Microsoft’s OneDrive is getting a massive new feature for all users: differential sync. If that does not make a lot of sense to you, let me explain.

When you modify and update a file on a service like OneDrive, it would usually upload the entire file to sync the new changes. This is not a big problem for small files, but it can be quiet time consuming and use a lot of bandwidth for when making tiny changes to a large file that leads to the entire file being uploaded every time.

With differential sync, OneDrive will only upload parts of the file that changed. So instead of the entire file being uploaded every time you make a change to it, OneDrive is only going to upload parts of the file that changed. This is obviously much more sensible, as it will save bandwidth and time.

OneDrive actually had differential sync for some files and users in the past, but the rollout has been quite staggered.

💥[boom it’s done] I love it when the team resolves @onedrive User Voice suggestions with thousands of votes! “Enable differential sync (only sync parts of the files that changed)” – is now rolled out to all customers https://t.co/lQUTiUrzqn

— Omar Shahine (@OmarShahine) April 27, 2020

This week, Microsoft quietly announced that differential sync is now enabled for all users and file types. More specifically, according to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, it looks like Microsoft has completed rolling out differential sync support for all file types for its business customers this week.

In case you are wondering, Dropbox seems to also support differential sync, but as far as I am aware, Google Drive doesn’t seem to support the feature as of yet.

Tagged with Microsoft 365, OneDrive