OneDrive for macOS finally gets long-awaited feature

Although there are many cloud storage providers nowadays, a lot of consumers tend to gravitate towards OneDrive, either because it’s bundled in their Microsoft 365 package or because they prefer Redmond’s interconnected technology landscape. While Microsoft is busy adding AI features to its cloud storage solution, sometimes it helps to just get the basics right. This is what the company has targeted with its latest update, which has introduced support for removable drives in macOS.

The power of the cloud, now on your external drive

Most OneDrive users probably just synchronize their local and cloud content directly on the machine they are operating on, but the fact of the matter is that OneDrive also supports storage on external drives, an option that many consumers utilize. Although the capability has been supported on Windows for some time now, it has only enjoyed limited support on macOS, until today.

Up until now, macOS users were only allowed to synchronize OneDrive content to non-ejectable external drives, but Microsoft has enhanced this feature by adding support for removable drives too. In a blog post, the company has unveiled this feature, highlighting its response to customer feedback. Starting from today, Insiders running build 25.097 or higher of OneDrive will be able to seamlessly synchronize OneDrive content to any drive.

Microsoft has cautioned that if your drive gets unplugged, OneDrive will show an error message after a brief grace period. This grace period serves as a way to offer a better user experience for customers with drives that intermittently disconnect. As soon as your device gets plugged back in, OneDrive will resume synchronization.

For now, this capability is limited to OneDrive Insiders running macOS 15.0 or later. In addition, Microsoft has laid out the following conditions for any drive that you intend to use:

• Formatted for APFS
• Protected by FileVault
• Not read-only, a network drive, or marked as quarantined by macOS

It is important to note that OneDrive cannot be utilized by moving your drive between different macOS devices. Customers will be required to set up OneDrive from scratch on a new Mac in order to get it synced with the external drive.

It is also unclear when this feature will be available generally for all Mac users to leverage. It likely depends upon the feedback that Microsoft gets from its testing with Insiders, along with gauging the continued interest in this particular capability.