alt Hacker NewsThat doesn't really make a lot of sense, though. Reading a file that's not actually on disk doesn't download it permanently. If I have zero of 10TB worth of files stored locally on my 1TB device, read them all serially, and measure my disk usage, there's no reason the disk should be full, or at least it should be cache that can be easily freed. The only time this is potentially a problem is if one of the files exceeds the total disk space available.
Hell, if I open a directory of photos and my OS tries to pull exif data for each one, it would be wild if that caused those files to be fully downloaded and consume disk space.
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It's generally now handled decently well, but with three or four of these things it can make backups take annoying long as without "smarts" (which are not always present) it may force a download of the entire OneDrive/Box each time - even if it never crashes out.
Right, but even if that’s working it breaks the user experience of services like this that ‘files I used recently are on my device’.
After a backup, you’d go out to a coffee shop or on a plane only to find that the files in the synced folder you used yesterday, and expected to still be there, were not - but photos from ten years ago were available!