Our Community is in read-only mode until April 8th, learn more here. You can still search existing threads or get help via Dropbox Support, the Dropbox Help Center, or Learn.
Forum Discussion
Policy changes to new files as online-only with File Provider on MacOS?
I am trying to determine the current policy for when files become online-only on a macOS machine that uses File Provider. As I understand it, using File Provider is optional for now, but may become m...
Rich
Super User II
Super User IIis this no longer the official policy, or has this just been rephrased so the behaviour is just implicit?
Pretty sure it's covered by this line:
Some downloaded files won’t display as occupying disk space.
Which basically means some downloaded files will download as online-only.
Sorry, maybe I’m stupid or missing some subtext here, but the word “download” as it’s used here feels intuitively different from how I’m used to it. Could you help me out?
My expectation for a file being “downloaded” is that the bytes of the file are physically on my disk on my machine. If my machine is disconnected from the internet, I should be able to access every file that’s been downloaded. With this definition, a file can’t be both downloaded and online-only. The only exception I could think of would occur in distributed version control that used file locking.
You may be using “downloaded” to mean “queued for downloading but not necessarily downloaded yet”, or “declared as to-download via Selective Sync, but not downloaded for other reasons”. Could you clarify?
- Rich
You're overcomplicating it. Whether downloaded as available offline or online-only, data still needs to be downloaded for the file to be shown on your computer. Whether you're downloading the entire file or just the marker file (in the case of online-only), data is still being downloaded.
