14 DAY TRIAL // Users started complaining that non-NTFS drives no longer work with OneDrive due to what appeared to be a quiet change implemented by Microsoft in early July.
And although it wasn’t clear what exactly happened, with the company remaining tight-lipped at first, a statement offered to onMSFT appears to suggest that no change has been made to OneDrive lately and that NTFS has always been the only supported file system.
“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,” the software giant explained in a statement.
Users claim a change was definitely made
Users, however, claim otherwise. A change that was made approximately one week ago made it impossible for SD cards to create OneDrive backups unless they were formatted as NTFS.
Previously, many users say, both exFAT and ReFS worked with the same drives, and the changes that Microsoft implemented made NTFS mandatory for everyone. The only workaround to continue using drives with OneDrive is to format them as NTFS, though this obviously involves backing up data and restoring it when switching to the new file system.
Microsoft, on the other hand, claims OneDrive has always been using NTFS, explaining instead that the only thing that was missing was a warning to be shown to users who configured a different file system.
Who’s right and who’s lying? We’ve reached out to Microsoft for more clarification in this OneDrive saga and we’ll update the article when an answer is offered. For the time being, however, NTFS is the only file system that can be used with the cloud storage service.