Windows 10’s OneDrive Changes Draw User Ire

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Latest technical preview build changes the way OneDrive files get synced

The latest Windows 10 technical preview build rolled out this past Wednesday with a number of changes supposedly inspired by user feedback (or, as the the company put it on the Windows Blog, by user “awesomeness”). User feedback may very well have inspired most of the changes contained in Build 9879, but the removal of the “smart files” feature from OneDrive does not appear to be one of them, at least going by the amount of flak it has drawn over the past few days from Windows Insider Program members.
Introduced as part of Windows 8.1 when OneDrive was still called SkyDrive, smart files are placeholders that contain thumbnails and metadata of OnDrive files not available locally. This gives the user a panoptic view of their OneDrive file system, with all OneDrive files and folders, including even those with no local copies, being visible offline.
Despite its all too obvious usefulness, the feature has fallen out of favor with the Windows 10 development team and is nowhere to be found in the latest test build of the upcoming operating system. However, the move hasn’t gone down too well with many Windows 10 Technical Preview users who want the company to bring the feature back post-haste.
In its defense, Microsoft says it was never “happy with how we built placeholders, and we got clear feedback that some customers were confused (for example, with files not being available when offline), and that some applications didn’t work well with placeholders and that sync reliability was not where we needed it to be.”
“The changes we made [in Windows 10 build 9879] are significant. We didn’t just “turn off” placeholders – we’re making fundamental improvements to how Sync works, focusing on reliability in all scenarios, bringing together OneDrive and OneDrive for Business in one sync engine, and making sure we have a model that can scale to unlimited storage,” the company said in response to growing calls for placeholders to be returned, adding that this move is part of a lengthy improvement process that could eventually see the company bring back “key features of placeholders.”
Image Credit: Windows Blog
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