In brief: Microsoft will be making a small but significant change to OneDrive shortly. Later in July, the service's "Fetch" tool will be discarded, which will make it a bit more difficult to quickly snag files from your PC while using a different device.

For a bit of context, Fetch lets you treat a separate PC like a cloud server – you could grab files from it remotely and copy them to whatever computer you happened to be using at the time via OneDrive's website.

Fetch was not the most popular feature in OneDrive's arsenal, but it was still handy for those who chose to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, useful or not, Fetch's niche use cases will ultimately be its downfall. Starting on July 31, the tool will no longer be functional, giving you roughly two weeks to use it before it gets killed off.

This information comes from an official OneDrive support article for the Fetch feature, which has been updated with the following notice:

After July 31, 2020, you will no longer be able to fetch files from your PC. However, you can sync files and folders to OneDrive and then access those files from your web browser or your phone. To automatically sync the Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders on your PC, you can turn on OneDrive PC folder backup.

It seems that, moving forward, Microsoft would prefer that you use its dedicated cloud servers to store, sync, and transfer your content, instead of your own PC.

This news will undoubtedly disappoint some, but it doesn't seem very likely that Microsoft will reverse its decision. So, for now, we'd advise anyone who has relied on the Fetch feature up to this point to seek alternatives; within OneDrive or otherwise.

Image credit: Nopparat Khokthong