Many organizations are coming up on their first-year anniversary of supporting a remote workforce. While some have already started transitioning people back to the office, whether in full-time or hyb...
Updated Mar 24, 2021
Version 4.0
Blog Post
Let me repeat that I like OneDrive. The critics I have to voice are about OneDrive NOT being any choice when working in shared environments with ACTIVE (read: changing) data. It cannot do that, it is using way-too-old single-file-linear-processing, cannot prioritize, does not have a granular "warning" system and too often "forgets" data (or even deletes files when it gets one of its once-a-year hickups).
Like most people reporting these problems around the interwebs (and this for years, if I may say so), it's a common problem in OneDrive with both LOTS of files in directories (think: C++ repositories) due to the single-file-processing, large files (taking longer to sync e.g. due to network issues) and frequent changes (think: every 1-2 minutes) due to the syncing not checking frequently enough.
In other words: It is the SYNCING that isn't working properly - you never know if a file is "in sync" or if it is not, because OneDrive won't tell you BEFORE it has checked a file (in theory it does, in reality, this isn't really working that great).
Try changing a file OFTEN. Check which revision you get on a remote computer linking to the same OneDrive share. Then do the same while syncing a secondary and a tertiary folder - something not uncommon in a real-world-situation.
Simple, typical situation: OneDrive is still busy trying to upload a repository of, say, 5GB of data. While it is doing so (on a 100mbps line), you start working. Obviously, you don't just make one change in one file, you make several in several files. Since OneDrive is busy doing its initial upload, chances are that your changes don't get synced before everything else has been uploaded (a simple "async-sync" would do the trick, but OneDrive can't do that) or that one or more files that you changed simply gets forgotten (is never synced again - NEVER).
You cannot "prioritize" single files. If a file gets forgotten, all you can do is copy its content over to a new file, manually. This is a frequent thing (not just for me, if it was just me I'd say it's the German who's to blame, as usual).
Try working on a share from several machines - after all, we are doing home-officing these days (well, I have been doing home-office for a living for around 35 years, but that's a different story): It is simply IMPOSSIBLE to do that using OneDrive if requirements are that your data is up-to-date anytime you access it (say: open a file). The "natural" thing to expect is that if a file is being opened and it resides on OneDrive, OneDrive FIRST checks if it has to be synced. That does not happen (reliably), you may be opening your local copy (out-of-date) or an interim version (from OneDrive's server, out-of-date as well) OR the most recent version (uploaded from third site). You don't know which one you will get, so you don't know how valid the data is.
This is not even mentioning the fact that running OneDrive someplace else isn't exactly a piece of cake (outside your user's directory on your system drive). Which would be another "natural thing" in a shared environment, obviously. Not going down that rabbit hole just now.
Marc Albrecht