If you’ve been using Microsoft’s OneDrive online storage for a few years, you likely remember “smart files,” aka placeholders. It was one of the few features—arguably the only—that made Windows 8 tolerable. Smart files let you see all your OneDrive files and folders in the Windows File Explorer, but not have to actually sync them to your PC. Those offline files would “stream” to your PC only when you tried to open them. Thus, you could save space on your PC while still accessing the rest of your files in OneDrive as needed.

The technology is easy to describe, but apparently hard for Microsoft to implement in Windows 10.

Two years ago, Microsoft released a beta test version of Windows 10 that didn’t support smart files. Windows 10 still doesn’t have this capability despite the continued customer angst. Microsoft says it is coming back—one day.

As shown below, OneDrive does have selective sync. In both the OneDrive app and in File Explorer, you can choose which folders to sync. But only those files and their folders are available on your PC, and they take up space. In Windows 10, you can’t have files and folders stream to your PC on demand, as smart files did.