I Don't Trust OneDrive After What Happened Today

[coip]

I used to love OneDrive (I actually much preferred the name SkyDrive and thought Microsoft should've fought harder for it, but that's another story), particularly on Windows 8.1. It was the type of cloud-storage system I had been dreaming of for years prior, after having hard drive failures in the Windows XP days cause me lost files and a lot of grief. On Windows 8.1, it worked. Placeholders saved space, the syncing was flawless and unintrusive. You never had to think about it worry about it; it just worked.

Flash forward to Windows 10 and the experience has been a disaster, and I'm not just talking about placeholders being taken away (although, that was a terribly stupid decision on Microsoft's part). Ever since I upgraded to Windows 10 'sync errors' have been a daily occurrence, and some of them are a huge nuisance to fix (having to manually re-open dozens of unsynced files just to re-sync them, for instance).

But today I just about lost it. I was away from home and needed to check a file that I have literally been working on non-stop for the past month. I pulled it up on my Lumia 928 and was confused to see it was way outdated. I checked the date in OneDrive and it was weeks old. I thought it might be due to a sync error, so I headed back home to see why, only to find that OneDrive hadn't been syncing for weeks. Apparently, some backend update went out that 'reset' everything. I had to re-set up OneDrive, assuming it would merely take what was in my OneDrive folder on my computer, and then update it online (since it explicitly said it would 'merge' the two). Instead, it chose to erase everything in my OneDrive folder and replace it with the outdated files from the cloud!

Lucky for me, I had a backup, so once OneDrive is done re-syncing itself from the cloud, I guess I'll just overwrite it and hope that OneDrive will work properly from here on out, but I'm quite furious as I really could've lost all my work from the past few weeks, which would be disastrous for me. I don't really trust OneDrive anymore and I'm quite peeved at Microsoft for taking a system that worked perfectly to one that isn't even close to being adequate.

 

[AndyCalling]

That's kind of the point of W10 though. If it worked one way in W8, W10 can't do it like that for ideological reasons. I'm sure they'll come up with something after the reasonable complaints, but it can't be the W8 system because, it's too W8.

I know, difficult to work with, but many have tried to shift MS on this and they are clearly not keen. I recommend you run W10 under VM in W8 so you can run up W10 only when necessary.

 

[_Emi_]

Well I have always said placeholders were crap, they were useless 90% of the time for me. they were nothing special unless it was photos, since you get thumbnails on images. the only thing missing today on Win10 it's synching of individual files, which I prefer to sync folders anyway, but if they ever give placeholders again, I would rather an option to always sync the whole folder not individual files within folder like on 8.1
On 8.1 you always have to check if files were online only or offline, if you double click on an online only files you would get to download it anyway if it was a 300mb file, you had to wait, and sometimes the program would crash and say the file was corrupted since it was not being downloaded, so it couldn't be open when the program wanted. so in my experience Windows 10 is okay. and while misses some features I wish it has, it still does a good job doing what it does. what happened to you, sounds like user fault rather than the software.
Because maybe OneDrive Fetch doesn't work on my computer (I don't even use it) but it has never stopped synching or I have never had to relog in again, same with other people, everything is green arrows for everyone I see using Windows 7 or Windows 10 and things are fine.

But I wonder, how did you miss the synching problems after days? I mean, the folder should display green check or not or the synching blue arrows. it's strange you didn't see that.
But of course OneDrive will take priority to the files on OneDrive rather than the ones on OneDrive folder you are "merging" with.
OneDrive is suppose to be on many devices, so if OneDrive is suppose to be synching all the time, why would it get files that are not on local storage as priority?
You didn't like the way OneDrive worked, it's okay. but OneDrive I think having priority of the cloud files over local files, makes sense to me. Since you can always move the files and overwrite them, if you have recent files somewhere.
8.1 OneDrive did pretty weird things to my files I remember, and was more problematic than Windows 10, especially when I had many devices and I had to individually download the same folders and files on different devices.

But, maybe you should reinstall Onedrive to make sure you are getting a good OneDrive version?

close onedrive or go to
cmd as admin:
taskkill /f /im OneDrive.exe

Then on CMD uninstall OneDrive by typing:
64bits:
%SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\OneDriveSetup.exe /uninstall
32bits:
%SystemRoot%\System32\OneDriveSetup.exe /uninstall

and then you just go to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\

and see if you can delete OneDrive folder there (I think there might be some files that might be in use like happened to me once)

then you go to SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\ or SystemRoot%\System32\ and reinstall by double clicking OneDriveSetup.exe then it will update to lastest version and you will have a reinstalled onedrive, you relog in, and resync folders again, and overwrite whatever is not the same, or merge files if they are the same version. because it seems it's weird you are getting that kind of synching problems.

 

[cgk]

I have never found onedrive to be that reliable - its been fine with photos but a diaster (oddly) with any office files - which might sync forever or not at all.

I switched back to dropbox which I have never had any problems with.

 

[Steve Thackery]

But of course OneDrive will take priority to the files on OneDrive rather than the ones on OneDrive folder you are "merging" with.
OneDrive is suppose to be on many devices, so if OneDrive is suppose to be synching all the time, why would it get files that are not on local storage as priority?
You didn't like the way OneDrive worked, it's okay. but OneDrive I think having priority of the cloud files over local files, makes sense to me.

Even if they are dated much earlier? I think the OP's point was that OneDrive had "silently" failed, so he had no idea his files weren't being synced with those online. This is a very dangerous failure mode, as he pointed out, because it can lead to serious data loss.

Microsoft could do this very much better. It could raise an alert if it has been unable to sync for some time (let's be honest, that tiny sub-icon-sized graphic is not in any way adequate). It could raise an alert if the cloud files are older than those on the local machine, before over-writing them.

This type of failure mode is not acceptable and Microsoft could handle circumstances like these very much better.

 

[Dewg]

Every time I've removed OneDrive, or reset it, it's saved the local files in a backup folder in my profile. Did you check your profile folder for those files?

 

[AV2RY]

I've been using OneDrive since Lumia 710 came out (I didnt know about Skydrive before) and also had quite few problems with it. OP mentioned two of them. I have one excel file I edit everyday (add info) from either PC or phone (I dont use W10 tablet anymore as it duplicates any office file I edit on it). For couple of weeks I've been editing it only on PC, later when I opened it on phone I found out it wasn't syncing at all (only that file!!). I just copy-pasted everything to a new file and it synced in seconds..

The other problem is what OP said on 2nd paragraph.. But reopening never solves this issue for me. I just make a copy of file and delete "old" one. Only solution that helps me..

When I updated tablet to W10 I had hard time with OneDrive. It ignored my SD card (and still does, but was fine on W8) and downloaded everything to local drive.. Except clean installation of W10 (one of the option recommended here) I tried everything to move OneDrive to SD and nothing worked

 

[mayconvert]

google drive never has any issues. been using it for years on OSX, iOS, android and windows (desktop) without fail.
OneDrive is buggy and slow. gave up on it. it just stops working at random even on WP and Windows 8.1 and 10...
I wanted to love it and use it. fail.

 

[coip]

Here's an update.

OneDrive.com has a Recycle Bin. If you delete stuff, it goes there. If it's not a lot of stuff, it's stored there for a year. If it's a ton of stuff, it's there for only three days. You can click on that folder and then choose to "Restore all deleted files". I tried doing this, but it must've been too many files or something because it eventually crashed (after hours of watching it slowly un-delete stuff, it eventually gave "Error Code 6", whatever that is).

In a state of panic, I remembered Windows "File History" feature. Luckily, I was able to recover the lost files from there, in full, but, I think, only because of the anomaly that got me in this mess in the first place: SkyDrive leftover from Windows 8, that got converted to OneDrive when I upgraded to Windows 10 (they renamed the app from SkyDrive to OneDrive in Windows 8, but the backend stuff was still called SkyDrive), that resulted in double folders that led me to delete the SkyDrive folders in their entirely (as it was doubly counting against my hard drive space, which was nearly full). So, what I did was re-delete the half-recovered files in my OneDrive folder, and then restore the SkyDrive folders via File History. Then I merged the restored SkyDrive stuff into the OneDrive folders, and then re-deleted the SkyDrive folders (after making a second copy on my external hard drive).

The good news is that I mostly got all of my files back, with a couple of temporal issues (like slightly older versions of some documents) and also some major duplication issues (there must've been some problem with OneDrive.com still in the process of un-deleting my files that crept back in while the SkyDrive merger was going on). So now I have to go back through all my folders and manually delete duplicates "filename.docx" , "filename(1).docx"

It's been a huge pain the neck. Very frustrating. It stole away an entire day of work that may cause me to miss an important deadline. Most importantly, though, I still don't trust OneDrive, and it's a shame because it was nearly perfect on Windows 8.1, I thought.

 

[wplee]

I save my Office documents now direct to OneDrive as default. For example yesterday I created a new Excel 2016 file and just selected my work folder in OneDrive. My thinking is that I never need to worry about backups or duplicates and simply treat my laptop as a client machine accessing the cloud just like my Lumia. The only thing I'm unsure about is what happens when I lose WiFi and need to access the data? Is there a local offline version saved someplace?

On a side note I had to stop playing Age of Sparta for the exact same reason as OP. I had been playing the game on my Lumia for months before I started also playing it on my Windows 10 laptop. When I signed in it told me it couldn't sync. So I went back to my phone only to find it had replaced my 2 month old save file with the 2 minute Laptop version. I stopped playing immediately. The negatives of the cloud don't always get advertised.

 

[coip]

Yes, files and saved games that mistakenly get overwritten are the worst. I had that issue happen to me when I was testing out backwards compatibility of Xbox 360 games on my Xbox One, streamed to my Windows 10 PC. Well, turns out I discovered a bug (hooray?) and it overwrote my save on Hexic HD that I had been working on for weeks. In contrast, Minecraft on Xbox One is really great about double checking with you about which save file you want to use, if there is a conflict.

 

[Steve Thackery]

I save my Office documents now direct to OneDrive as default. For example yesterday I created a new Excel 2016 file and just selected my work folder in OneDrive. My thinking is that I never need to worry about backups or duplicates and simply treat my laptop as a client machine accessing the cloud just like my Lumia. The only thing I'm unsure about is what happens when I lose WiFi and need to access the data? Is there a local offline version saved someplace?

I think you misunderstand what happens when you save to OneDrive. Your comment about your PC acting simply as a client machine accessing the cloud gives it away. For those of us who are used to saving files on the company server, it is tempting to think of OneDrive as just like a server, but in the cloud. Unfortunately that isn't what happens.

By default, OneDrive works as a synchronisation service. When you save something to OneDrive, you are actually saving it to a folder called "OneDrive" on your own machine. OneDrive then works in the background to upload that to the cloud, sorting out any synchronisation issues as it goes. If there is no wi-fi connection then the file stays on your local machine until internet access is restored, at which point OneDrive uploads and synchronises it.

So you are not as secure as you think. If the OneDrive service silently fails and doesn't upload that file to the cloud (which happens frequently, in my experience) then it just sits there on your own PC. Meanwhile if you access that file from your phone, it gets the old version from the cloud and you end up in a mess. In other words, your approach does not help you avoid the mess the OP found himself in.

I said "by default" earlier on, because you can change which folders in OneDrive keep a local copy. Getting rid of local copies reduces the storage requirements on your device. However, it means you cannot work on a file unless you are connected to the internet in order to download it. If you save such a file when you are not connected to the internet, it gets stored locally until the connection is restored. At that point it is uploaded and the local copy deleted.

Again, though, it isn't working quite like a straightforward network server, which I believe is what you imagined, because file writes are deferred until the OneDrive service decides to upload it for you.

 

[paul simong]

That's what I do as well.

 

[wplee]

Again, though, it isn't working quite like a straightforward network server, which I believe is what you imagined, because file writes are deferred until the OneDrive service decides to upload it for you.

Thanks, that's why I asked the question. But can you explain exactly where the file is locally saved in Windows 10? and is the actual whole file (eg .XLS) or just a temp? When I hit save in Office 2016 it immediately says uploading to OneDrive. When I disconnect internet connection, true it does say pending but appears to keep trying every 5 seconds. So yes, there is obviously a temp save 'hold' but it does seem to actively retry uploading especially in Office 2016 so I can't see much data being lost.

When I look in my "This PC" I don't see a OneDrive (virtual). When I look in the path way to save as, it simply shows a https:// d. docs live net address that's why I assumed it was saving to OneDrive like a server with a local temp file on my PC. Similar to in the past when working in Excel and saving locally a separate temp file was created (hidden deep in the local user folder) but this was not the actual file. This prevented duplicates/confusion to most users.

I still think the way I'm treating my setup like a client/server with only one target location (OneDrive) is the best practice going forward. There is no need to manually upload/sync files and no need to remember anymore than one location OneDrive (cloud). Sure there is the Wi-Fi dependency problem (and maybe local security - but I password protect docs anyway) but apart from that I can't see how saving direct to OneDrive isn't the way forward. I'm pleased with Microsoft's direction, though of course its not perfect.

 

[taymur]

All in All, OneDrive is a mess.

I (Thank God) have it working for now.... after months of weird stuff.

My friend once called me, hating on me for recommending that he upgrades to windows 10, and sent me a pic from his task bar with 50 icons of the upload center, with an error. lol

 

[Ten Four]

I am losing trust in "the Cloud" in general for important stuff. Yesterday I was assisting someone applying for a job so I was uploading resumes, editing cover letters, etc. Despite a robust Internet connection that I use every day for work, there were constant delays in uploading, downloading, and syncing with OneDrive, and then MS Word online kept fouling things up too. It was just impossible to get rid of some strange formatting that online Word insisted on inserting. I eventually downloaded a copy, edited and saved it using desktop programs, and then uploaded it to OneDrive again. It was so much easier and faster to write and edit using the desktop programs. Also, where I work has now gone Office 365, and we have been encouraged to try out the online versions of Word, Excel, etc. in case we need to use them at some point, and they are just so much slower and awkward compared to using the desktop programs, plus you have endless upload/download problems with OneDrive. It is really a step back in terms of productivity.

 

[Jack Neill]

I gave up on OneDrive on W10, I have had the same syncing errors. I keep everything local and use Onedrive as a backup because it can no longer be trusted..

 

[Jazmac]

You are not alone OP. My wife had some odd sync errors with OneDrive too. She was working on a report for school on a Word doc stored on the cloud. One day she went to save the file and it would not save. Gave some weird sync error that I could not get around. Even recovery was a bust. Word said the recovery was there but because of the sync error, it could not be recovered. Long story short she lost an entire week of work in the process. What's worse, she never got any kind of warning from Word about auto sync not working or some kind of problem.

Now we only use it to store backups but she keeps her files local. She was not pleased and I still have not found a solution. Its worrisome to say the least. She's still running 8.1 and running Office 365. I don't know what happened but it seems using it as a document folder as you're working on it isn't a good idea anymore. It used to work but not so much anymore.

 

[Steve Thackery]

But can you explain exactly where the file is locally saved in Windows 10? and is the actual whole file (eg .XLS) or just a temp?

Like I said earlier, by default your entire OneDrive is actually on your hard disk. Every file, every folder. Only if you choose to switch off the local copy does it exist only in the cloud. Have you actually switched off local storage? If not, then your entire OneDrive is right there on your computer. The OneDrive service just syncs it to a mirror image in the cloud.

I'm sorry, I can't tell you where it is on W10 because I've just rolled my desktop machine back to W7. In Windows 7 it is C:\Users\<name>\OneDrive.

I still think the way I'm treating my setup like a client/server with only one target location (OneDrive) is the best practice going forward. There is no need to manually upload/sync files and no need to remember anymore than one location OneDrive (cloud).

Oh, yes, I wouldn't disagree with you there. Of course, before we had cloud syncing there was still only one place you had to remember: "My Documents", so in that respect nothing has changed much. The ability to get access to your documents from anywhere, on any device, is brilliant and of course they are backed up and secure. I use OneDrive for all my college work. I don't use it for my video library, though, because it would take too long to upload it all, so I've got local backups instead.

 

[Krystianpants]

As far as synching goes I haven't ever had issues. But consider any privacy settings or background usage settings you may have inadvertently sweet. Also make sure your lan or wireless card doesn't go to sleep when not used. And if opening a file directly on one drive the app with the lock should be closed. Some apps will create a temp file and won't make changes directly to the file till it is saved and closed. I don't believe one drive is the issue. My designer friend relies on it quite a lot and had never had issues. The services would be the same for everyone. The pc setup is all that would differ. You can also go on one drive web version and look through the settings. Check your windows event logs for errors. Something is obviously causing the issues.