical Preview, thanks for bearing with us as we make these changes and be assured that we have a clear roadmap to bring the best experience we can to you between now and the end of the year. Keep sending us your feedback and suggestions through the Windows Feedback app. If you’re not yet in the Windows Insider Program and want to help shape Windows 10, join here. For those not yet on Windows 10, thanks for your support and trust, and please continue to use our UserVoice forum to provide feedback and suggestions.


Chris Jones
Corporate Vice President, OneDrive & SharePoint

103 Comments

  1. AAKASH SHARMA, January 8, 2015 at 10:11 am says:

    - inbuilt pin password

    - remove poor hambrgr

    - bring modern UI

    - LOGIN / LOGOUT OPTION IS NECESSARY

    REGARDS , @AAKASH006SHARMA

    • Adam Lein, January 8, 2015 at 10:22 am says:

      Yes, the hamburger button makes no sense. Lose it! Modern UI based on typography is much easier to read and use.

      Glad to hear shared folders sync is coming to Windows 10 though!

      • Peter, January 8, 2015 at 2:38 pm says:

        The hamburger icon is fine, it makes sense. It depicts a menu list. Modern UI very much allows and even requires iconography, it never was simply about type. A UI of only type would be limiting yourself in a box for no reason.

        Apart from pushing features out of reach to the top I’ve noticed the main source of teeth gnashing by a vocal minority is simply about the look of the hamburger icon; that it appeared on Android. Silly.

        • Shawn C, January 11, 2015 at 8:11 am says:

          I agree that the hamburger makes sense. It works well as an UI indicator and has been around some time in web apps. Keep it please.

        • Elecky, February 22, 2015 at 4:26 am says:

          But the hamburger bar is really hard to reach.

  2. Chromaniac, January 8, 2015 at 10:20 am says:

    I read this blog post several times and I have no idea what they are trying to convey. Are you removing smart files feature on Windows 8? Are you adding this feature to other platforms? What are you doing? And how does it affect me?

    • Cheggers, January 8, 2015 at 10:32 am says:

      Same here. It’s a fantastic example of corporate drivel if nothing else.

    • Jonathan, January 8, 2015 at 10:46 am says:

      What they’re saying is that they’re moving towards converging the 3 sync engines by making improvements to the syncing on existing platforms and completely replacing the sync engine in Windows 10. For the initial release of Windows 10, this means placeholders will not be available, but they plan to add the “core features” of placeholders back to Windows 10 by the end of the calendar year.

      Basically, if you stick to the OS that you’re on, everything should simply stay the same, but be a bit more reliable. If you upgrade to Windows 10 before the end of the year, however, you’ll have to live a few months without placeholders.

    • Youssef, January 8, 2015 at 10:49 am says:

      http://winsupersite.com/onedrive/microsoft-confirms-its-plans-onedrive this could help clear things for you

  3. Andrew, January 8, 2015 at 10:29 am says:

    The biggest issue for me is not being able to use OneDrive with local account on Windows 8.1.
    The single cloud account definitely has its own pros, but the users should have a choice.

    • Peter Schott, January 23, 2015 at 11:57 am says:

      I had to work around this by setting up the account set up w/ my OneDrive as a separate account, moving the files to a commonly accessible location, then setting permissions on that folder to allow my local user access. It also requires that the MS account be logged in for the sync to work so I have to do that whenever I have a restart (which doesn’t happen too often). It’s kludgy, but it works. I miss the ability for local accounts to sync as well.

      • Dan, January 31, 2015 at 1:51 am says:

        They already have the ability to have domain accounts sync with OneDrive, so the underlying tech should be there. It just seems like it was purposely disabled to force people to login with their live accounts. They also went out of their way to prevent you from using the older 7/8.0 client on 8.1, even when setting compatibility modes to pretend you are still running on 7 (it seems unlikely they hook at such as low level that you would NOT be able to run it on 8.1), so I doubt they will ever provide this feature as it seems more political than technical.

    • AJ, February 19, 2015 at 2:10 pm says:

      This right here.

      I canceled my paid OneDrive account when Win 8.1 forced me to use a MS account in WIndows to be able to use OneDrive. I’d be happy to embed my MS account credentials in a OneDrive app, but I WILL NOT use a MS account as my primary device logon.

      How am I supposed to connect to my personal OneDrive account from a work PC, or to my work OneDrive account from a personal PC? It can’t be done!

      Win 8.1 was a really big step backward for OneDrive, and it seems that this problem will persist in Win 10.

  4. Anonymous, January 8, 2015 at 10:42 am says:

    tldr: There was an awesome version of OneDrive from the Windows team and a bunch of ****** ones from Office. No one cares about Windows (not even here at Microsoft), so the Office team calls the shots now. Guess which version did not make it?

    • Shawn C, January 11, 2015 at 8:12 am says:

      Groove didn’t make it. Live Mesh did.

  5. Aaron, January 8, 2015 at 10:55 am says:

    It looks like the take-away from this is, “placeholder files” will be available in Windows 10, but not at first… It will be added in a patch later.

    Also glad to see that shared folder sync is finally coming. This is the biggest thing keeping me from fulling diving into OneDrive.

  6. Anonymous, January 8, 2015 at 10:57 am says:

    Placeholder files got me into OneDrive, now i have to switch again… Goodbye and thx for nothing..

    • Twaites, January 8, 2015 at 11:33 am says:

      Unless you upgrade to Windows 10 right when it comes out, nothing changes… Why would you switch?

    • Frank, January 8, 2015 at 2:32 pm says:

      I can see you problem, you still have that function in Windows 8.1 and it will come to Windows 10, just not when it launches. You can always wait with the upgrade until they have added the placeholder function to Windows 10.

      “It will add placeholder-like functionality to OneDrive at some time in the future. But not in time for the initial release of Windows 10.” http://winsupersite.com/onedrive/microsoft-confirms-its-plans-onedrive

      • Frank, January 8, 2015 at 2:32 pm says:

        *can’t

        I can NOT see your problem…

      • Ezhik, January 12, 2015 at 12:32 am says:

        Placeholder-LIKE. We still don’t know what this implies. For all we know they’ll just make it so that online-only files appear in search or something like that. Which just wouldn’t be enough.

    • Peter, January 8, 2015 at 2:46 pm says:

      Didn’t you read the post? Some features like shared folders are coming with the next release (W10 consumer preview?), the functionality of placeholders is coming in an update after that later this year. The placeholder functionality will be brought in a way that gives you placeholders and more, but without the technological issues it had before.

    • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:02 pm says:

      I agree…placeholders on my new SP3 got me to use one drive. If that goes away, so does one drive. It’s so simple to use and works great the way it is.

    • Derek Gabriel (@dsghi), January 9, 2015 at 2:05 am says:

      Right? So they offered 1 TB to users and now going unlimited… who’s got enough space on their devices to completely sync a 1 TB library or .. unlimited. The WHOLE reason I spent $1800 on a surface pro with only 256GB is because I have OneDrive Pro…. such a dumb move. They just guaranteed I won’t upgrade to 10 until the placeholder feature comes back.

  7. Barry Johnson, January 8, 2015 at 11:06 am says:

    Rarely have so many words been used to convey so little information. To those, like myself, who thought placeholders were *the* thing that made OneDrive such an ideal cloud driver service, it seems your message could have been more succinctly put as, “go pound sand,” to use a family-friendly expression.

    • Derek Gabriel (@dsghi), January 9, 2015 at 2:07 am says:

      Excellent comment!

    • jh, January 9, 2015 at 10:25 am says:

      “Pound sand” is a perfect distillation of this post. Or maybe “Forget the cloud – here comes the fog.”

  8. D. Rogers, January 8, 2015 at 11:13 am says:

    Smart files made me go all in on the windows ecosystem. Removal of them means my money will go to someone else besides Microsoft.

    • Frank, January 8, 2015 at 2:34 pm says:

      It has not been removed from Windows 8.1, for Windows 10 it will be added later.

      “However, others will come in updates that follow later in the calendar year – most notably the core capabilities of placeholders that are both reliable and comprehensible.”

      • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:25 pm says:

        That does not mean placeholders will be used. Matter of fact, that means they won’t come back.

  9. Joshua Timothy, January 8, 2015 at 11:14 am says:

    Great to see that there ate plans to unify the whole Onedrive experience!

    Thanks for listening about keeping placeholders. One drive without place holders would be another Dropbox. In changing age of tablet PC like the surface pro and other models with limited on device storage… Placeholders is a must!

  10. Rush, January 8, 2015 at 11:19 am says:

    Just Rollback and relive Mesh, this is the way.

  11. NoCLoud ForME, January 8, 2015 at 11:31 am says:

    In light of NSA revelations and the fact that I cannot rely on Microsoft to keep my information mine; including the fact that HDD drives are bigger than ever, I will not be doing ANY cloud storage. Furthermore, I will not do business with companies that store their customer’s information in this way. Cloud based storage and file sharing is ignorant to say the least.

    • Peter, January 8, 2015 at 2:54 pm says:

      Cloud storage is not for everyone. Nobody’s forcing you to use it, don’t get your panties in a bunch :)

    • Derek Gabriel (@dsghi), January 9, 2015 at 2:11 am says:

      Microsoft is far from being in bed with the NSA by any means, you’re blowing that so out of proportion. Ultimately though, if you’re not trying to break the law, what do you have to hide? The NSA can read my data all day long if they find it entertaining enough.

  12. Onur, January 8, 2015 at 11:32 am says:

    Placeholder’s was the only distinctive feature of one drive. Now that it’s gone , I am out too.

    • Frank, January 8, 2015 at 2:36 pm says:

      Can you read? It’s not out. They do not remove it from Windows 8.1 and for the Windows 10 sync engine they started with the engine they had in Windows 7 and 8 meaning that they must remake it if you will so it will not be in Windows 10 from the beginning but it will come.

      “However, others will come in updates that follow later in the calendar year – most notably the core capabilities of placeholders that are both reliable and comprehensible.”

      • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:28 pm says:

        That does not mean placeholders will be used. Matter of fact, that means they won’t come back…only some half a s s e d attempt at appeasing. Once placeholders leave one drive, so do I, including office 365

    • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:07 pm says:

      I agree…once placeholders leave one drive, so do I

  13. jimh, January 8, 2015 at 11:35 am says:

    So – I will have to move my 100 GB of photo work to a competitor for a year or so, then move it back when OneDrive is fixed. Because I’m loyal to MS. Even though they’ve totally stiffed me on this one. Ok, sounds good.

    • Peter, January 8, 2015 at 2:52 pm says:

      NONE of the competitors have placeholders either IIRC. So why exactly are you moving your files there?

      • naterz, January 8, 2015 at 10:44 pm says:

        Flickr. Just use Lightroom perpetual license. Sync Flickr sets. Cheaper than office and one drive storage in the long haul.

        Or, move to OSX. Their Photos app will be less ******** and iCloud space is cheap. It’s what I’m doing. Buying an iMac next week. iWork is good enough for me.

        Was thinking of a Surface Pro 3 but it’s not an option now. Costs too much to get larger storage on it. My currently prop has a 1 TB drive and I can just stop using a Microsoft account now and delete it since I’ve already moved all my stuff to iCloud Drive in preparation for getting my iMac.

  14. Jim, January 8, 2015 at 11:44 am says:

    Geez, what a bunch whiny children. The article seems pretty clear to me:

    1. Placeholders AS THEY EXIST TODAY are going away.
    2. MS is committed to replacing them with something that provides the benefits of placeholders WITHOUT the problems they currently cause.
    3. Said functionality will not be in the initial release of Win10, but will come with a later update.
    4. OneDrive and OneDrive for business (currently COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PRODUCTS under the hood) will both get the same sync engine, which is exactly what MS needs to do.

    • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:10 pm says:

      when placeholders go away from one drive, so do I.

  15. Bob, January 8, 2015 at 12:01 pm says:

    Okay, I understand the apps not having the code to download the files. I’m guessing I thought that is where Windows would step in and do something about it. But I still don’t understand what was so **** complicated about the placeholders and why you couldn’t simply “grey out” the files that were only on the cloud (and had to be downloaded).

    Also, if this feature will not be ready until late 2015, give us the Windows 8.1 version until it is ready! Don’t piecemeal you program to us. Give us all or nothing.

  16. Noberto, January 8, 2015 at 12:05 pm says:

    It seems like their problems are the difficulty of some users to identify which files are online only or available offline, the errors that occurs when apps try to access online only files and failures that might occur when manipulating the smart files.

    It also seems to me that those problems have better workarounds (for example, use different folder/file icons to represent the online/offline status) than just removing the files/placeholders, what would be much worst than “step back”, since this feature was one of the best and most useful things ever developed about cloud services (the amount of people complaining here and in the UserVoice forum is prove of that).

    I really hope that the “core features” of placeholders they say will come back will be really similar to what we experience today in Windows 8.1 (or even better, as they insist in trying to convince us). I am one of those who learned being unable of living without the smart files. Without the placeholders/smart files, OneDrive becomes just more one service among Dropbox, Google Drive, etc: more of the same.

    • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:43 pm says:

      “core capabilities” means placeholders will not be back. In order to have access to your one drive files on your PC you’ll have to store them locally — guaranteed

  17. Peter Whitehouse, January 8, 2015 at 1:18 pm says:

    I hope this sync engine improves on the poor sync in Onedrive for business as well as removing the sync file limits (5k for a team site library & 20k for a user Onedrive), these are major issues for us which are stopping us selling many more Office 365 for business subscriptions.

  18. Thomas Levesque, January 8, 2015 at 1:39 pm says:

    As others have noted before, this article isn’t very clear, to say the least… I’m not sure I really understand what the roadmap is for OneDrive. What I think I understand is that placeholder files will be back in Windows 10 (eventually at least), and that’s the most important thing.

    • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:44 pm says:

      No, placeholders will not be back … only “core capabilities” which means nothing now until we actually see it. If placeholders do not come back, neither will I come back to one drive

  19. Martin, January 8, 2015 at 1:42 pm says:

    I really like OnDrive, but what drives me nuts is that single account to use…
    So I have to stay with 3rd party tools to use it or use it in a browser…
    Why can the user not have the choice to select the Microsoft or local account ?

  20. sXe, January 8, 2015 at 2:04 pm says:

    I’m glad we can hope for a patch at least. Placeholders are the best feature over competitors.

  21. John, January 8, 2015 at 2:39 pm says:

    Congrats, you just killed all the small spaced devices you have been selling for months. Why promote Onedrive as a replacement for physical space when you will force all the devices to now keep a 1:1 storage of it. I don’t want GB’s of pictures and video clips on my local PC. I have been really pushing people to Onedrive for backup purposes. Onedrive should be a replacement for space, not a storage of stuff you already have on your PC. Placeholders needs to be an RTM feature.

    • Peter, January 8, 2015 at 2:47 pm says:

      You don’t need to sync every folder to your device. The placeholder functionality is coming back in an update this year like they just said, be patient.

      • Peter, January 8, 2015 at 2:50 pm says:

        I would assume by “later this year” they mean by the launch of W10 later this year. So technically you’ve never lost anything, the W10 beta is pre-release.

    • Michael Ryan, January 12, 2015 at 5:43 am says:

      John,

      Try WebDrive for accessing your OneDrive storage. Our default mode of operation is ‘not’ to sync your entire OneDrive data store to your PC, rather we operate in a Network Drive mode; meaning that your files stay out on OneDrive until you need to access them, then they are pulled locally.

  22. Brendon, January 8, 2015 at 2:53 pm says:

    That’s what I like to hear. The functionality of placeholders will return. I completely agree though, the engine must be reliable but cannot sacrifice features like placeholders. Keep up the great work guys!

  23. gr, January 8, 2015 at 3:03 pm says:

    Hang on here… what happens to devices like the HP Stream? 32 GB storage is all you have. It’s selling point is basically placeholder files.

    I think MS should work much towards brining placeholders to the initial RTM release. Sorry, but otherwise you really do risk causing some users a big problem.

    Windows is succeeding in the low end market right now and it is important that the placeholder files are available on these devices.

  24. Vadim, January 8, 2015 at 3:47 pm says:

    Microsoft should let Chirs Jones go. And not for removing placeholders (although this reason looks good enough to me), but for a total inability to communicate with the customers.

    Yes, I’m talking about this blog post full of corp speak and clichés, unstructured, terribly convoluted and failing to clearly deliver the main and important message to the most loyal fan base.

    Vadim

    P.S. Made me especially appreciate Building WIndows 7 and WIndows 8 blogs.

  25. Sofia, January 8, 2015 at 4:06 pm says:

    Good to know, I won’t renew my Office 365 subscription

    • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:21 pm says:

      agree…once placeholders leave one drive, so do I …. from both one drive and office 365.

  26. Stanley, January 8, 2015 at 4:12 pm says:

    Ok people, the article states in order to converge the sync engines they’re going to use the Windows 7/8 engine as a base, thereby removing placeholder files but offering more stability than the other sync engines. However, it states later they’ll add the right features from the other two sync engines, offering customers the features they want all across the board. I think that’s a really good strategy, something they should have done from the start.

    This is a great article and it offers good insight to what’s going on behind the scenes. As much as I love the placeholder concept, they provided more than adequate justification to remove it temporarily and it’s a sore spot in can accept for a while.

    • Larry, January 8, 2015 at 6:47 pm says:

      placeholders work fine, never had one problem with them. once they’re gone, so am I from one drive.

  27. jim, January 8, 2015 at 6:01 pm says:

    This blog post is more than just a rehash of earlier statements. This time, they’re telling us exactly why they’re throwing us under the bus. And telling us to stay there because they might – maybe – do something to help us get out, at some unspecified future date.

    I don’t see anything here that I’d call a ‘commitment’ to restoring placeholders. I just see more hand-waving about delivering a great experience, and vague promises that everything will be made right, eventually.

    I moved my photo work to OneDrive because I could then view photos – and show them to friends and possible customers – on my Surface RT and even my Windows Phone. It looks like that’s going away, especially as I have little control over updates on the phone and Surface. Nothing in this blog post convinces me that I’m not going to lose that capability, or that it will be restored in a time frame short enough to matter.

    Basically, the OneDrive cloud is going away. Poof. I might as well just go back to a portable hard drive.

  28. Anonymous, January 8, 2015 at 6:31 pm says:

    Quoting:
    —–
    Smart files (placeholders) are going away. Instead of making OneDrive in Windows 10 work like it does in Windows 8.1, it will instead revert to the way the sync client works elsewhere. That is, it will use selective sync like it does in Windows 7 and the Mac.

    Why? Three reasons:

    1. Because many users(IDIOTS) found smart files confusing(They are ********). They would see the smart file on their PC, assume that meant the underlying file was there, and then go offline (on a plane, whatever) and discover they could not open the file. Outrage ensues(That’s a FALSE STATEMENT, that never happened to me, because I opened the file first, I’m not stupid, THEY ARE!!!).

    2. Compatibility reason. Some applications—like Adobe Lightroom—don’t work well with placeholders. (Who cares if a NON MS APPLICATION is not compatible for not being upgraded?)

    3. Reliability. Microsoft says that sync reliability was not where it needed it to be.(That’s true, you can access the OD files if the pc is booted from a usb or cd, I concede that point, that needs to be fixed)
    —–
    Resuming: What a bunch of BULL…

    • Wolfgang, January 26, 2015 at 8:17 am says:

      I agree totally what you write! (even you are anonymous)
      It is totally stupid practice by MS to remove the placeholders, just because some stupid users were not able to understand what this is.
      And it is totally stupid practice by MS to remove this feature first, and then to start with new development. If the IT boss in my company would act like this, he would be fired immediately.
      And it is totally not true, that all these many complaints in the different OneDrive forums about placeholders and shared folder synchronisation is new – you can read statements about shared Folders since 2012 when they called it SkyDrive.
      OK I hope MS will find nice colors or symbols for the file-Icons, what can be loved by all MS users in the world, maybe otherwise MS will cancel the whole service again after promised restart in summer (2015?)

  29. Tink, January 9, 2015 at 1:21 am says:

    Chris Jones stated, “Over the past year we’ve seen a massive increase in OneDrive use for people who use Windows and Office both at home and work.” Windows 8.1 release date Oct 2013, (a little over a year of public consumption).
    I know that I increased my use of OneDrive because of smart files; I imagine many others did also. If you read enough of these posts, you may notice a lot similar comments like mine in regard OneDrive usage.
    Yes, some users were confused with smart files; yes, some apps did not work well with smart files. So fix those problems without killing the feature that attracted the users.
    Chris Jones and his team, instead of building on the OneDrive solution that arrived with 8.1 and brought with it “a massive increase in OneDrive usage”, decided to revert to a solution that did not see massive increase except in hard drive usage. Simultaneously making it more difficult to choose which files/folders to sync or not to sync.
    Chris Jones, how does this make any sense?
    Your post reminds me of post from Steven Sinofsky (building windows 8). First post Aug 2011.
    Chris, just so we are clear, that was not a compliment. Sinofsky was the master of ignoring beta/tech preview users. Which left us with the disaster that was Windows 8 released Oct 2012.
    Time lines. Some fact. Some prediction. A little funny but mostly sad.
    - Oct 2012 Windows 8 Massive disaster.
    - Oct 2013 Windows 8.1 fixed many issues identified in the building Windows 8 blog before Oct 2012 Windows 8 release date.
    - Oct 2014 Windows 10 technical preview (attempts to further introduce some of the fixes identified in the building windows 8 blog before the Oct 2012 Windows 8 release date)
    - Oct 2015 Windows 10 estimated release date. (this is just my best guess based on recent release history)
    - Oct 2016 Windows 10.1 will fix many issues identified in the forums like this one before the actual release of Windows 10 or was that Windows 8.
    - Oct 2017 Windows 11 tech preview (breaks awesome features that actually made it into Windows 10.1 or was that 8.1, you know like OneDrive Smart Files)
    - Oct 2018 Windows 11 released after 6 years of beta testing, turns out to be a massive disaster and the universe finally implodes.
    - Oct 2019 no new version of windows released because the universe has already imploded.

  30. David, January 9, 2015 at 1:25 am says:

    Yeah, Win 8.1 sync is very buggy. Often causes problems.
    But you you have to fix it. BUT keep that perfect OneDrive feature, please.

    • Francesco, January 10, 2015 at 7:35 am says:

      If you have problems with a folder or some files, you can just make them available offline… dropping the placeholder feature is not a solution

  31. CC, January 9, 2015 at 3:51 am says:

    When will you patch (fix) Windows 8.1 so that we can use OneDrive and roaming profiles????
    This problem has been outstanding for 9 months now!!!!!!!

    • Philip Cass, January 9, 2015 at 5:04 am says:

      Indeed, this continues to be a thorn in my side. And it won’t let me use the legacy (win7) app either!

  32. moodjbow, January 9, 2015 at 8:39 am says:

    Dear Mr. Jones,
    I am terribly sorry to inform you that this was too little too late.
    Our company opted out SharePoint because of numerous syncing problems and you are herewith addressing only a couple of them. I can enumerate at least two more really huge design flaws.
    It took people like me almost two years to inform you about such issues, starting with the announcement of SkyDrive Pro. And the end of this debacle is still not visible.
    Did it really have to go that way?
    Yours sincerely

  33. Bruce Edelsten, January 9, 2015 at 1:22 pm says:

    I have an Office 365 account. I have a domestic hotmail /oulook.com/ live.com account. So I have two onedrives. On my Windows PC, I find the domestic Onedrive functionality great but Onedrive for business lacks that functionality, so I cannot make best use of the 1TB available. This blog does not make it clear whether Onedrive for business will get the same functionality as the domestic onedrive (which might break something for Sharepoint users) or the differing functionality will still exist but will now be available from one client (as happens in the andriod), which will then be twice the size and, therefore, impact on PC performance.
    Example. I put a bunch of images in a folder on my domestic onedrive and share it with my friends with a URL. When they open the URL, get a slide show. This does not seem to be possible with Onedrive for business. Even sharing a URL with someone within the same Office 365 domain doesn’t give that functionality. So, what is it then, better functionality or bigger, clunkier code?

  34. Jose Daniel Chacon, January 9, 2015 at 1:47 pm says:

    Hi. Thanks for sharing your remarks and what onedrive’s company is expected to be going on the short-middle term.

    I would like to comment some things that i consider important as user’s experience.

    1. Desktop Application:

    Im user of Windows 7 still and I tried testing two ways of how to get permanently connected with one drive and the first one is across desktop application and as this solution is very easy to implement in my desktop, the thing that become in a pain is that what you put in ondrive’s folder spend GB in your disk locally as it spends in the cloud. So if you got a hard drive with 1.5 TB locally, as you are putting files in onedrive’s folder, the amount of disk usage is gonna be increasing as locally as in the cloud. I understand that is quite practice to have your files in your pc while they are being synchronized permanently with the cloud.

    My recommendation here (if possible and if it exists nowadays please let me know the how to-) is to evaluate the possibility of development that let the end user to choose between two possibilities: Is an option that let the end user to choose if he/she prefers install as a mirror (option 1) or if he/she prefers install application without using the local drive space. I try to mean that onedrive folder can be set up or configured in local PC as a Network Drive in order to dont use local space from hard disk. The idea of this is really to have a backup in the cloud letting you use your hard disk without the need to keep synchronized what you have in your pc as well as you have uploaded there (the cloud).

    Thank you in advance
    Regards

  35. Ajai Nair, January 9, 2015 at 2:42 pm says:

    Does this fix OneDrive for Business? I mean this is a HORRIBLE product. Doesn’t work, can’t share files, sync fails on a daily basis.

  36. Robin Wilson, January 9, 2015 at 3:18 pm says:

    I was very disappointed when I heard about the removal of placeholders and initially found the OneDrive functionality in Windows 10 to be confusing as I was not even offered the choice of which folders to sync so the upgrade to the newer version effectively broke it.

    Now it is very unreliable where files will fail to sync for no reason at all and I keep being prompted to take action but it is not obvious what action to take – sometimes I find renaming them works.

    Due to the unreliability of the new placeholderless version I have switched to using a mapped drive which is a good way to use the full OneDrive without your storage suffering.

    It is a shame as it had finally got to the point where it was reliable before placeholders were removed.

    Robin

  37. Jared, January 9, 2015 at 10:46 pm says:

    Blah blah blah. Please add placeholder functionality to Windows 10.0.0.0.

  38. Shawn C, January 11, 2015 at 8:20 am says:

    Please make placeholder files an option per folder at best. Or, make a modern app that works. Or a desktop explorer the weaves the offline pointers in better. They don’t work in 8.1 and I can’t figure out why it hasn’t been fixed. Sounds like too many priorities.

    If I have Unlimited storage and I turn on placeholders ill have so much **** local. That’s why a per folder enable switch is needed.

    As for a modern file explorer why is it the Hide folks can do it http://www.jide.com/en/desktop/remixos.html

  39. Roberto, January 11, 2015 at 9:48 am says:

    Please, male OneDrive the unique native file manager For Windows 10, as its name suggests, For pc’s, tablets and Phone internal memories and sd cards, future otg usb and onedrive cloud itself.
    Thanks.

  40. Jeehyun, January 12, 2015 at 2:58 am says:

    Hi.
    Is there any plan to add Selective sync and Camera upload feature for ODB?
    Or Office 365 business with OD not ODB?
    ODB is terrible.

  41. sba923, January 12, 2015 at 3:03 am says:

    Indeed, we need placeholders or something similar to keep considering OneDrive the best cloud solution, way above competition.

    I’ve attempted to list what we need here: https://webmail01.oce.com/OWA/auth/logon.aspx?replaceCurrent=1&url=https%3a%2f%2fwebmail01.oce.com%2fOWA%2f

    Did you guys check that out?

  42. C-J Watson @C7JFW, January 12, 2015 at 3:27 am says:

    I am delighted that this is going to be properly addressed. The option to download the contents of each account on a per-device basis would be incredibly helpful.

    I would greatly appreciate being able to add several accounts as options & to simply save to them as convenient. For those of us with multiple business accounts & personal this would make recommending and subsequently supporting OneDrive clients simple.

    One final note – I’d like OneDrive to save locally, then sync – rather than save to the cloud primarily. I get tired of waiting for the cloud when the process could be performed after the operation when I won’t notice it.

    Oh and before I forget – Please display links to pictures/videos/media in the Public area in the same very simple method that Photobucket does, so I can cancel the photobucket subscription – it’ll make explaining bills to my wife much simpler.

  43. Michael Ryan, January 12, 2015 at 5:36 am says:

    Chris, It’s good to see Microsoft finally working toward a unified file access client; it’s the only way that you’ll be able to reach broad acceptance between consumer and business customers. Since many Enterprise OneDrive customers were once SMB customers were once single users, you need to maintain that unified experience and feature set across the base for long term user retention.

    A unified, transparent experience is one thing we learned early and we’ve been doing with WebDrive since it’s initial release on Windows 95 nearly 20 years ago. Our firm belief is that there must be 1 desktop drive/sync interface to access all online storage services. WebDrive does this for OneDrive, SharePoint, WebDAV, SFTP, S3, Google, Box, DropBox, and many other storage services, and does it on all supported Windows Platforms.

  44. Naoya Ikeda, January 13, 2015 at 4:12 am says:

    Get rid of place holder is terrible.
    This is death penalty for small storage hardware.

  45. Mike Dumont, January 16, 2015 at 4:34 am says:

    Based on this I’ve reinstated my Dropbox Pro account and am moving everything off OneDrive. Placeholders were the key feature that made OneDrive the choice for me, made it worth living without full versioning support worthwhile. Meanwhile, syncing seems to have become very buggy and slow lately.

  46. George Birbilis, January 20, 2015 at 3:00 am says:

    An area where OneDrive fails compared to Dropbox is that it doesn’t sync locally shared folders you have with other people, so it’s hard to collaborate with others unless you only use apps that know about OneDrive (not classic ones that work with a folder) or involve the browser everytime you open the file. With Dropbox it’s way more easier and intuitive

  47. Anonymous, January 23, 2015 at 5:23 pm says:

    Microsoft has no plans to listen, I have no plans to keep paying. Placeholders and onedrive was the only thing in windows 8 worth keeping. So Microsoft removes them… Sounds about right.

  48. Farrside, January 26, 2015 at 3:29 am says:

    It’s all about the $$. I have all faith that MS will deliver the goodies soon enough after the Win10 release, however with their current ‘free’ upgrade offer (open to everyone and his/her dog) they will only see revenue from new hardware purchases. Purchase decisions typically take time to get traction, so MS need to ‘start the clock’ as soon as possible, i.e. without delaying a Win10 release. The words ‘lipstick’ and ‘pig’ do spring to mind though ;-).

  49. Wolfgang, January 26, 2015 at 7:58 am says:

    For me is hard to understand the strategy what Chris Jones writes above on top; when MS saw, that placeholders were not appreciated by many customers; well maybe, but more – many used this feature. So a strategy just to take this away is penalty for customers by a punishing god! ‘Normally’ a developer should try to improve first and THEN replace!
    I hope MS will show up with a satisfying OneDrive sync engine soon, and I hope it will be a simple solution, just including what users want: -include shared folders. -placeholders for ‘only-online’ files (folders)

  50. Fabio, January 27, 2015 at 6:10 am says:

    Please bring the placeholder files back. It works perfectly in Windows 8.1, and it is a shame that the feature was removed because some users had trouble accessing their files. Now every user has that problem.

  51. Hasan Rahman, January 27, 2015 at 2:33 pm says:

    Getting more and more impatient… Where is the new Mac client? Only 4 days left of January… :-)

  52. BC, January 29, 2015 at 3:43 pm says:

    This Sucks. OneDrive’s selective online/offline files made a small tablet like my HP Stream 7 totally usable. Now an “upgrade” to Windows 10 takes that away? You’ve got to be kidding me. The “Office” version of OneDrive always sucked. The Windows 8.1 version was almost perfect (just needed the option to sync shared folders like DropBox does). Seriously I hope you change your plans on this. In order to support Windows 8.1 you’ll have to support the server-side component anyway. Why not just leave that functionality in Windows 10 and grey out the “online only” files in order to avoid the “confusion” you seem to think existed (though reading the comments on this makes it clear that we all loved this feature, and weren’t at all confused).

    You just spent time on stage telling us how you’re taking our feedback seriously. PLEASE take this feedback seriously. This is a mistake. Period.

  53. mcosmin, January 31, 2015 at 11:39 am says:

    Seriously, bring back the smart files. This was just perfect implementation for tablets. Now we can’t use our entire onedrive anymore on limited storage devices.

    SSDs aren’t cheap you know…

  54. d703, February 3, 2015 at 2:51 pm says:

    Can you make the font color in the article darker so it not such a pain in the a** to read? What’s up with that?

  55. ExistBI, February 13, 2015 at 8:42 am says:

    Great post, this was a very interesting read. I will be sharing this with my team.

  56. Gildon Opao, February 13, 2015 at 7:51 pm says:

    My suggestion for OneDrive is for Microsoft to Return the Smart Files or Online-Mode Files. To do this you will need to add a new attribute to the existing (system, hidden, etc) known as Online-Only. This attribute will have a similar behavior to the “Hidden” attribute, meaning legacy applications will not be able to see the files that are “Online-Only”. However when implemented with Windows Store Apps using the FilePicker these files can be seen and can be treated accordingly. For developers of “Legacy” or Desktop apps would want to avail of this feature, Microsoft has to create a FilePicker that supports this in “Legacy” or Desktop Mode and developers should update their code to use this. If they don’t want to update their code then the “Online-Only” files will be treated has hidden. In this case everyone wins.

    • jim h, February 17, 2015 at 5:08 pm says:

      Great suggestion – actually update and extend the operating system to support cloud storage. Unfortunately, MS has decided that would be too much work and they’re now backing away entirely, killing the ‘placeholder’ feature they’d already implemented.

  57. Ed S, February 14, 2015 at 4:46 am says:

    I’ve been using OneDrive (SkyDrive) from the beginning and since they announced unlimited storage for Office365 subscribers I’ve been using it more and more. However I have a problem. I installed Win10TP on my Surface Pro 3 and OneDrive no longer lets me make my OneDrive files “available offline”, instead all files are on my hard drive. On my PC’s 1TB hard drive this isn’t a problem but on my Surface Pro 3 128 gb hard drive is will become a problem very soon. I know that I can select which OneDrive folders I want to sync but if there’s a file I need that is in a non-synced folder it won’t be available. I’m hoping that the OneDrive team takes another look at this changes it back in future Win10TP or at least the final version of Windows 10.

  58. Michael, February 14, 2015 at 12:21 pm says:

    Friends,

    Thanks for the blog, but I can hardly read it on my monitor. The font is light blue on a white background. I could manage with the small print and very close lines if it weren’t for the light blue font. Probably it’s not a problem for anyone else as you still have it (I haven’t looked to see if anyone else has mentioned this – too hard to read!).

    Thanks for your help,

    Michael

    p.s.: I just saw someone else complaining about the font color, too. Thanks d703!

  59. Dries, February 16, 2015 at 8:39 am says:

    I got an office subscription and with that came 1TB of onedrive storage for 5 users. These five users all have an account on my laptop.. 3 of these 5 users do not live with me all the time (divorced dad, married a second time)But they use onedrive to store stuff from different computers, so they can work on their stuff wherever they are. With the “available online only” this was great, the file was there when needed, but not occupying any space if not needed.

    Losing this option in the first version of windows 10 means that all of a sudden I need 450GB (that’s the actual use) of space on my laptop disks if I do upgrade. But it could even go up to 5TB (as that is the total onedrive space).

    No I was just wondering, upgrading will be free of charge in the first year, will this feature be back before this year ends?

  60. Rick, February 22, 2015 at 7:52 am says:

    This is a mistake, placeholders were what differentiated OneDrive from the competition. The purpose of cloud storage is to offload precious local hard drive space and to have it easily accessible. To have to open an app or go to a website is terrible after being used to the convenience placeholders in windows explorer provided. I can’t fathom that anyone would be confused, it’s not rocket science. Maybe a modified icon showing it’s a placeholder? Anyhow I see this as OneDrive losing one of their key features and selling points.

  61. Lee Drake, March 1, 2015 at 6:07 pm says:

    Yeah no sorry. You need to address clients for Windows 7-8.1. Saying – just wait this will all work once Windows 10 comes out is NOT an answer. The current state of OneDrive and SharePoint and the consumer product are full of not winning.

  62. Anonymous, March 5, 2015 at 3:56 am says:

    Going backwards was a mistake. The OneDrive team needed to build/improve upon the 8.1 version that drove one drive adoption. Especially on small foot print devices. Stub recall for archived files is nothing new and placeholders were/are very similar to archive stubs. For example http://docs.commvault.com/commvault/v10/others/pdf/one_pass_driverless.pdf. The fix would have been to correct the recall or sync of the placeholder prior to the application hand off. The placeholder or stub file is significantly smaller than the actual file. A 20 or 40Mb file or a 1G file would be seen as a about a 4k or 20k placeholder on local storage. Once done with edits or viewing the file can be re-stubbed manually or on a schedule or based on connectivity

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