As you would know, some “cloud drive” applications like Google Drive and OneDrive, desktop and mobile clients doesn’t always sync all of the files to preserve local space.
I have a use case like this; there are 5 different companies I want to manage in one instance as these are group companies. I will create group folders for each of them and many sub folders inside these group folders to share between different departments.
This will of course create a load of files after some time. Since I am the administrator of all; my Windows and mobile client will sync all of these files which I wouldn’t need all the time.
What GDrive and OneDrive do is; they show you the files just like a normal drive, but they keep the files only online. Whenever you need a file which you don’t have synced locally, the client transparently downloads the online copy and voila! This way, you don’t need to have gigs of data synching back and forth for seldom use. As you know, this is more vital for mobile devices.
By the way I know you can un-check a folder you don’t want to sync, but that is actually not what I described here.