Forum Discussion
Files on Demand randomly downloading and filling hard drives
Olav - thanks for the reply.
We are not using any third-party indexing tools and the files and their metadata are not being modified. The files are clearly being downloaded by SearchProtocolHost.exe, which is the Windows Search service, even though online-only files are not supposed to be indexed. As far as I can tell we have no group policy that is affecting this and we have non-domain-joined machines that are doing it as well which pretty much eliminates that possibility. We do have all of the machines managed through SCCM, but we aren't enforcing anything non-standard in terms of indexing or anything like that.
We are now finding this happening on Windows 1709 machines, too, so it's not just a recent development with rolling out 1803. I'm more suspicious that it's something in the latest binaries of OneDrive. With all of this experimentation I have discovered that Windows Search is tightly coupled to the Files on Demand function. If you disable Windows Search, the "Free up space" option will be greyed out in the menu unless you are clicking on a file or folder that has been made available locally. If Search is running, you can select "Free up space" from anywhere in the hierarchy and OneDrive/Windows will remove locally-stored copies from everywhere below that point.
I'm pretty frustrated as our whole Office 365 rollout strategy is based around this feature. I have tech support incidents in progress with both the OneDrive and Windows teams (who don't talk to each other!) and can't seem to get this escalated to someone who understands how this technology works better that I do!
I have three customers with the same issue, and myself. One I found was a Dell optimization tool that had Antivirus built into it. Each time the antivirus touched the file on demand it would download it. I have a couple open tickets with MS, but nothing resolved yet.
Quite sure that the antivirus are not «files on demand» compatible. Quick out of my head I see 4 ways of fixing it. Number one and the best, use built in windows defender instead. Windows defender are now on of the best AV, had a bad rep for a while but totaly trustworthy know and free. Number 2, get a newer version of AV or another vendor. Number 3 exclude the path to the onedriver folders, this might be risky since the files will not be scanned regularary, but most AV would scan them while they are being downloaded and for sure when been runned. Number 4, select only necessary folders to be synced and keep everything downloaded
We are using only Windows Defender for antivirus. The application that is downloading the files in our case is SearchProtocolHost.exe, which is the Windows Search service. So for I have not found a way to tell Windows Search not to try to index the files in OneDrive. The documentation actually specifically states that for FOD files only the filename will be indexed.
I have tickets open with both the OneDrive and Windows teams and have given them extensive log files and screen captures and they haven't been able to come up with an answer. I am waiting to try out Windows 1809 to see if the new features including Storage Sense have any impact on the problem.
What's odd is this seems to happen to specific users, not computers. I have five machines that I use and once it started happening it started happening on all of them. Other users that have had it happen have the same experience. But we have dozens of users with identical hardware and software configurations for whom it is not happening.
Richard DugganDid you ever solve this issue or get a response from microsoft? I'm seeing the same issue with searchprotocolhost.exe downloading files.
- One other tip if it’s not AV related, clear upload cache. For Office you might need to manually delete the folder with the cache. Onedrive try tips 8 and lastly 9 in this post https://www.windowscentral.com/9-tips-help-you-fix-onedrive-sync-problems-windows-10
