Data marked as available offline is being switched to online-only mode; the download will take hours

Question

A coding project that I had set to ‘available offline’ was switched to ‘online only’ overnight, even though the offline icon is still green. I can’t work on my project until it has been downloaded again. It’s already taken two hours to download the folder (approx. 1.2 GB).

Walter · Answer

Thanks for the clarification there @bsiebs - much appreciated.

If you don't mind me asking, how much hard drive pace do you have available on your computer? Have you tried adjusting your bandwidth settings through the app's preferences?

Also, how do you sync settings look in the app's preferences under the sync tab?

bsiebs · Answer

All files in the folder used to be offline when I set the folder to ‚available offline‘ and they got a green sync icon (without any cloud icon). Everything worked for a few days, all the files were offline. However, over night (I didn’t switch my mac off), some files in the folder got magically switched to online-only. I didn’t change anything in the folder, they were suddenly online-only the next morning. The same happened to files in other folders marked as ‚available offline‘ that used to be offline before.

Why is this happening?

Jay · Answer

Thanks for the image. These are folders that contain both available offline files, and online-only files, as seen in the sync icon article.

This means that the folder itself wasn't marked as available offline in the right-click menu.

If you make that selection, then the folder will download and remain available offline for you, and files won't automatically return to an online-only status.