A long time ago, in an OS far, far away, ok not that far away but with Window 8.1, Microsoft had a feature for OneDrive called placeholders. This feature allowed you to keep a very small file on your local machine that showed a thumbnail of the document that was stored in the cloud.
By double-clicking on the placeholder, the file would download to your machine and open as if it were always stored on your local disk. For those who understood the feature, it was fantastic, as you had quick access to all of your cloud content without paying the penalty of storing it locally.
The problem was that not everyone understood how the feature worked and when a consumer was offline, they became angry that all of the content they thought was stored locally, was not. So, Microsoft removed the feature but for power users, this was a sin on the same level as spoiling the new Star Wars movie for those who have not seen it yet....
OneDrive Placeholders To Return With Redstone
Hi,
Thanks a lot for this.
I never saw the point in using cloud services and then having the same content stored locally as well.
Best,
This is GREAT news ! Disabling placeholders defeated the main purpose of offline storage.
This is great news
Looking forward to this update, thanks for the info
I hope this does not OneDrive to crash all the time like it did in windows 8. Too me I got plenty of internal space so placeholders are useless just hope I can disable it because it caused crashes all the time.
There is a workaround you can use (not as effective but does help on a tablet with limited storage). You do not get the metadata eg thumbnails of photos etc.
1) Open your web browser and sign-in to your OneDrive account, navigate to Files, and access any of the folders.
2) Next, you'll need your unique CID ID from the address bar link, which looks something like this:
(numbers are different of course).
The ID is what comes after ?cid=. From my example, the cid is A12B1234567FD1D2
3) In Folder enter this URL: and append the CID ID. The URL should now look like this:
4) Check the Reconnect at sign-in and Connect using Onedrive credential
5) Click Finish and enter your OneDrive credentials (your Onedrive MS Account details.
You can now access files from the mapped netork drive in same way placeholders used to work, without any syncing needed.
I would to love to have this back , it's bothered me couple of times since I upgraded it to 10.
