
There is no delay while files are synced. When you save a file, it is immediately and silently uploaded. When you click on one, it is immediately and silently downloaded and opens completely normally. But the files are not on your hard drive, they’re in the cloud. You can browse through the files and folders exactly like any other folders. So again, to be clear: when OneDrive Files OnDemand is turned on, OneDrive appears in the left column of File Explorer, just as it does now. Microsoft has now built that feature into OneDrive and OneDrive For Business in Windows 10. Here’s an introduction to Box Drive and the idea of online files appearing in File Explorer.ĭropbox is starting to introduce Dropbox Smart Sync for its business users. You can buy a laptop with a smaller solid state drive and still browse through your collection of 50,000 family photos.īox was the first cloud storage company to introduce this feature to a broad audience when it made Box Drive widely available in June. The result is that you can store as many files online as you want without using any hard drive space. When this is set up, you can browse through files just like you do now but you’re looking at a list of what’s online instead of looking through files that have been synced to your local hard drive. The online services are starting to work the same way. You vaguely know that the file is on some other computer but that doesn’t matter. You browse through the files and folders and click on a file to open it. Maybe you call it the P: drive, or maybe you’re familiar with UNC names like \\server\companydocs. The company files aren’t on your own computer, they’re on the server. Your files will be stored online but you will browse through them and open them using File Explorer on your computer, exactly like you do now with the files on your hard drive.Īnyone working in a business with a server already knows what that experience is like.


In the next couple of years, you will become comfortable with something new.


When will you get OneDrive Files On-Demand?.How do you turn on OneDrive Files On-Demand?.Some of the fun and interesting mysteries discussed below: It’s worth knowing about the concept even if you don’t use OneDrive. But this is from Microsoft, so you will not be surprised to find out that (1) it’s hard to predict when you’ll get the update that includes the new feature, (2) it’s confusing to set it up, and (3) it’s poorly documented. It’s a valuable and welcome new feature that you should know about and that you might use. OneDrive Files On-Demand is a new feature being rolled out now to Windows 10 computers worldwide.
