Forum Discussion
OneDrive - Synchronisation issues SharePoint document libraries
jcgonzalezmartin, thanks for taking the time to respond. Hopefully StephenRice or @Stephen Rose may have heard of these issues or if not be able to point me in the right direction to get these issues resolved for our customers.
As an update; the customer that was having issues with SharePoint and OneDrive have decided to scale back how they use the service as it was causing too many issues. The data that they had in the cloud has now been moved back to a local file server with only a single document library now being used.
I have performed some additional tests and believe that the issue is due to file path lengths. When OneDrive is setup for the SharePoint sites, the default path for creation is 'C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Office 365 Company Name\SharePoint Site Name - SharePoint Document Library Name'. We abbreviated this down as far as possible, but, before adding any data to SharePoint via the OneDrive client we were finding that on average 20 - 30 characters were being taken by this portion of the file path. Before any data was moved processes were run to make sure that the data fell within limits, but I believe that data was copied or uploaded by the customer that exceeded the amount of characters that can be used. This was 218 for Excel and 250 for file Explorer.
I have run a test myself today and if, through File Explorer or Word, Excel etc a path is used that is long and a file is created that would exceed the 250 character limit you are blocked from either creating or saving the file. However, if you copy the file to this location it will create the file (breaking the limit) and synchronise to SharePoint. This will in turn then try to synchronise to the other clients and cause an issue.
Due to the naming requirements for this customer they had quite deep folder structures on a file server. This was not a problem when on a file server as they started with a drive letter, M:\FOLDER etc.
We did try running the Office diagnostic tools and each time the OneDrive client passed all checks.
Hopefully for future versions of the client the fact that files can be copied in and break the file path limits may be resolved as I think that this will resolve the issues that I have seen.
I haven't been able to find anything on this problem but this post is identical to the issue we are currently having.
It started a couple of months ago and to start with it was fairly easy to deal with. However the finance department are finding it a bit of nightmare as twice now they have had their finance library disconnect and haven't notice. This has caused chaos as they will have both worked in the OneDrive folders on their machines making a resync a very messy task. This has caused them to lose a lot of faith in the system as they feel they are always looking over their shoulder with it to check its syncing.
This has been pretty sporadic for other users too with a spate about a month ago.
However there doesn't seem to be any obvious solution. The users are currently using Windows 10 1703 so haven't got the latest OneDrive version with files on demand.
I am having a hard time convincing people that sticking with Office 365 and SharePoint is the right thing to do. Starting to wonder myself!
Did you ever find a solution or acknowledgement to this problem?
Thanks in advance!
