OneDrive - force file dehydration

[Garacesh]

Our Art dept want to use OneDrive on their devices so kids can easily pick up work between their own devices and school computers.

Makes sense, but the file sizes of RAW photos and Premiere Pro files? Not a fun time!

 

Well Windows' Storage Sense should fix that, right?

 

GPO:\Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\OneDrive

Enable OneDrive Files On-Demand

: Enabled

GPO:\Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\Storage Sense

Allow Storage Sense

: Enabled

Allow Storage Sense Temporary Files cleanup

: Enabled

Configure Storage Sense cadence

: Enabled (Every day)

Configure Storage Sense Cloud Content dehydration threshold

: Enabled (1)

Configure Storage Sense Recycle Bin cleanup threshold

: Enabled (1)

 

Well, womp womp, no it doesn't.

In fact, that doesn't seem to do anything

 

I opened a file on Thursday, Monday morning it was still there, even after several reboots.

 

Well, can I script it with PowerShell? Well, yes, but actually no. I can use a combination of Get-ChildItem and Where-Object {$_.LastWriteTime to dump files that have a LastWriteTime -gt 2, but that assumes that the user has deleted them and dumps them from OneDrive. Not quite what I'm after.

 

So next I try looking into ATTRIB, a file that's downloaded from OneDrive has the O attribute, whereas one that hasn't doesn't.

Awesome, pipe Get-ChildItem and Where-Object {$_.LastWriteTime into ATTRIB -O, right?

Nooope. Still nada. Command appears to complete successfully, certainly there's no errors, but nothing actually changes.

 

So now I'm kind of stuck here. I can't just slap OneDrive on the machine or it'll be rendered useless once the disk fills up, and the official way of doing it doesn't seem to work.

 

Is there another method I'm missing?

Something wacky about Storage Sense I'm not in the know on?

Edited March 20, 2023 by Garacesh

[psydii]

In my experience, the control of storage sense is not granular. Anecdotally:

 

If you open an file it resets the timer on that file to be dehydrated.

 

Also Storage Sense only dehydrates the files of the currently logged on user, so if they don't have a lot of large files to ofload, not much difference will be made to the free space.

 

I believe it only kicks in when it feels the machine is getting low on space, even if its set to run once a day. I see our Photography machines running for months with very little free diskspace - the cycle of students through them seems to be just enough to hold an equilibrium... but unfortunately eventually too many students have too many recent large files and not enough older files to dehydrate and wipe/reload is the fastest way to recover. (usually happens on average every 12 months - but some machines make it 18 months, while others don't last six).

[Garacesh]

Also Storage Sense only dehydrates the files of the currently logged on user, so if they don't have a lot of large files to ofload, not much difference will be made to the free space.

 

I believe it only kicks in when it feels the machine is getting low on space, even if its set to run once a day.

Well, bugger. If true, that completely negates what I'm trying to achieve.

I can appreciate opening the file resetting the timer, but that's fine, because they're probably using that file, so it can stay.

I know 'low space' is its default setting but I was hoping that changing that to daily would make it run regardless of file space. That's certainly how the GPO's help text makes it sound, to me..

Enabled:

You must provide the desired Storage Sense cadence. Supported options are: daily, weekly, monthly, and during low free disk space. The default is 0 (during low free disk space).

 

Disabled or Not Configured:

By default, the Storage Sense cadence is set to “during low free disk space”. Users can configure this setting in Storage settings.

[psydii]

I rejigged the order of sentences in the above before posting, the whole lot should have be under the caveat “it seems to me”. I think I did read about how it worked in more detail once but I can’t find it now.

 

We have seating plans for all lessons. This works well for Storage Sense as all users log on to ‘their’ machine once a week/two weeks. I’m not sure we’d have got away with it at all if not for that.

[RobD]

What if you created a folder called art or similar which is set not to sync on the computers and asked the users to upload directly to the website?

[psydii]

What if you created a folder called art or similar which is set not to sync on the computers and asked the users to upload directly to the website?

 

We have a department that works that way, because "it makes sense for them". They hate it and everything OneDrive.