Using Sequoia on my very new Mac Mini with the latest update (15.4).
Synching my work and personal OneDrive account files on an external drive.
First time I installed the OneDrive app, the external drive was formatted with exFat. Files started downloading but then quit after a while with an unspecified Error -50.
Uninstalled, formatted the drive as APFS as advised by a Microsoft article. But then OneDrive wouldn’t let me choose my external drive to store my files as it wasn’t an encrypted drive. So I reformatted the drive to APFS encrypted and I was able to choose the external drive to store my files.
Disk Utility shows the files are taking up space on the external drive. I can see the files all listed in the finder. But they all have the cloud icon designating that they haven’t been downloaded. I can’t open the docx files with Word, Pages or LibreOffice.
Everything works fine accessing OneDrive online.
Everything works fine if I download a file from one of my online OneDrive accounts to my Mac.
Microsoft, what gives?
Oh, and I get none of this mumbo jumbo using the Google Drive app for desktop Mac version. I have normal access to those files using Word, Pages and LibreOffice.
Update
I synced my personal and work OneDrive files on to my Mac’s hard drive instead of the external drive and all is working as expected. Not an ideal setup as it takes up a lot of space. But now I know at least that I have a local copy of my files.
I use BackBlaze. So I think I just have to double check that all of those files are being backed up. And how to get the syncing on to my external drive working.
I’d be careful, you might want to exclude your work OneDrive from the Backblaze backup. I’d double check the corporate rules and regulations, not that you endanger your employment by backing up company data in the cloud on a non-authorized service…
I suspect that OneDrive didn’t like the fact that it was being stored on a “removable” drive. On Windows you can store it on other drives, as long as they are pemanently attached, it doesn’t like it if it is being pointed to removable media, as it cannot guarantee that the drive will be connected and thus cannot guarantee file availability.
From Microsoft’s website:
If you need to change your OneDrive storage location from your computer to an SD card or other external storage source, you can do so as long as the external drive is non-ejectable. Removable USB drives are not supported.
One option I’m considering is redirecting the downloads folder on one of my browsers to point towards a folder on my external drive. Then I could use OneDrive’s download function? And perhaps I can figure out some way to automate that process incrementally? Maybe I can use an Apple shortcut
What exactly are you trying to achieve? The whole point of OneDrive is that you don’t need to have all the files locally, so they don’t take up too much space on the local machine.
Your company should already have a backup solution in place that makes a backup of OneDrive for all of its users.
If you are trying to backup your personal account, you can use rsync in a cronjob, or you can use one of a number of tools to keep the folders synchronized.
I’m a teacher. When I change school divisions, I lose access to that division’s OneDrive and Outlook. Because I’m always updating my lesson plans and resources, I want to keep those files.
And thank you for the rsync link.
In the good old days, you’d burn a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM with your data when you departed a gig. Don’t you just want an archive of your old Outlook e-mails – exporting all of your data out of e-mailboxes? Ditto for the OneDrive stuff.
As a member of the “Corporate IT” world, you shouldn’t be saving your personal stuff in a corporate OneDrive. I know we are implementing DLP policies that will prevent you from downloading data from your OneDrive onto a machine that is not corporate managed.
I hear where you’re coming from. Corporate ownership policies as well as privacy matters.
On the other hand, i think policies in the education field (at least in the primary and secondary public levels) may be slightly different. Obviously I would not recommend that any teacher should personally retain data containing private information (including marks and comments on assignments, for example, unless the comments are completely anonymized so teachers can use them as examples for future classes and portfolios for interviews). But I don’t believe, in this case, schools and or their divisions own the lesson plans and resources created by teachers unless a teacher has signed a contract agreeing to that.