Forum Discussion
OneDrive - Synchronisation issues SharePoint document libraries
Teemu Strand I understand your hesitation. We have had it a lot recently and the sync client isn't the fastest at resyncing a lot of files which is rather frustrating.
We only have 2 users who are currently having the biggest issue with OneDrive. However they probably do the most in terms of sharing a single SPO library. The problem is if a sync drops out on one of their machines and they don't notice, it becomes a very messy and time consuming process trying to match up the most recent files from each.
We have tried to push the 'Online only use' but they really don't get on well with accessing everything via a web browser. Only today I have just had one of them call with an issue where a handful of new files they have created on their machine are just sat there in the 'Processing' stage and have been since 08:00 this morning. I can understand their frustration but I have no answer for them other than 'Just leave it running and it will update . . . eventually' But I have no reason to give them of why this is the case.
Generally OneDrive for Business drives have been ok. They have dropped out but due to the fact that really only one user is using them the chances of files mismatching are small. However shared SharePoint libraries are a mine field of problems when synced to multiple machines and users.
My next step was to start using Windows 10 1709 which allows the use of 'Files on demand' in OneDrive rather than having to sync everything straight off. At least with this users are only downloading files they use so if a sync problem occurs it will only effect a small amount of files, in theory. (fingers crossed)
Apologies for not replying sooner.
From my findings with the OneDrive client, I am convinced that the issues that our customer was experiencing was due to the file and folder paths exceeding limits. I have no proof of this from log files etc as nothing gets reported, but hope this helps.
Even though I explained the finite limit of the file and folder path could not exceed 250 characters or 218 for Excel files, they would regularly name folders and files in such a way that this limit would be exceeded. I ran some tests myself and it is surprisingly easy to do.
When running the Microsoft Office 365 analyzer tools on the data once it synchronised, it showed no errors. However, I could run a script against the data and review as a CSV in Excel to show that data broke the limits. I think that intermittently the client would realise this and just stop working rather than flag an error when trying to synchronise the data to say that a rule had been broken.
We have another customer (both are in the building trade so use similar naming conventions) and they intermittently have the same issue. They are happy to workaround this by using the OneDrive app from the Microsoft Store which works well, minus being able to integrate into File Explorer.
On a personal note; I have synchronised my own OneDrive data and a SPO library that is in use at our business on several PCs and to this day have never had this issue. Side loading the customers OneDrive on the same PC I experienced the drop in synchronisation (and co-incidentally so did several of the staff at the customer site at exactly the same time, though not all).
One of our customers grew too frustrated by the issue and decided to move back to hosting the data on their server and using VPN connectivity to access remotely. Our other customer is persevering with OneDrive and for the moment is happy to work with us to resolve. I am going down the data route to fix, but due to Microsoft not being able to find anything, is best guess on my-part.
Hopefully my experience may help you.