OneDrive for Business shortcut disappears from file explorer and other instability

[AllanWith]

Are we the only ones seeing issues with the OneDrive client when sync'ing from OneDrive for Business? There have been problems ever since the client with support for "Files on demand" was released.

What we've been seeing are these issues:

1. The OneDrive for Business shortcut disappears from file explorer. This is reproducible when synchronizing a folder that is "shared with me", but it also happens in other cases which we cannot precisely reproduce. The fix can be anything from closing and reopening the OneDrive client to reinstalling Windows... And we're aware of the troubleshooting guide on this topic as well as registry keys and other workarounds...

2. The overlay icons are not always representative - sometimes they show that a file is being processed for no reason

3. We've been getting reports that some users are missing files from the online view, that are visible in file explorer. These are as of yet unconfirmed, but I'd be curious if anyone else are experiencing this?

Thank you!

[#2]

I have already  seen 1 and 2 since I started using on demand last week.

[#3]

OK, so we're not the only ones... I did some experimenting yesterday and I think there is a bug where it overwrites or resets the registry so that the keys that are mentioned in the link below disappear when you choose to sync folders "shared with me"
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_onedrivefb-mso_other-mso_o365b/remove-th...

I could be happening because when you sync folders "shared with me" it writes its own keys into the registry - but when you quit and reopen the OneDrive client, it will automatically add those keys back.

Unfortunately this doesn't necessarily happen when you reboot, you have to explicitly quit the client and the reopen it.

But sometimes that doesn't work either. Sometimes you do have to quit the client, reopen it and then reboot and sometimes you need to uninstall and reinstall the onedrive sync client. And we've even had at least one case where we ended up with a complete redeploy...

[#4]

The only issue we see at one customer is that the Sharepoint Library Link is missing after a password change. More on this issue: https://www.inthecloud247.com/onedrive-business-sharepoint-library-link-missing-file-explorer/

[#5]

Thank you, it's the same registry keys that I was looking at yesterday and which I think partially is the cause of the problem, except in our case, it is the OneDrive shortcut that disappears and I can reproduce it, by synchronizing a folder shared with me.

We've seen this across Windows versions from at lease 1607 and up to 1803 17120 which I am running om my own PC and with all versions of the OneDrive client since the one in the fall that included "files on demand". I also want to point out, that we haven't necessarily activated the "files on demand" feature either. I'm seeing the problem with the feature enabled, but others are seeing it without.

We'd really like to see this addressed as we don't want the story out there among our users, that OneDrive for Business is unreliable (that's how they see it), as it will ultimately cause them to go looking for other solutions.

[#6]

I've noticed similar instabilities with my users.

• The OneDrive Clients quits and the users aren't noticing it. 
• When you remove (delete library, prevent offline sync or delete whole site) a document library that is synced, the OneDrive Client for users that had this library synced gets whacked and can no longer start properly at all. Had to manually remove every registry that points to this library.

Today I have a user where the OneDrive for Business Locations don't show up in the left side in Windows Explorer, but the client is running and syncing. I haven't been able to solve this yet, but I haven't tried a full reset of that client. Does anyone have a recommendation?

[#7]

We've had the same issue as your first one. I don't know if we've had the second one.

As for your issue, what has worked for us 80% of the time in that case, has been simply to quit the client and reopen it while the computer is running. Not a restart.

We've also had moderate success following some of the recommendations in this article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/fix-onedrive-for-business-sync-problems-207e983e-146d-404c-...