I’ve complained a lot on Twitter about the lack of development from the OneDrive team, but it looks like they’re finally adding new features. Running the latest insider build of Windows 10 (fast ring), OneDrive now allows users to pause syncing for 2, 8 or 24 hours.
Imagine you’re travelling and have horrible hotel WiFi, so you decide to tether. Unless you explicitly tell OneDrive to stop syncing, or exit completely, you can burn through gigabytes of data. If you know what to do, you can mark the connection as a ‘metered connection’, but this is pretty buried.
Having an option to pause syncing of files to OneDrive, and then automatically resume is the perfect blend between convenience and control. If you’re like me and have had to kill OneDrive for performance or data reasons, you put at risk an files you work on, as they aren’t being backed up. At least with this option, you can select 24 hours, go away to an even, then forget about it and syncing will resume without intervention.
This is one of the few examples where the OneDrive team have actually added new features, the other being the ability to constrain up/down data speeds in settings. This works great if you use one internet connection, but most of us don’t, most of us travel between work and home, or home and mobile, or even public hotspots. Ideally you’d be able to specify that fat connection at work or fibre connection at home to do the hard work of transferring gigabytes back and forward, while the most recent documents (say under 200MB) would be synced regardless of the connection.
There’s much work to be done here, especially the ludicrously lacking sync conflict screen, but it is finally heading in a positive direction.
