OneDrive sync SharePoint bug re-syncs everything!

Iron Contributor

Has anyone seem OneDrive.exe suddenly decide to re-sync loads and loads of files in a SharePoint site?

 

My guess it that it happens when there's lots of files in one site, so my recommendation would be is don't do sync (even with new sync client) if you have many files in SharePoint. The official limit is apparently 100,000 but this customer is only at a third of that and we've seen this happen on two machines already. (PS it wasn't me who put ~30000 files in the site! :-))

 

Suddenly OneDrive is resyncing ~24000 files, and downloads them slowly one-by-one. As you can imagine this make an unusable PC for the user. Changes they make aren't uploaded to SharePoint for ages, (real!) changed files from the site don't appear for ages, the CPU level is high etc.

 

In the first case they added some new files to the sync'd folder on the PC and it started resyncing 'everything'. The second instance happened when a user returned from holiday. The site had been sync'd before she left, few files had changed on the site in the meantime, and boof re-syncing ~24000 files!  The settings dialog becomes unresponsive too in this case. Stopping the sync of the affected site takes a few attempts!

 

365 support couldn't suggest anything other that stop sync, update, re-start sync.

3 Replies

Try Microsoft's Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365. I was having OneDrive issues - constantly resyncing (grinding down life of my SSD). It identified a OneNote notebook stored in ODFB. Never knew these should never be located in ODFB (outside of the stub). See Restrictions and limitations when you sync files and folders from Microsoft Support.

 

Cleared out the notebook. Paused & restarted syncing, and restarted computer for good measure. All clear!

I'm seeing the exact same thing over the past few weeks. It appears to be the most recent version of OneDrive that was installed (17.3.6943.0625), which also happened around the same time my laptop was forced to update to the Creator's Update. Randomly (it seems), when I login to my computer, OneDrive feels like it needs to resync some or all of the 12GB of sharepoint folders that I have synced. I have 3 sites synced, and it doesn't always resync all of them, but usually at least 7GB of something. It is driving me crazy, and several other people in our office are experiencing it as well. I tried the assistant you recommended and it found no issues. Is there any way to go back to an old version?

 

Is there any hope on the horizon for a fix for this? As others have said, this is not good for my SSD drive, and it's also not good for my home/office bandwidth usage.

I'm bumping this thread because I have been dealing with this since Files On-Demand came out with no resolution.

 

I have one client with hundreds of thousands of files in a SharePoint Online library. Before Files On-Demand, you needed a hard drive large enough to hold all of the OD/SP data but at least it worked. When Files On-Demand came out, I thought it would be the perfect answer. Instead, if a user changes one file, the OneDrive client scans the entire library "looking for changes." As a result, that one file doesn't get synced for 5-10 minutes until the client has finished scanning.

 

Currently, my client can only check the folders that they need in OneDrive settings but that's a tedious step when they are constantly moving between project folders.

 

I would recommend to my client splitting their data into separate SharePoint libraries but I can't make that suggestion without knowing if it would actually resolve the issue. It's a waste of the client's money and my time.

 

As Office 365 users, It makes sense for them to use OneDrive/SharePoint but I may have to move them to a competitor if this doesn't get resolved. The added cost outweighs the impaired productivity.