Forum Discussion
A request for help: SharePoint causing tons of sync problems?
- Mar 03, 2018
Seeing your NGSC version, I guess that you are also on Windows Insider.
Of course, I cannot say if the issues you are experiencing are actually due to installing Insider builds, but, in general, Insider (aka beta) versions of both Windows and Office should be avoided on production machines.
Also, instead of reusing existing Office documents, you should use Office templates. See for example http://www.techadvisory.org/2014/01/using-office-templates/
Finally, you could disable Autosave completely or only for single files. See https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-is-autosave-6d6bd723-ebfd-4e40-b5f6-ae6e8088f7a5
Hope it helps...
At this point, I am afraid that your setup is heavily scrambled.
I would suggest contacting Microsoft support.
(Another approach could be rebuilding the machine from scratch, this time using only production builds of everything.)
For solving the immediate problem, have you tried to download locally (e.g. to the desktop) the file from the web UI and send it from there?
The touchscreen on my laptop has been giving me issues to, so opened up a support ticket for that today and they are requesting I send it back. Likely the laptop will be wiped before I get it back, so that will give me a chance to start fresh. But I haven't been focusing on it, but my older Win 7 computer with Office 2010 is a production build, and also has had many of the same issues with SharePoint. I had originally chalked that up to just being Office 2010 and not having full support for the new features, but now I'm not so sure.
- Salvatore BiscariMar 07, 2018Silver Contributor
Reid, OneDrive sync client works fairly well for me and all my customers, not to mention most of the people in this community and their customers. (BTW, as I have said many times, I don't think that it is always a good idea to sync locally the files that are shared, but this is another story...)
Hence, making short a long discussion, local sync should work, point.
If it doesn't, either you have some problem in your tenant, and then you should open a ticket with Microsoft, or you are doing something "wrong" locally, and then you should try to understand what.
Speaking about Win 7/Office 2010, IMHO Microsoft is doing an incredible job trying to have Office 365 working with such legacy software, but, of course, they cannot succeed in every aspect.
So, my obvious advice is to upgrade to Win 10 and Office 2016 Pro Plus as soon as possible.
Regards.
- Reid HamiltonApr 14, 2018Copper Contributor
So I received my computer back with a fresh install of the OS as expected. Since then I've been trying to only slowly add back programs and keep as much at the default settings as I can stand. Windows has been updated and is on the Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted). I am using Office 2016 ProPlus Retail. I'm not sure if there is an issue, because when I originally installed it I was forced to associate it with an email account, and so I used the same account as I have an Office 365 subscription with, but I do not want to use a subscription version of Office (I will not be at this job for that much longer, and do not want to lose access to Office when I leave).
The OneDrive client is 18.044.0301.0006, which has only updated via Windows Update as far as I know. I've disconnected my Windows 7 machine from OneDrive, so that shouldn't cause any conflicts if it ever was. I've only connected one of my Office 365 accounts to OneDrive for Business so far, and am syncing one SharePoint folder. This Office 365 account is a different account than the one that is associated with the Office 2016 install, in case that matters.
So even with these changes I've been facing mostly the same issues as before. Files that should have a cloud by them in the Outlook attach file dialog only show up as local files. Files that do have a cloud icon will not attach a link to a message, I get the cannot find this file error message. Starting a couple of days ago when I was working on some files in Word that were saved to my ODfB folder I received error messages that cannot be dismissed saying "Upload Blocked" and something about needing to signin to my account. Of course I was already signed in, and signing in again didn't do anything to fix the problem. I tried saving instead to the synced SharePoint folder for the same account, but still got the same error. Searching for fixes I saw a suggestion to clear out the credential manager of Microsoft, Office, and OneDrive accounts. There were about a dozen of these listed in the credential manager, associated with 4 different Microsoft accounts. Clearing them out seems to have fixed the syncing issue, but I'm worried that it will just return again as I have need to use various MS accounts again. And I still don't have the cloud attachment bug fixed.
I'm pretty frustrated, and just about ready to throw in the towel on integration. Cut down my work Office 365 account to just Exchange, and move our file server to Box or Dropbox which we've used without any problems for years...but figured before I rule all my past efforts a sunk cost, I'd try to see if there are any last suggestions for what might be going wrong, or more importantly how to fix it.
- Reid HamiltonAug 20, 2018Copper Contributor
So for work we eventually did throw in the towel and have been in the process of moving everything over to Box.com, which has been working better for our needs. But I still need to use SharePoint for collaboration with school classmates. For the last few weeks things were generally running better for me just using SharePoint for school, but in the last few days I've again started running into problems and I'm hoping I can get some suggestions or ideas on what might be going on.
When I'm creating documents, I'm primarily working offline as I find I concentrate better without the distractions. While working on my document I save frequently, and my expectation was that the document is being saved locally in my SharePoint folder, and then when I go back online it will sync with SharePoint automatically or if someone else happened to be working on the document at the same time I might get a conflicted copy. But that doesn't seem to be what is happening. Instead, I've been getting a red arrow notification in the tray saying there is a problem with uploading the file. Yesterday though I had a bigger problem. I was offline and opened the file from the File Manager. Worked on it offline for a few hours saving regularly, and then came home and went back online. I've noticed that it won't try to sync the file until it is closed, so I saved and closed, and then went to open back up again from the File Manager and saw that the timestamp on the file was still from a few hours before, the last time I'd been online. Opening the file confirmed that indeed none of the work I'd done had been saved. I closed the file and then tried opening it directly from Word instead. I verified the file path was the same as what I was using in the File Manager, but luckily this file had all of my changes. I then did a Save As to make sure it was saving correctly in the SharePoint folder, and overwrote the file that still had the old time stamp on it. But that seems to have deleted changes that my teammate made to the file that happened after that timestamp as well, and he was not able to recover his work.
So, what am I doing wrong? Why is my file not saving properly to my local computer when I'm offline? Why won't it sync when I go back online?