Forum Discussion
Deleted files/folders reappear as they are synced back online from client OneDrive
We are heading towards the end of a big push to get all files in OneDrive or SharePoint. The Finance department (VIPs) are getting very frustrated with deleted files/folders reappearing as they are synced back online from other user's sycned client OneDrives (the name of the user and date/time are listed with the file online). PLEASE HELP. I am also opening a ticket.
This is what we have tried:
- Make sure all sync clients are up to date
- Try renaming the folder/file and then deleting it from online SharePoint
- This did not work at all. Both the original and the renamed files/folders reappeared
- Checked SharePoint permissions. There are some unique permissions on a few documents but in general the members have edit permissions.
- GET HELP FROM THIS COMMUNITY
Are these alle Windows 10 clients? So, in other words exactly the same Onedrive clients? Windows 7/8 uses a different Onedrive client, even if you have downloaded the latest version.
So I'd guess if you are using mixed Windows versions, this might give these sort of strange problems?
- In our experience - no difference unfortunately in client. Used only 8.1 and 10 clients in test environment. We noticed that changing "default" internet time NTP service refresh interval to custom setting and used same NTP time server made improvements, but we skipped further testing and closed environment before certain conclusion made. Using one only NTP server is another problem and time drifting was significant also within ~24-48h update interval. As we guessed Onedrive itself had no impact on problem, but we wait some more after next jump to testing.
I had the same problem. What did the trick for me, was through OneDrive(Desktop) creating a new folder and moving the file to that folder, then deleting it. I am not sure why it worked. But it was a quick solution for me, albeit a workaround.
J_Rouse we've had our users also do this trick of creating a folder for those OLD (deleted) folders which seem to reappear everytime someone syncs them back online.
any word from Microsoft as to when this issue will be permanently fixed?
Does anyone have a concrete solution to this problem?
Microsoft has been no help and the problem is intermitted.
Recently, in our case users that work on multiple files/folder within a document library, delete files and they re-appear months later. Any help would be appreaciated.
Are you sure that those files were not opened on other users machines when they were deleted?
Thanks for answering. No they were not opened but were synced. I opened a ticket with MS and have a call with them today. I will report back to here.
Did you get this resolved?
I'm having the same issue.
- Hi we have the same issue, someone delete's a folder in onedrive then it'll sync and re-appear, drives people insane. Everyone is on windows 10 with the latest version of onedrive. Sharepoint is online not on premis.NTP: we dont have a local NTP server but do not see time drift between machines.
Having the same issue with a deleted document continuously reappearing from other users who have synced the library.
We have not had this problem for a while now. Update Windows and the Onedrive syc client for all users who have access to the files. That seemed to fix it for us.
aravind murugesan wrote:Having the same issue with a deleted document continuously reappearing from other users who have synced the library.
- OneDrive still continues to annoy me. I've just been commissioning four new laptops so I've logged on with my Office 365 account which has a copy of Office 2016 for installation. I noticed some folders deleted ages ago had re-appeared. Specifically the "Monthly" folder here: https://i.imgur.com/ndUl4XE.png
So I hit delete on the folder. It disappears from a second but then re-appears! I got a snapshot of it missing: https://i.imgur.com/4RzaOHc.png
But a few seconds it re-appears: https://i.imgur.com/rvyRy86.png
Same thing happens if I delete the "Monthly" folder on the web. It simply comes straight back.
Having battled with OneDrive on 50+ systems now, I really do have a pretty low opinion of the fundamental algorithms used. Log onto an old computer where you haven't synchronised for a while (like a few weeks maybe months) and that computer assumes it's the master version and restores files that you have deleted since. This has caused a BIG problem by restoring a script that I had deleted from one part of my command path, OneDrive restored the old version and I accidentally ended up running it.
Seriously broken IMO....- Ahh, I might have found this specific problem. OneDrive is synchronised in a VM and on my main PC. I was deleting it from the main PC so I tried to delete from my PC and for some reason there is access denied on one of the folders deep inside "Monthly". So what's happening is that OneDrive on my PC probably tries to delete the folder but fails due to this access denied and therefore restores it back. Big question, why access denied??? I'll reboot and have a look.
Same here in the Free version of onedrive. This is the first issue I encountered and I resolve it by taking all clients offline, then remove the file/folder from every computer (including the copy on onedrive). Stupid but it works.
It appears some file has been opened by a computer, therefore it reappears. I think a "OneDrive reset" on each computer would work?
The problem is more annoying for me: if I go to Onedrive on the web, I delete a file, then Onedrive client on Windows 10 re uploads the file that's just been deleted. And this sync back to all my other devices. So the file remains on the cloud and on each device.
This is happening to a client of ours, have you been able to resolve the issue or did Microsoft shed any light? David Saber
So here we are years later and this is still happening. For example, I have a onedrive personal folder open on the desktop (windows 10-1909) in one window and the company onedrive open in another. If I cut a picture from the personal onedrive folder and paste it into the other, it appears to work as expected, but several seconds (the time depends on the size of the file) later, it reappears in the personal onedrive folder. If I repeat the exact same procedure, and click to overwrite the files that are now in the target folder, the files will stay deleted from the source. I have several windows 10-1909 clients as well as an iphone all syncing my personal folder. I was organizing files for a couple of hours and it did not start happening until hour two. I am guessing this is some kind of rudimentary problem but the specifics of how to recreate it escape me. Perhaps its time related or perhaps it occurs when the files are enumerated and thumbs created? The sync engine decides if a file is the same somehow, right? perhaps if the time and date is rounded to the nearest minute first it would help? or maybe a hash should be created or a semaphore?
If you are still around, did you ever get MS help or find out how to work around the problem?
Same issue here, very annoying. The library in question uses Document Sets, not sure if that has anything to do with it. I'm going to open a support ticket and go through the hell that is Office 365 support. If I get any resolution I'll post back (I'm not very hopeful here).
I encountered this problem in the last week or so. I was using the WordPress UpdraftPlus plugin to backup my website and selected OneDrive as the backup site. Then due to the small free space allocation for OneDrive I decided to use Google Drive instead. Naturally I wanted to delete the portions of the backup that were put in OneDrive. However, after deletion they got mysteriously replaced. While fumbling around, at one point I got the error code 0x80004005. Don't know what to do about that, since that error seems to be about the WordPress SQL over which I have no control.
Any ideas?
On June 2021, it is still happening on my Windows 10. I am having the latest client. What else should I check to resolve the problem?
- Dump OneDrive - seriously...
Did you get any help from support? I tried and they were useless. This is a reoccurring issue that doesn't happen all the time but we got extremely lucky and could see files start reappearing as I was on the phone with them. The agent's reply? Oh, it could be the user reuploading these files by hand. Refused to believe that wasn't the case. Then he told me to run Fiddler on all my computers 24/7 so they could get logs (completely absurd idea, not how fiddler works).
So we're still no where. And this is the type of support I get from them on every single issue (and boy is there a ton of issues).- Yes, I didn't see how running fiddler would help.
My experience is that the files won't reappear right away, some times it takes 4-5 days before I comes again. I had the personal onedrive which no one is gonna upload the files except me. I tried delete the files/folders in windows 10. I tried to delete the files/folder in the web. They both coming back.
It is been almost three years and it was not getting fixed. I think I should give onedrive up and so as everybody.- fiddler? that's hilarious. Its obviously some sort of timing issue. Probably indicates an error at the very heart of synchronization. It has stopped for me, for now, but seems to come back from time to time. For me, it seems to occur most often with files that are "kept on computer" in multiple locations.
- So I was just brought in to consult at a client experiencing this issue using Sync in SharePoint online ( Which is basically One drive for a SharePoint Library). I had run into something similar on SharePoint 2013 on prem a few years back. I was able to resolve this by the following:
When folders were renamed they created duplicate and when they were deleted they would re-appear. By combing through the files we discovered that users had selected Check Out and Open when using Adobe to open PDFs, so going through all the files as an admin and discarding the check out that were left open by Adobe , we were then able to delete the folders and /or rename them. Once we had the cause, we created a powershell script to find the files and check them in. There were thousands. To stop this from happening going forward we implemented registry changes to disable Adobe SharePoint features via Group Policy. A quick first step is to educate the users to NOT click Check out and Open but instead Just Click Open. You can google the reg edits needed to disable Adobe SharePoint feature, this is a super frustrating issue so I hope this helps someone.Thanks for posting your solution. Unfortunately this isn't what's happening to us. I'm finding that running chkdsk /r /f on the computers recreating the folders seems to fix it since there is a reparse error on the drive and OneDrive can't delete the folder off user's computer when it's deleted on SharePoint (so with it's infinite wisdom recreates the folder on SharePoint).
This is an ugly solution as it's happening all the freaking time. Microsoft support continues to tell me this isn't their issue and only way they'll help is if I can figure out how to run fiddler on all computers 24/7 for months and capture all those logs for them (yup, I just need to figure out how to do the impossible and they'll get right on it I'm sure).Hi Pawel - I think you're describing a different problem but it's in the same ballpark. I also classify it under the "Why I hate OneDrive" which was a long running thread hereabouts.
This reparse error is something I've seen twice now in the last couple of days which suggests that's it's a new bug 😞 For my client, they are doing the following:
- Adding a shortcut to OneDrive (this itself is a new feature) from a SharePoint document library. This document library is about 70GBbig with 14,000 files
- Wait until the on-demand folder has synchronised - doesn't take that long as all it's downloading is the file placeholder
- Rename the shortcut...
It is at that point that OneDrive throws a dicky fit! What happens is that you end up with a folder with the new name that only contains the folders - doesn't appear to be any files. This folder is not linked back to the document library. OneDrive then re-creates the shortcut link and downloads all the placeholders again.
However, this renamed folder is in a really bad way and often has reparse errors. You can't delete it and have to resort to chkdsk /f /r - which of course requires a reboot AND takes a long time as it's scanning the entire disk for bad sectors.
I really do despair about OneDrive sometimes... it's really the crappiest buggy bit of software in the entire M365 stack. And it's one of the most vital!! I work equally with Google Drive, Dropbox and even the open source Seafile system. Not of them are anyway near as bad as OneDrive.
My theory, as a some-time software developer, is that the algorithms and metadata maintained by OneDrive is simply not as good as the alternative cloud storage systems.
GocloudaccessI wonder if the same thing happens in office365. I have not had the problem since I disabled connected features in word. Well, now I am on nextcloud and will never have that particular problem again.
econcepts Indeed, it does happen in Office 365.
