Forum Discussion
Synchronization issue
I have an active Microsoft 365 subscription. My wife and I share Microsoft To Do lists.
We recently noticed a synchronization issue:
- When she creates/deletes/updates tasks, they sync to me.
When I create/update tasks, they don’t sync to her.
When I delete tasks, they are deleted for her.
We’ve already signed out and back in, and tested on different devices and platforms.
Permissions are correct, and everything used to work before.
8 Replies
My wife and I are having this problem too (for the past month). She gets none of the updates that I make. I get most of her updates, but not all of them! I discovered this today, when I returned from the grocery store missing a few items. I looked at her phone, and there they were on her list.
Wunderlist had a few sync issues, but they were fixed soon after the change to MS ToDo. Sync has been very solid in my experience. But it is broken now. Hope it is fixed soon!
My wife and I are having the exact one-way sync issue you all are describing. I just tried creating a list from her phone/about and sharing with me, the opposite of what we normally do. Now the syncing issue is reversed. So, still no solution but at least it's repeatable! Hopefully this will be resolved or a fix will be discovered.
I'm also experiencing the exact same issue as Milchkuh and fernandopro2 ... if my wife creates the list and shares it with me, everything works fine... if I create the list and share it with her, my adds/edits don't sync. We both have personal accounts and we both are testing using the web interface to remove any possible caching/sync issues with the apps.
Hello djgrossman and Milchkuh
It's not exactly a solution, but what I did and has been working so far is:
- At first, I created the lists and shared them with my wife. Now we've done the opposite. She creates the lists and shares them with me. So far, it's been working both ways.
Hello everyone,
I can confirm the same one-way sync issue and have successfully implemented the suggested workaround. I want to add a few more details that might be helpful for the diagnosis.
Based on the differences between the tasks in my lists, I would estimate that the synchronization problem has existed since about mid-August. It seems the sync was working correctly until then.
I also confirmed that the problem is consistently one-way. I created several new lists from my account and shared them with my partner, and the issue was the same for all of them: an initial sync of all tasks occurred, but no updates from my side were synchronized afterwards.
Following the workaround, we tried the opposite: my partner's account created a new list and shared it with me. I'm very happy to confirm that this has solved the problem completely. We have been able to add and update tasks from both accounts without any issues since.
As a side note, I first tried to duplicate an existing list with my partner's account. This worked, but when I shared the duplicated list back to my original account, only about two-thirds of the tasks were synchronized, which I could reproduce multiple times.
My final successful solution was to have my partner's account create a new, empty list and then manually move all tasks (including completed ones and notes) from the old list into the new one. This successfully migrated all data, although it did result in the loss of all task assignments, which had to be manually re-established.
Thank you very much djgrossman for this helpful tip! This confirms that the issue is indeed related to the list's creation process.
Oh I can't take credit for that – I was just chiming in that I'm experiencing the same issues. We're still waiting for a solution and not a workaround on this end.
Hello, I am experiencing the exact same issue and would like to provide additional details to help with the diagnosis.
My specific problem is that changes I make to a shared list are not synchronized with my partner's account, while any changes my partner makes are instantly synchronized with my account. The synchronization is therefore completely one-way.
We have already tried the following troubleshooting steps without success:
- Re-sharing the list: We un-shared the list and created a new share link. This resulted in a temporary sync of old data, but new changes from my side still failed to appear on my partner's account.
- Checking across multiple devices: I confirmed the issue persists on both my Android phone and the web version of To Do. This clearly indicates the problem is not device-specific.
- Confirming internal sync: Within my own account, all my devices (phone and web) sync perfectly with each other. This confirms that data is correctly reaching my account's server space, but it's not being pushed to the shared list on my partner's account.
This behavior strongly suggests a server-side bug specific to how certain accounts or lists are handled during synchronization. It's not a client-side issue (app or device).
Thank you for your attention to this matter. I am hoping for a fix soon.
I'm experiencing exactly the same things as Milchkuh. I could have written that post myself.
The To Do app is an important part of how we manage our household and we'd appreciate it if the team could resolve whatever's gone wrong here.
