Colorado State University

UPDATE: Some of this post contains deprecated information.  As of the fall semester of 2024 – the OneDrive quota for new users has been reduced to 5GB.  All existing users will maintain a quota which is their current usage plus 5GB at the time of this change.

In days past, one of the major drawbacks to using the OneDrive sync client on your local computer, was that your local storage was often far less than your OneDrive quota of 5TB.  The sync client required that you download any files to your local computer in order to even see them!  Of course, this was sort of a buzzkill in that you quickly realized you could never take advantage of the the 5TB of OneDrive storage.

All of this has changed with an update to OneDrive called “On-Demand”.  Basically, this allows you to only download files locally when you need them, but you can still see all of the files in your OneDrive account.  This update introduces a new set of icons listed in your Explorer window that designate whether a file is in the cloud or available locally.  You can also set certain files to always be available locally if you wish.

All in all, this is a great update.  At the moment, this only affects the Windows client, and there are rumors that the Mac Client will soon release these changes.  For more information directly from Microsoft about using “on-Demand”, check out the following link!

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=859553