OneDrive: Problem and Solution

[modellingman]

A few weeks ago I reported here viewtopic.php?f=39&t=15555&p=193087#p192765 that I was a fan of OneDrive. That almost came to an end a couple of days ago, so I thought I'd report my experiences here in case someone encounters something similar and can adopt the solution that Microsoft's OneDrive Support team suggested to me.

As I previously noted I have a W10 PC with a tiny SSD so I keep my stuff in OneDrive's cloud storage and use the "download on demand" feature whenever I want to work on or just view a file. After dealing with a file any changes are sync'd back to cloud storage and I use the "free up space" feature to avoid it taking precious space on the SSD. Works for me - until a couple of days ago. The OneDrive sync client (the bit of software that sits on the PC) got stuck and was in an infinite loop trying to sign in. Worse, when I went into the web interface for OneDrive it didn't show anything where my content (all 150 GB of it) should be. Nor could I do anything in the Android app for OneDrive, that was stuck in permanent refresh. However, I knew my OneDrive content hadn't disappeared entirely because I could see it in all its glory when attaching files to email via the outlook.com web interface.

After some emails back and forth with the OneDrive support team over the weekend their solution turned out to be remarkably quick and simple. It involved clearing the credentials of the OneDrive sync client on the W10 PC, restarting the client and signing-in. The credentials are cleared from the Control Panel using

Open Control panel > User accounts > Credential Manager > Windows Credentials > Under Generic Credentials, remove the credential of OneDrive

Once this solution was acted on, everything went back to how it should be.

AIUI clearing the credentials won't do anything bad. If the sync client can't find them it forces a user login and if that is successful creates a new set of credentials. The sync client credentials are different from the Microsoft account login credentials.

[Slarti]

As I previously noted I have a W10 PC with a tiny SSD so I keep my stuff in OneDrive's cloud storage and use the "download on demand" feature whenever I want to work on or just view a file.

So do I understand you correctly, your only copy of your stuff is on somebody else's computer?

Slarti

[ReformedCharacter]

As I previously noted I have a W10 PC with a tiny SSD so I keep my stuff in OneDrive's cloud storage and use the "download on demand" feature whenever I want to work on or just view a file.

So do I understand you correctly, your only copy of your stuff is on somebody else's computer?

Slarti

I expect they do a regular backup

RC

[modellingman]

As I previously noted I have a W10 PC with a tiny SSD so I keep my stuff in OneDrive's cloud storage and use the "download on demand" feature whenever I want to work on or just view a file.

So do I understand you correctly, your only copy of your stuff is on somebody else's computer?

Slarti

There's a second W7 laptop. The sync client in W7 doesn't have "download on demand" so files are also kept on its hard drive. This copy of the content syncs with the OneDrive cloud when I run the client service on this laptop.

The two laptops live in different locations. OneDrive is my solution for dealing with the same stuff in the two locations which doesn't require physical movement of my data between the locations either on a laptop or a portable hard drive.

The chosen somebody else is, I suspect, a bit less likely than me to lose data through hardware issues, system problems or a plane crashing into the building. I'm quite relaxed about the resilience of my chosen approach. The problem I had over the weekend was resolved in less than 24 hours, so not much more than a hiccup in the grand scheme of things.

[Infrasonic]

As I previously noted I have a W10 PC with a tiny SSD so I keep my stuff in OneDrive's cloud storage and use the "download on demand" feature whenever I want to work on or just view a file.

So do I understand you correctly, your only copy of your stuff is on somebody else's computer?

Slarti

There's a second W7 laptop. The sync client in W7 doesn't have "download on demand" so files are also kept on its hard drive. This copy of the content syncs with the OneDrive cloud when I run the client service on this laptop.

The two laptops live in different locations. OneDrive is my solution for dealing with the same stuff in the two locations which doesn't require physical movement of my data between the locations either on a laptop or a portable hard drive.

The chosen somebody else is, I suspect, a bit less likely than me to lose data through hardware issues, system problems or a plane crashing into the building. I'm quite relaxed about the resilience of my chosen approach. The problem I had over the weekend was resolved in less than 24 hours, so not much more than a hiccup in the grand scheme of things.

You would be a bit inconvenienced by a drive failure on either laptop in that scenario though, unless you have to hand a plan B like dual OS drives.
Having just suffered a recent SSD 'C' drive failure and then booting straight into the backup clone on the desktop, I have appreciated this even more lately.
My next step is to equip myself with a WinToUSB bootable copy of W10 on a USB 3.1 gen 2 SSD like a Samsung T5, which will fit in a pocket with ease.
https://www.easyuefi.com/wintousb/