You are on a plane, in a car park or on a site with no signal, you open the folder, all your files are listed - and none of them will open. Nothing is broken. What you are looking at is a list of files that live in the cloud, not on your laptop. OneDrive calls this Files On-Demand, and once you know how to read the icons it stops being a mystery.
What the icons mean
Open File Explorer and look at the small icon in the Status column next to each file name.
- A white cloud outline. Online only. The file name is on your laptop but the contents are not. It needs internet to open. It takes up almost no disk space.
- A white circle with a green tick outline. Available on this device right now, because you opened it recently. It will open offline, but OneDrive is allowed to clear it later if it needs the space.
- A solid green circle with a white tick. Always kept on this device. It will open offline, today and in six months, and OneDrive will never clear it.
Only the solid green circle is a promise.
Try this first: make a folder available offline
- Do this while you still have internet, ideally the day before you travel. It cannot be done once you are already offline.
- Open File Explorer and find the folder you will need - the job folder, the client folder, the forms folder.
- Right-click the folder and choose Always keep on this device. On some versions it sits under OneDrive in the right-click menu.
- Wait. The icons change from white clouds to solid green circles as each file downloads. A large folder can take a while, so start it before you pack up. Do not shut the laptop until the folder shows the solid green tick.
- Check your disk space afterwards. In File Explorer, click This PC and look at the bar under the C: drive. If you have marked a lot of folders this way you can fill a small laptop, and a full disk stops sync for everything.
To reverse it later, right-click the same folder and choose Free up space. That removes the local copy but keeps the file safely in the cloud. It does not delete anything.
On a phone or tablet
In the OneDrive app, tap and hold a file or folder, then choose the option to make it available offline. On a phone this is per-file rather than per-folder in some views, so pick the handful of documents you actually need rather than everything.
If that didn’t fix it
Log a ticket if you see any of these:
- The Always keep on this device option is missing from the right-click menu.
- Files stay as white clouds no matter how long you wait - that is usually a sync problem rather than a Files On-Demand one.
- You keep running out of disk space when you mark folders offline. There is a proper answer to this, and it is not deleting things at random.
- You need the same set of folders offline on several laptops. We can set that up centrally instead of everyone doing it by hand.
Why this exists
The shared file store for a whole business is usually far bigger than the disk in any one laptop. Files On-Demand lets you see and search everything while only storing what you actually use. It is a good trade nearly all the time. It is only a problem on the two days a year you have no signal, which is exactly why it pays to know the right-click option before you need it.
Still stuck?
Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.
Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.
Related Articles
OneDrive or SharePoint has stopped syncing
You save a file and the little cloud icon never settles, or a colleague says they cannot see the document you finished an hour ago. Sync problems are the single most common thing our clients ask us about, and most of them come down to one stuck file, ...
A folder has gone missing: how to find it and get it back
A folder that was there yesterday is not there today, and someone is already saying the word deleted. Before anyone panics: nine times out of ten it has not been deleted at all. It has been dragged into a neighbouring folder by accident. One slightly ...
Going back to an earlier version of a document
Someone has saved over three hours of your work, or a spreadsheet that was fine on Tuesday is now a mess of broken formulas. Almost nobody knows this, and it saves a lot of afternoons: Microsoft 365 quietly keeps earlier versions of every file in ...
Giving someone access to a folder, and sharing outside the business safely
Someone needs to get at a folder, or a client needs a file that is too big to email. Sharing in Microsoft 365 is easy, which is the problem - the quickest option is usually the least safe one. Here is the short version of how to do it properly ...
Moving or renaming files without breaking everyone else's links
You want to tidy up. Rename a folder, move a few files somewhere sensible, and suddenly three people report that a link they use every day no longer works. It is worth knowing which links survive a move and which do not, because the answer is not ...