Microsoft reintroduces placeholders in OneDrive in Windows Redstone

Microsoft is going to reintroduce placeholders, documents that are visible in OneDrive but don’t sync until they’re opened, in the next major update to Windows 10 in 2016. That’s according to sources from Microsoft insider Paul Thurrott.

Microsoft insider Thurrott publishes the news on his own website. The reintroduction of placeholders would be part of Windows Redstone, which is the code name for the next major update to Microsoft’s operating system. The feature was in Windows 8.1 but it turned out not to be carried over to 10. The placeholders are small shortcut-like files that point to a file in the cloud of OneDrive. The moment users click on the placeholder files, the file in question is downloaded for use. The functionality was able to save users a lot of disk space, but led to confusion among users who did not realize that their OneDrive files cannot be accessed without an internet connection.

Microsoft argues this confusion among some users was too much to keep the feature. Now users can only sync selectively, meaning unsynced OneDrive files won’t be visible in File Explorer either. This is now also the case with competitors such as Google Drive and Dropbox. The feature would now return in the next major update to Windows 10, Redstone, which is scheduled for June. Microsoft may be tweaking the implementation of the feature to avoid repeating the aforementioned confusion.