Microsoft OneDrive file sync apps for Windows, Mac broken for 10 months In June 2024, users of the OneDrive sync client for macOS and Windows began reporting that shared folders had vanished from their local drives, replaced with web shortcuts. Ten months on, with no real fix and only vague noises from Microsoft, it looks as though Redmond may have forgotten about the matter. OneDrive users on …
if it's broken, if you lose your files, it's not like most people have any alternative.
There's no real competition to desktop Windows or Office for most users. Yes, I know Linux, Google and Apple are there, but for most home and office users, it is a Microsoft world, and Microsoft owns that world as a monopolist.
There is plenty of competition for file sync, though. Frankly, OneDrive sucks at that. If you want to sync specific folders, and not the ones OneDrive wants you to sync, you have to jump through stupid hoops. When sync fails, there is very little diagnostics beyond "try again later". The distinction between file sync and backup (which are two very different tasks) is implemented in a very confusing fashion. There are several different versions of the app, and when you try to search the web for some problem, you frequently find the right answer for the wrong app.
Personally, I use Mega. It doesn't try to tell me how I should do things. I tell it whether we're talking backup or sync, tell it which folders, tell it when and how, and then it does exactly what I said. When it can't, it tells me exactly why. I can't ask much more of a sync/backup product.
Microsoft DO care.
They receive their monthly subscription payments and that's all they care about. They don't care about you, your inability to do work offline or any inconvenience or profit loss caused by any of that. Their Terms and Conditions absolve them of any responsibility. They are in the business of sucking as much money out of you as they can. They are under no obligation to fix anything in a timely manner nor tell you about any progress.
Miss a subscription payment though and watch the 'communication' kick in.
You are not a customer, you are a money cow being milked regularly.
I gave up using OneDrive and syncing files with it several years ago. I use a Mac and have a Microsoft365 subscription with its 1TB of cloud storage, but I use it as a separate location to hold a duplicate archive of old files. For current stuff, Apple's iCloud just works without any fuss.
My Windows11 VM offers to sync with OneDrive (and periodically nags for me to run a backup) but I dismiss both - the VM is backed up daily with TimeMachine to an attached HDD (and also monthly to a separate network HDD and an air-gapped HDD) via parent macOS.
The US in particular is far too hung up on so-called "bad" language. Words are just words, and there is nothing in the House Rules specifically indicating that posters should avoid swearing. Indeed, the rules themselves use the words "arsehole" and "wanker".
In any case, if you think this is what's going to warp the fragile little minds of children on the internet, you really have no idea about what else they'll be stumbling across on a day-to-day basis.
the wife and the MiL iphones regularly need them to go in and "kick it off" again.
Also as it is mainly for pictures and the sheer number, does require a bit of "tidying up" to keep it working - move old pictures to a new folder in the PARENT and create a shortcut.
My Android is OK - kiss of death
the memories seems to reset whenever you have installed it onto another machine or had to reset. It then seems to affect Android and IOS, but not in my experience, the other Windows installations.
I tried sharing from extra accounts in the Family. worked for a few days and then stopped. Maybe this issue is the cause
I don't use extra accounts.
My Dropbox and Google backups have no such issues with equivalent files on the same device.
I do clean up my Photo Roll from time to time, and it has no effect to improve OneDrive sync. Espeially because the setting button in the OneDrive app keeps going to OFF (just like the Memories setting keeps turning on again.) This has pursued me across several phones now.
"Even now, there are always sync errors. Multiple people editing the same file doesn’t always work. It’s just, as usual, typical Microsoft."
Are that many entities in need of applications where multiple people are working on the same file? For CAD applications, I can see it as some projects are very involved and groups meet at the interfaces. For office applications? Too many cooks and all that. For a large project, I see a better approach of people working on "chapters" that slot into a master document with work on any one section accessible by one user at a time. It's that or somebody takes other's work and compiles it into a single document.
I see tons of "functionality" being implemented just because it can rather than for it being useful. The problem becomes when it doesn't work or has glitches, there's no workflow to do the job any other way. Companies are also fond of just dropping support when it no longer suits them to keep on supporting it.
Er, no. There are plenty of use cases for multiple authors where your suggested solutions add time and complexity - technical architecture docs, proposals for large IT projects being written against a deadline to submit to a client, cutover approaches are three examples from just my recent work where multiple people need to work on a single section.
Of course, that would be if the tech can handle it. Which MS stuff frequently cannot. On at least one occasion we have resorted to working separately on individual sections because MS Word on OneDrive craps out, and a right pain in the arse it was too.
At least it just fails to sync. A co-worker had his OneDrive for Business account simply be empty one day - no files, nothing in recycle bin (either of them), nothing in the hidden data retention folder, nada, like it was a new account. Our IT couldn't recover his files.
Then it happened again a couple months later.
Note to everybody who administers machines with OneDrive for Business - it is a synching tool, it is NOT a backup. Make your own backups.
OneDrive is already fundamentally broken on Mac as it relies on the underlying filesystem the server runs on to deal with file names. It’s possible to have a perfectly valid file name on Mac that will not sync to the cloud because Windows doesn’t like the file name. In 2025 we can’t name our files just about anything we like and have the computers deal with the underlying filesystems. It’s madness.
Google Drive has this exact same "feature" (putting shortcuts to the webview of shared folders instead of the actual sync-ed folder) by default. There is an arcane, not officially documented workaround and a promise to properly support this use-case, but it's been broken since at least the before times (~2019, likely earlier). Dropbox works exactly as the user would expect, and I assume so do OwnCloud/NextCloud.
used to run into mac users that were fond of characters that onedrive didn't like. could spend hours waiting for the sync to fail and then track down what file caused the problem and then renaming so it would back up. users didn't like their file name being changed just because ms didn't like the names. there was a system that kept separate directories for different file systems. when you looked at the file from unix, windows, mac or dos, you saw filenames that were compatible with your os. when a file was saved it would translate the file name and put an entry in each directory. worked pretty well, never had problems with mac names on windows machines. probably takes more storage for the different directories.
Sync issues, files going missing and to top it off, impressively bloated crap to use software.
Company supplied workbench PC syncs with a sharepoint full of my employers documentation each morning. Despite being a rather performant if old i7 machine it spends a good ten minutes with the CPU maxed at 100%, all to sync 20 or so PDF documents....who writes stuff this poorly?
Work laptop is an 11th gen i7 and that behaves in the same way!
I wouldn't trust M$ with any of my own files at all, ever. Fsck 'em.
You do know some of us work in support, right? We're not all l33t haxors.
One Drive has been a disaster from the beginning and failing to handle files saving and retrievable is about as damn fail as it gets. The OS is literally, LITERALLY, not fit for purpose. That people are not holding M$ feet to the fire and outright abandoning them is Kafka level absurdity.
I suspect the vast majority of Reg readers are perfectly capable of disabling OneDrive and using our own sync of choice. But a lot of us work in places where we don't have that option, it's Microsoft Everything or unemployment.
After a few years of a kinf of OK experience wit onedrive, this bug decided to surface for me yesterday evening - which now makes doing regular tasks fairly difficult.
I've been using the 365 family subscription in order to get the office suite etc for my wife (occasionally working from home) and daughter at University. This effectively gives 5TB of one-drive storage for not much money which I have been making full udse of.
Perhaps too many people like me have been making too much use of this storage (which can't be cheap for Microsoft to provide) so they are using this issue to scare off heavy users.
It is easy to be paranoid though :-(
I've never had anything sync reliably. One app, when a sync decided that I wanted new content that I'd added on one device on neither device, told me "Tis but a bug, but its actually permanently gone. Sorry." This is dozens of things over 30 years. I won't have the little apps that onedrive, google drive, dropbox et al want to install, and don't use apple cloud sync, because none of them have proved reliable.
Hint: Don't using syncing except for unimportant things, IMHO.
Is syncing really this hard?
Actually, syncing is really hard. Many, many years ago I worked on syncing for PIM data (structured data, for calendars, addressses, etc). In general, it is impossible to do correctly -- all you can promise you can do is make the two datasets the same. In general, if there can be changes on both sides, you can create conflicts which the software will not know how to resolve "correctly". Even if you timestamp changes.
To see that this is obviously the case, imagine you and a colleague are both editing a document (say, a proposal to a customer). You notice that the price and the delivery date are inconsistent (as a price change is coming up). You make a change to your copy which changes the price, and your colleague makes a change which changes the delivery date. The software cannot reconcile those changes - in this particular case either would be valid, but changing both the price and the date would not be valid!
That is a carefully chosen example, but it turns out that in almost all structured data there are similar cases of conflicting changes which do not look like they affect the same field but which cannot be resolved to consistency.
However, that doesn't excuse OneDrive! It doesn't attempt to make semantic promises - it really only needs to make sure it saves one of the versions of the file and lets the user know of conflicts.
For the record... I have several 'Personal' OneDrive accounts, because I have several Outlook.com email accounts which I use as throwaways when a site I don't trust insists on getting an email account. Each Outlook.com account has a OneDrive account. I have never even logged into most of them. I logged into one just today, after reading the El Reg story; yeah, it's fucked, and if I had had actual content in there I would have been Very Annoyed. For reasons of Microsoft, you can log into as many 'Business' or 'School' accounts at the same time as you wish; I have two 'Business' and two 'School' OneDrives open right now. You can only log into one, just one, 'Personal' OneDrive at a time. I'm not usually logged into 'Personal' OneDrives. If it wasn't for El Reg I might never have noticed this particular fuck-up, as it doesn't seem to touch 'Business' or 'School' OneDrives. The fact that someone is paying for 'Business' or 'School' accounts while 'Personal' accounts are free may/may not have something to do with this fuck-up. The observer may be able to guess what I think is likely. It should be noted that the 'Business' and 'School' OneDrives came as part of an Office 365 sub; the 'Personal' account keeps nagging me to get, and pay for, Office 365, that being one of the reasons why I usually don't use it. Hmmm. One wonders if the users who paid up for Office also have this problem...
>” Microsoft told us the issue as we've reported is correct, with the error happening on personal accounts, not enterprise ones,”
MS clearly like having consumer and business versions of their products with totally different architectures, and then end gaming the consumer version.
I wonder if the strategy is to encourage consumers/personal users to only use the browser version of 365.
There's an awful lot of businesses out there that aren't big companies with IT ( or any other) departments. Small businesses. Maybe just one or two people doing admin and another handful making stuff. IT support won't exist. If it's broken they take it somewhere to be fixed. Even if there are a few dozen this probably still applies. The people in the office will be using Windows PCs running Office- with possibly the bare minimum of IT skills required to turn it on and off, then launch and use a small number of programmes;WORD, EXCEL and something that does the book keeping. If they are adventurous enough to use some kind of backup/Sync software it will probably also be Microsoft's. It's all they know- and there is no way on this Earth that these millions of small businesses are going to be switching to something they've never heard of.
The world of IT is not just about Megacorp PLC with its offices in every major city, nor about IT pros using obscure Linux distros to control a custom made board that manages the lighting in their aquarium.
I agree.
You can get that sense from the Microsoft Community thread on the subject
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/folders-shared-with-me-are-syncing-as-internet
which shows 206,531 views just now.
Reading the thread is very instructive, lots of people with no IT support really struggling to understand why their paid-for software doesn't work.
And NOT ONE RESPONSE in over a year from Microsoft - just the hero Hans who took it upon himself be a champion.
at my last $dayjob before retiring they used it. regularly we lost access to folders, made backup copies of EVERYTHING and in the end discovered the only reliable network drive for Macs was to copy files into folders of, get ready for this -- Teams!
not well documented but Teams allows shared folders that live forever. who the fuck thought this was a better solution???
This is not just a OneDrive Free or OneDrive Family/365 account problem. It has been reported by business accounts too. It may be that those with the largest amounts of data are the last to migrate to the new back-end. There is a "Microsoft Support Community" thread on this which started on 2024-06-08 and has thousands of replies:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/folders-shared-with-me-are-syncing-as-internet/6abc9383-6072-4562-b4fa-370c4ea8ce49
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