OneDrive 4+

Better than it was...

I had to stop using previous versions as they would repeatedly forget the service I was logged into and require everything to be downloaded again when reattached (despite the files already being on my machine). The whole thing was also disasterously slow, even clicking the icon to check the download status would take 10 seconds to appear.

I can't tell if the former issue has improved, but I've had to install the latest version due to requiring SharePoint sync support and at least the UI (clicking the menu bar icon) no longer takes an age to show anything. It also no longer burns just one of my CPU cores. So it moves from 1 star to 3 stars, as I'm feeling generous today.

you need to know your limitations !

As per all Microsoft software - its written by Microsoft and as such they have no idea of the Mac Universe as an ongoing OS, They write like programmers they think like programmers and they dont employ any designers / artwork people or people who design interfaces , they don’t appear to test out their products very thougherly - The case in point is that it fails on repeated occasions, and it fails in 2 specific areas - No 1) it does not like large files - ie over 2 gb - it treats them with contempt and more often than not won’t back them up properly - this has been ongoing since version 1 (If there was a version 1) and the most frustrating is its funny over file names - its like going back to MSDOS of the 70’s ! - If for instance you have an ical calendar backup, if you right click on these on the mac and choose “show package Contents” it consisits of 100’s or 1000’s of assosciated files, and lots have odd names and full stops forward slash / in the names - it does not like these 1 little bit ! again this has been ongoing since early versions, and the only rels work round is to comprees the file before hand, these things are not an issue in Dropbox which works faultlessly - i understand that drop box want £70 a yera for their system , but it works 100% - Microsoft the Multi Million Pound company should be able to run rings around these other services - but they dont and i always wonder why ?

Offloaded files are nor searchable

OneDrive has always been working well enough for me on Windows, and I would say the same about MacOS version, BUT. It doesn't behave the same as on Windows. On Windows it creates placeholders for whole directory/file structure, making it quickly browsable and searchable. On MacOS, however, it doesn't create placeholders for the whole directory tree, which leads to these problems: 1. When you browse to a directory you didn't browse on this machine before (or it was previously evicted from disk) it requires internet connection to load directory content, and takes some time. 2. Since there are no placeholders and metadata for child dirs and files in such a directory, it's not indexed by Spotlight Search and is essentially not searchable in any way. The latter is practically a show stopper: who wants to dig into directories structure every time they need some file while you could just search for it in Spotlight? MacOS have all needed APIs to be able to download folder contents (without downloading files). And iCloud Drive doesn't seem to have this problem.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your review and for your feedback. The issue you are describing with searching for files is a limitation in macOS and is something Apple will need to fix. It should work if you use Spotlight (Cmd+Space), but won't find files using the Finder toolbar search or the mdfind app. If you are seeing something else or would like to submit feedback to Apple, please email us at onedrivemacosfb@microsoft.com and we can help.