How to enable Onedrive when Group Policy disables it

My employer chooses not to allow Onedrive by Group Policy setting. I only have personal stuff on my Onedrive and for some reason they allow other drive synchronization tools like Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.

So when I need to synchronize stuff with Onedrive I am faced with the prospect of trying to find a way to enable Onedrive. The quickest and easiest way I have found is to change the registry key which controls Onedrive’s ability to load.

To do this please first be familiar with Regedit and the consequences changing the wrong thing can have on your computer. This information is provided for your information and I accept no liability for any harm you may cause your computer by following my advice!

Open Regedit and find the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\OneDrive

Change the key

DisableFileSyncNGSC

from 1 to 0

Exit Regedit

Start Onedrive

Override OneDrive’s Daily Download Limit

Recently I was trying to download my entire Onedrive file collection to a local drive for safe-keeping. I’ve made the most of the 1Tb of disk space Microsoft currently gives you for being an Office 365 owner so I knew I was into a long process to get all the data back.

What I didn’t expect, however, was that Onedrive limits the amount of data it will download to you on a daily basis. This shows up by Onedrive rather cryptically saying this:

In my case this is because I had exceeded the pre-set download limit of 537600 Megabyte per day (537 Gigabytes). So theoretically it’s going to take me another day to download the remainder of my nearly 1Tb of data.

There is, however a workaround to this buried in a file on your Windows machine, located here:

C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive\settings\Personal

If you open a command prompt and CD to this folder you’ll find a file called

ClientPolicy.ini

Open this file in Notepad,

notepad ClientPolicy.ini

and you’ll get something like this….

Search for a line that starts:

MaxClientMBTransferredPerDay = 537600

Change the number here to something more appropriate for your needs. In my case I chose 1075200.

Save the file then go to the Onedrive icon in the System tray, next to the clock, right click, click More then Close Onedrive.

Start Onedrive again from the icon from the Start Menu and you should find synchronizing starts again.

How to do the same on Mac OS X

The same setting can be changed in ClientPolicy.ini on a Mac. To find the file go here:

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.OneDrive-mac/Data/Library/Application Support/OneDrive/settings/Personal

Where ~ is your user directory.