There also was a separate sync engine for OneDrive for Business, making three separate sync engines in total. Microsoft had introduced the placeholders feature in Windows 8.1, which had a different sync engine than the one used for Windows 7/8. Future OneDrive releases will tap a single sync engine that will be used across Windows versions ranging from Windows 7 through Windows 10, he explained.

Jones said that Microsoft is opting to build on the sync engine that's associated with the older Windows 7 and Windows 8 OSes, going forward, instead of the current leading-edge build. Instead, Microsoft will issue an update to Windows 10 later this calendar year that will add 'the core capabilities of placeholders,' according to Chris Jones, corporate vice president of OneDrive and SharePoint, who explained the changes to come in a blog post last week. Windows 10, when released in the latter part of this year, won't include the engine for the placeholders feature. The feature displays a file's icon and metadata information, while the bits of the actual file are stored in Microsoft's OneDrive service datacenters. Placeholders, which is also called ' smart files' by Microsoft, allows people to browse files stored across in the cloud without those files actually taking up disk space on their devices. Microsoft is planning to unify the synchronization engine used with its OneDrive cloud storage service, but that move will bring a feature change for Windows 10 users.Ī change in the sync engine might be unremarkable except that it also entails losing a ' placeholders' file storage feature in Windows 10, at least in its present form.

Microsoft onedrive review 2015