Microsoft appears to have dropped OneDrive support for file systems that aren’t NTFS. Except that the company claims that it never supported those files in the first place and nobody actually noticed.
The problem began over last week where some OneDrive users began to see warnings about NTFS files systems. In other words, the cloud storage service does not recognise FAT32, ExFAT, or ReFS. Admittedly, these formats are not exactly commonly found on Windows machines; but they are in use with some groups.
What is of more interest is the fact that ReFS was created by Microsoft itself in Windows Server 2012 to replace NTFS.
Microsoft provided a statement to onMSFT that reads: “Microsoft OneDrive wants to ensure users have the best possible sync experience on Windows, which is why OneDrive maintains the industry standard of support for NTFS. Microsoft discovered a warning message that should have existed was missing when a user attempted to store their OneDrive folder on a non-NTFS filesystem – which was immediately remedied. Nothing has changed in terms of official support and all OneDrive folders will continue to need to be located on a drive with the NTFS filesystem.”
It essentially claims that OneDrive has always only supported NTFS, and the error was a lack of warning message. Which is extremely curious since people have reported that non-NTFS drives worked fine before this message began appearing.
The problem here is that those who were already using these other file systems will have to format their storage drives in order to use OneDrive. FAT32 drives can be converted with little issue; as Windows has a built in tool just for situations like this. On the other hand, ExFAT and ReFS drives will have to be wiped and reformatted from scratch.
[Source: onMSFT]
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